Information Research Weblog

A good portal to resources in psychology can be found at the Psychology World Wide Web Virtual Library.

The excellent Current Cites has drawn my attention to Science.gov, which provides a search capability for 30 federal government databases.

It doesn't provide direct access to all documents, but is quite valuable because the databases go back beyond many of the online databases, to the early 1970s. There's a good chance, therefore, that you'll come across something relevant to your work that you might have missed.

Usability is a pretty hot topic and all times and I've referred from time to time to Jakob Nielsen's "Alertbox" pages. Now here's an interesting site on the subject, drawn to my attention by the developer. More than you ever need to know about the subject.

Everyone is interested to some degree in food, so discovery (via The Scout Report) of the Epicurious (sic) site interested me, especially as it is suggested that this is the world's biggest source of recipes - 16,000 pages. Being in Oporto at present and, on Monday night having sampled a very nice dish of 'cabrito no forno' with a red Vinho Verde Espumante (which I didn't even know existed), I thought I would check on recipes. However, 'cabrito' as a search term returns nothing, 'kid' returns nothing, and 'goat' only returns recipes using goat cheese. Now some may have an aversion to eating goat, but the young animal is as popular as lamb in some parts of Europe - especially Southern Europe and I'm a little surprised that the publishers of Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines have no recipes on file. Incidentally, the goat was delicious!

If you are a bird-watcher ('birder', if in the USA) or, more seriously, of an ornithological bent, you'll find the Ornithological Worldwide Literature (OWL) site of interest. It's a collaborative affair:

OWL is a joint effort between the American Ornithological Union and the British Ornithological Union and Birds Australia. The database is hosted by the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology, based in the Zoology Department of Oxford University, UK

Moreover:

Eventually, the online database will go back 50 or more years to acquire citations to the serial literature. OWL will proceed well into this century with a database of the current worldwide literature that would be of interest to ornithologists.

The database is reported to have 19,000 entries at the moment - but that should increase substantially, given the plans.

Be sure to take a look at 'Help with syntax' before you search - otherwise, like me, you are likely to get nothing but an error message. There's no automatic 'AND'ing.

Curious that a site with the acronym OWL, should have a picture of what appears to be a plasticene humming bird!

That acronym is really too common. A quick search reveals:

• Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL)
• OWL - the discovery magazine for kids
• OWL.org (Our Web Location for education)
• OWL Composite Protein Sequence Database
• OWL Web Ontology Language
• OWL - Older Women's League
• Career OWL
• The ESO 100-m OWL Telescope concept
• OWL-online.de
• Openwall GNU/*/Linux
• [A site for women's organizations in Russia]

I thought I'd give the links, just in case someone isn't interested in birds!

I still get requests for offprints of my 1981 paper, 'On user studies and information needs', so I've finally got round to digitising it. The diagrams have been re-drawn and there are one or two other small changes and corrections, and I may even get round to adding a commentary one of these days.

On re-reading the paper, while I worked on it, I was struck by the fact that pretty well everyone who has referred to it has missed the significance of Figure 2.

Tom

I've just taken the time to check Web of Science and it seems that all items in Information Research from Volume 8 no. 1 have now been indexed there. I look forward to every increasing hits :-) Speaking of which... the current hits on the top page now exceed last year's total by more than 10,000

A couple of items come to my notice today. The first is an item from the excellent Current Cites, on the use of RSS feeds by the Library of the National Cancer Institute to augment their catalogue and to provide services to members of the staff. It's published in the Library Journal, which is worth keeping an eye on. Here's a quotation to whet your appetite:

At the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, MD, we have used RSS both to integrate Internet content into the NCI library system and to make content from the library system available on our intranet in the form of RSS news feeds. This new content makes our library system a more useful and timely resource, allowing us to better 'feed' the information appetites of our clients, whose jobs require that they keep up with cancer and healthcare news, events, research, and politics. After the initial investment of time and technology, the information flows without requiring hands-on staff effort.

The other is from the Internet Scout Report (which has been going for years), which directs us to the Peter Drucker archive. I think that Drucker was the first to talk about the 'knowledge society', in his book 'The age of discontinuity', back in 1968. I imagine that today's 'knowledge society' enthusiasts will be astonished by the date - 'You mean we've been living in the knowledge society for almost 45 years?' And they think they invented it a couple of years ago :-) Actually, Drucker believed that we'd already been in the 'knowledge society' for some years, even in 1969.

The site has quite a wealth of information on it but not much in the way of electronic documents - properly speaking it is a guide to the archives. However, can anyone tell me why a Web designer would choose to use a very small point-size, sans-serif fount on a grey background? It is desperate to read, so I recommend Opera's zoom feature, which allows me to blow it up to 150% to make it readable. Even then it is necessary to discover the source address of the pop-up articles so that you can load them separately into a new browser page - messy. In fact it was only in this way that I discovered that one of the buttons at the bottom of the page is a fount-enlargement button!

Does no one pay attention to the usability gurus? Here's one of Jakob Nielsen's Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002

Style sheets unfortunately give websites the power to disable a Web browser's "change font size" button and specify a fixed font size. About 95% of the time, this fixed size is tiny, reducing readability significantly for most people over the age of 40.

Respect the user's preferences and let them resize text as needed. Also, specify font sizes in relative terms -- not as an absolute number of pixels.

[PS: why am I using 'fount'? Because it has been that way in English since 1683. "fount A complete set or assortment of type of a particular face and size. Also fully, fount of letter or type. (OED)]

New of the online Dictionary of Canadian Biography from Research Buzz.

More than you ever wanted to know about any Canadian you've ever heard of. Who knows, you might find an ancestor here.

Reflecting on Terry Brookes's Web services column:

Amazon tools will let Office users access Amazon information from within an Office document, using the research pane included in most applications. A writer typing a bibliography in a Word document, for example, could click on the name of a book to get catalogue information or cover art from Amazon.

Microsoft is making a major effort to encourage partners to build online services that exploit the new Office's XML capabilities, with service providers looking at Office as a familiar interface that will encourage greater consumption of Web services. Early backers include Factiva, a Dow Jones-owned online research service, and online payment services from eBay's PayPal.

Another major digital resource - The Lancet - is going digital (with its entire archive) but:

People will still have to pay to access the electronic version, and it is likely to be available in major reference libraries at universities and in cities rather than affordable by private individuals.

Here's a clever site, courtesy of The Shifted Librarian. It is the University of Minnesota Assignment Calculator, which is much more than a 'calculator'. Its basic aim is to enable a student to complete an assignment in time, and to that end, it breaks down the work into a series of tasks, with dates by which they should be completed, and supports learning about those tasks with links to other sites at Minnesota and on the wider Web.

It is the work of the University of Minnesota Libraries, in association with other campus organizations, such as the Writing Center and is an excellent piece of organization. Even if you don't want to use it for its established purpose, a student could gain a lot by following the links.

For those interested in maps, there's a new(ish) site covering Scottish towns, mainly in the 19th century. To quote:

Over 1,900 sheets covering 62 towns - the most detailed maps ever surveyed by Ordnance Survey.

Ideal for local historians and family historians.

A little while ago I had an item on the 1986 Domesday Project, operated by the BBC and using now defunct technology. There's a useful article on this in the current issue of Ariadne.

Volume 8 No. 4 of Information Research is now available.

This issue is devoted mainly to research being carried out at the Department of Information and Communications, Manchester Metropolitan University - there are six papers covering topics from 'synchronised object retrieval' to 'information literacy', indicating the wide span of research going on.

There is also another 'Luso/Hispanic' paper - this time in English, from Brazil on "Observing documentary reading by verbal protocol"

Tom Wilson Editor-in-Chief

For anyone interested in language the Ethnologue site will be of interest - it is produced by SIL International, an interesting organization that collects information about and encourages the development of unwritten languages. Did you know, for example, that Spain has eleven languages, five of which are official, as well as two extinct languages? Next time you're on holiday and wander into a little village where you don't understand a single word, you'll know why! I came across this, more or less accidentally, on a Weblog I hadn't seen before, MRSO

Readers of the Guardian newspaper's online resources are going to be required to pay for access to some parts according to a BBC News item.

"The realities of web publishing mean that we also have to seek opportunities to maximise our revenues," said Emily Bell, the editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited.

I assume that newspapers regard their Web sites as part of the marketing budget and I imagine that the costs are a closely kept secret. Given available technologies I imagine that, once the site is designed, a great deal of the content is automatically generated from the news service feeds and the newspaper's own databases. However, I don't recall papers on this subject coming to my attention. Does anyone know?

This from the LIS-BAILER list:

A selection of anti-apartheid periodicals published during the period 1960 to 1994 have been digitised by DISA (Digital Imaging of South Africa Project funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation). The digitised journals have been indexed and are available on the web for research purposes. As most of these journals are not readily available in South African Libraries and complete collections are rare, information managers are encouraged to create links from their Library OPAC to the digitised version on the Disa website by inserting the relevant URL in the SAMARC 856 field. This will greatly enhance user access and availability. The full list of digitised periodicals and the required URLs for the links are available from

http://disa.nu.ac.za/Bulletin/JournalURL.pdf

Information resources come in all types and a new site at the Library of Congress will be of interest to those involved in oral history. It's a site recording the experiences of people in war - from World War 1 to the Gulf War.

It should provide budding novelists with a lot of ideas :-)

Just back from Murcia, Spain, and the Scout Report draws my attention to a report from the Council on Library and Information Resources on New-Model Scholarship: How Will It Survive? by Abby Smith. The 'new model' is defined as: "specifically, the variety of Web sites and other desktop digital objects that faculty and graduate students are creating that fall somewhere short of “published” but are worthy of access into the future." Three examples are given, the History of Recent Science and Technology site at the Dibner Institute, the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, and Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia. The key issue dealt with by the report is the problem of ensuring that these sites are permanently archived for future use.

'Permanent' archiving is an interesting issue - especially in the digital world. Physical objects can survive centuries, but we are uncertain as to how long electronic documents can survive. Much depends not only on the storage medium, but also on the technology for 'reading' and displaying the record. I can no longer use 5.25" discs on my computer - and don't know anyone who can. So - what I wrote in the past now has to be scanned if I wish to put it on my Web site.

And how long will Information Research and its related Web sites, including my personal Web site, survive my disappearance from the scene? I am in the process of trying to ensure that the journal survives, but even that is at risk, given the apparent lack of interest in its survival from the LIS and information systems research communities.

The one thing of which we can be sure is that nothing is for ever!

See Dict.org, a site that provides definitions from a wide range of open access dictionary resources from Webster's Unabridged of 1913 to the Internet dictionary project.

A range of client software plugins for the project is also available.

The final report on the first stage of Project INISS has long been out of print. Now I'm scanning in and creating a Web site for it, since it was a fairly unusual piece of work for the time.

I'm putting up the Chapters as I produce them and you can find the first at http://informationr.net/tdw/publ/INISS/index.html

This chapter deals with the structured observation method used in the research and may be of continuing interest because that method is still relatively little-used.

The extent to which reference materials are increasingly available on the Web is fascinating. I recently came across the site for the 11th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, generally held to be the most scholarly of the editions and full of fascinating articles. The site has been put together with volunary labour and still has a few glitches, but it is an excellent resource.

My attention was drawn to another interesting site by The Scout Report, which I imagine most people on this list already know about. The site is the Internet Sacred Text Archive, which has the full text of practically everything you've ever heard of, and more besides, along with, in some cases, scholarly commentaries. For example, the section on Islam includes, of course, the Koran, but also Sufi texts and Palmer's "The meaning of the Koran". All of it out of copyright, of course.

Out of copyright texts were also the subject of a Guardian Online article on Thursday, "Drive to put in a good word" is about Brewster Kahle and his 'Bookmobile' - not the usual kind of travelling library!

Gary Price produces a useful Weblog for information professionals called The Resource Shelf. Lots of useful stuff.

An interesting site for those interested in Information Management, Content Management and Records Management is a site by Rick Barry. There is a massive amount of information on there, and personally I find it confusing to navigate, but then I also don't profess to be expert at searching the web.

I did see somewhere on there that Rick has admitted the site has expanded faster than he could keep up with to catalogue it, so hopefully he'll get time to have a look at it some time. However, don't take that as a criticism - it does have excellent information on it and is well worth wading through to find all the gems.

Ah, I was just about to give you some examples of pages on his site, but it's all in frames, so go hunting ...

(This message is re-posted on behalf of Chris McEvoy)

I used to think that IR was a mechanism that allowed my pocketPC to talk to my TabletPC, but now I know differently.

I have read a lot of the articles on IR, and have found them extremely useful. I work with a lot of people in the web field who have no idea about the wealth of knowledge, experience and information that exists, which they could use to great effect.

I am interested in tying to generate some cross- discipline communication, and am currently maintaing a site called Usability Views, on which I publish links to thousands of articles from areas ranging from usability testing to games design.

I have added all of the articles from IR, as well as the items from Tom Wilson's publications page.

The articles can be sorted by Popularity. This measures the number of pages that link to the article, so whilst it doesn't measure the number of times an article is read, it does give an indication of the popularity of the article.

The articles can also be sorted by Da te as well as T itle.

Do you think that this method of presentation has any value?

Social network theory seems to me to be one of those techniques that simply reports the obvious: however, if you are into that kind of thing you might be interested in a site, Buddy Zoo, that applies the ideas to 'buddy lists' in instant messaging systems. You have to have an AOL Instant Messaging user-name to sign up to see the information - and I couldn't be bothered to do that, since I get enough stuff by other means already. Still, the maps on the top page look pretty enough - according to Slashdot the site was created by a student at Caltech, and I imagine that students are among the prime users of IM.

Yesterday was a travel day, so I didn't get round to posting a message. From about 0 Celsius in Sweden, with a couple of inches of snow, I returned to +12 and sunshine - freak weather in both countries, you might say :-)

Here's a couple of sources that may interest people. One is the Newsletter of SCONUL, the UK Standing Conference of National and University Libraries. There's a wide range of topics in the current issue from institutional portals to e-learning. Thanks to Peter Scott's Library Blog for that one.

The other, which I think came to me through a mailing list, is Transformations: liberal arts in the digital age, published by the Associated Colleges of the South (Southern USA of course - not the 'South' generally! Again - mainly for college and university libraries, but, given the interest in technology, something there for others too. The journal doesn't appear to have an ISSN, and who knows how long it will survive? However, good luck to the venture.

Finally, for tonight, news just in from Slashdot - next time to get an insane desire to discover the relative dimensions of star ships, check out Zardalu.styles.net

A nice directory of RSS feed readers and news aggregators has been produced by one Haiko Hebig.

Some of the links appear to be to messages about rather than to sources from which the aggregator can be downloaded, but perhaps that will change.

Things are going on on one's own doorstep and you never know!

The Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield and the Higher Education Digitization Service at the University of Hertfordshire have been working (funded by money from the National Lottery) on a digital library of the proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1734, which is described as:

A fully searchable online edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing accounts of over 100,000 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.

Fascinating stuff!

Colleagues may be interested in a block of papers from the ALIA Conference. Some well known names there, with generally quite brief papers.