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Now fast-forward to 2008 and meet Euan Adie, web-developer with Nature Publishing Group. He has taken Chernoff's ideas, applied them to PubMed search results and created a mock-up called "PubMed Faceoff."
The age of the face represents the age of the article. The height of the eyebrows is the journal impact factor. A frown means the article wasn't cited as much as expected, while a smile means it was cited more than expected. The results are crude but you get the idea. If you could come up with an advanced search with more variables and could sort your results by facial features this could actually work. It really simplifies your search results based on those criteria. If you see a happy face with high eyebrows grinning at you that would tell you the article was highly cited and published in a high impact journal. If the face was young it would be a recent article. Simple and to the point. I like it but put some hair on the heads of those faces!
]]>Her suggestions include using Twitter to:
* Keep in touch with librarian friends and colleagues
* Keep up with the latest news by getting Twitter feeds from BBC or CNN
* Get conference information
* Share resources
* Use it for a notepad
* Post library announcements
If Christina doesn't motivate you enough to try Twitter, check out this older post from Des Walsh on Twittering where he talks about guides to Twitter. The concept of Twittering is simple but sometimes it takes reading a guide for people become aware of the whole concept of microblogging.
Want to learn more about Twitter? Come to the ML2SIG brownbag panel discussion on Twittering at Hatcher, room 100, from 12-1. Who knows, it might even be held in Twitter...
[forgot to mention the DATE of the panel discussion - Monday, June 16.]
]]>The wiki is well organized from the start. The front page lists the types of tools they reviewed based on what you want to do. Want to edit images? There's a link to a page listing seven different titles for helping you do this, with direct links to each title. Want to network with other researchers? There's a link for that, too with a list of suggestions like Ning, Academici and Pronetos Professor's Network.
These librarians have obviously put a lot of work into this wiki and best of all - it IS a wiki so it can be updated and you can add content yourself. They are using PBwiki which is very simple to use. If you do want to contribute you will have to contact Lisa Spiro at lspiro@rice.edu to get editing access to the wiki but she says they welcome contributors.
]]>The author recommends a process for reviewing online content, by which I assume he means non-commercial content which would include the following process or steps:
* The major professional and scholarly organizations in each discipline should devise a certification process in which a site owner can apply to have a site reviewed and recognized, perhaps for a nominal processing fee. The site would be subjected to a formal and rigorous review by peers in the disciplinary area covered by the site.* Only those sites meeting the highest standards should be awarded certification.
* Once a site wins certification from the national scholarly society, it should be permitted to display that stamp of approval prominently.
* The certification should remain in effect for a specific and limited amount of time (since a site can change rapidly and without notice). The site should regularly seek renewal of its certification.
* Each disciplinary organization should issue a resolution recommending that departments construe certification of a site as indicating that it has met the highest standards of scholarship.
* Each organization should maintain an online registry of certified sites.
This is a noble idea but what's in it for the organizations? Right now they're making money, theoretically, on scholarly, peer-reviewed journals and have a vested interest in keeping the status quote. Is the author expecting these professional organizations to review this content out of the goodness of their hearts? Internet content springs up like mushrooms daily. This would be an impossible task.
I agree, self-regulation is not the answer but scholarly communication is changing but evaluation of this communication doesn't have to change that much just because the media changes. There will always be tiers of scholarship, including the highest tier of reputable works of rigorous scholarship. What form the media takes will not change the most reputable publications but other levels have already changed. Look at how Wikipedia is changing scholarship. It is not considered the highest level of research but as long as people are willing to invest the time writing articles which include citations to scholarly materials and as long as these materials have been vetted or can be traced what's the harm in using it as a starting point?
Collaborating scholars should be able to make much more progress on their research than in the past, with the ease of international communication and instant re-visioning of wikis and other online tools but as long as publishers can make money from research and as long as tenure and promotion decisions have to be made the peer-reviewed process will remain.
]]>According to Lord the classic bibliographies of law during these time periods are at least fifty years old and since that time many important archives have been digitized and are now available online, either free or from subscription databases. Using a wiki makes this a fluid, organic document which can grow along with the knowledge in this field since it can be instantly updated. First made available in February of this year, this wiki has had 72,000 hits in its first two months. Lord envisioned a project of about 200 records but the database as grown to nearly 1,000 records.
The wiki is well designed, starting with broad categories such as case law, statutory law and administrative law but also includes sections on early legal treatises, research guides and bibliographies. Navigating around the wiki is simple with main subject category links available from every page. There is a search function which is also available from every page and which ranks search results by relevance. Where possible, OCLC record numbers are linked to items so users can easily locate materials in WorldCat. LibX makes this feature that much easier when using FireFox, since you get the MGetIt icon and link back to Mirlyn or online databases.
]]>One of the conference presenters, Melanie Hawthorne of Texas A & M talked about Natalie Clifford Barney, a most interesting woman, know as the amazon who strove to be Oscar Wilde's successor. According to Professor Hawthorne she was married twice but the second time was illegal in a number of ways, 1.) she wrote and signed the marriage contract when she was already married and 2.) the marriage contract she signed was with her female lover Elisabeth de Gramont, Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre. Since same-sex marriages were not legally recognized in France in 1918 this marriage was doubly illegal.
Well, back to library research. One of the Victorian Studies scholars attending the conference mentioned he had never heard of the marriage contract between Barney and the Duchess before to which the presenter answered this was a relatively new discovery.
The next day on a whim I decided to perform a Google search on Natalie Clifford Barney and the word “contract” to try and get a sense of if and how well this bit of information has migrated into general knowledge. The first link on the list of results was for a Wikipedia article on Barney which mentioned this same contract and gave a correct citation to a 2005 article in South Central Review by Francesco Rapazzini. I am not necessarily condoning students use Wikipedia for their research but I couldn’t help but consider that a possible expert in the field of Victorian Studies didn’t have this information while, likely an undergraduate English student might easily trip on it, using a resource many scholars and librarians consider inappropriate.
Having LibX installed in FireFox I was able to link directly to the full text of the article cited in Wikipedia and confirm the finding of the marriage contract between these two remarkable women.
Research has come a long way, baby!
]]>Staff at the Information Center desk get a few phone calls every term from students on cell phones trying to find their way out of the stacks. The YouTube video "Harlan Hatcher Graduate Labyrinth", a tongue-in-cheek tour of the library made the rounds last year. I think its time for the library to come up with our own tour to help students and faculty find their way around this lovable, old relic.
Here are some links to what other libraries are doing to help people find their way around the library. There are audio tours, tours set up in Flickr and other ideas.
Evidently some Flickrites are less than thrilled about this. One of the most popular tags in Flickr last week was "novideosonflickr"
]]>[USAID] found two items in the database related to abortion that did not fit POPLINE criteria. The agency then made an inquiry to POPLINE administrators. Following this inquiry, the POPLINE administrators at the Center for Communication Programs made the decision to restrict abortion as a search term.There is no explanation of the criteria for items to be included in POPLINE. We can only guess, since USAID says on their web site they are an "independent federal government agency that receives guidance from the Secretary of State." It's sad but true that librarians and researchers have to be the watchdogs of information. This is an excellent example for student researchers on the hazards of information products, what is and, more importantly what is not included. To his credit, Dean Klag announced on Friday the controversial word has been reinstated in the database but significant damage has been done to the credibility of the Bloomberg School of Public Health because of this incident ]]>
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Everyone should have a copy of this!
click to see original
Please note that this image has a copyright, for non-commercial distribution with attribution.
The Note on the ABC News Site
First Read on MSNBC's site
The Political Ticker blog on CNN
pollster.com by Mark Blumenthal
memeorandum.com, which automatically generates links to the most important news summaries from other commentators and sites every 5 minutes
politico.com (Did you know William F. Buckley just died?)
One last interesting site mentioned was techpresident, a blog which tracks how presidential candidates are using technology, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, etc. It tracks statistics on how many supporters candidates have in MySpace and Facebook, along with how many times their videos have been viewed in YouTube.
Let's see if their badge works here
The Women's Studies Section of ACRL offered an interesting discussion topic at ALA Midwinter in Philadelphia last week, "(Re)Thinking Subject Guides: Interactivity Unbound." This group offers great topics which generate a surprising amount of interest, based on the fact that I ended up sitting on the floor for this.
There was a great deal of sharing from a number of institutions on how they are dealing with subject guides. Two libraries mentioned using LibGuides from Springshare. Here are a couple of examples of institutes using it, Boston College and Dalhousie University. I'm not going to get into the pros and cons of this software in this entry, since my purpose is to simply spill the gist of the discussion that took place.
Another management system mentioned was Luminis, which offers personal portals with tabs and will automatically show subject librarians.
A Michigan State librarian mentioned using open source LibData for subject guides, created by University of Minnesota. Here's an example of one of their subject guides for African Studies
Wayne State mentioned using Conduit software to create toolbars with different categories.
There was talk of using Del.icio.us to create a feed or list of online resource into guides but people agreed that it doesn't work well for personalizing a guide once you're in Del.icio.us.
One participant said there is such a thing as too much information and offers strictly one page guides to undergraduates at the University of Central Florida.
There was talk about whether "emerging technology" is the best thing to use for subject guides. Some folks said good ol' paper handouts work best for them. Others give handouts during instructional sessions but also offer them as PDFs and post links to them online.
We discussed using wikis as subject guides and I was surprised by acomment from one librarian who said people at her institution bulk at offering wikis for students because the library discredits using Wikipedia for academic research so creating one might encourage the wiki mentality. (Honey, the wikis are already HERE! Read Everything is Miscellaneous)
University of California - San Diego's Science and Engineering Library talked about using wikis but one person said they ended up with too many wikis and couldn't tame the clutter. They are now working on working out ways of creating better control over wikis and working toward standardization.
It appeared that many librarians opted for newer, easier technology for subject guides in order to circumvent institutional IT departments which weren't allowing them to create their own personalized tools for specific courses or topics.
Someone in the group asked if anyone kept statistics on the use of subject guides in their library and there was very little response to that idea. One library had surveyed students to see what they would like in a subject guide. There was no mention of the results of this survey. A couple librarians mentioned they relied on subject guides for answering research question from disciples in which they were not as familiar with resources. Others said their faculty used subject guides and even suggested topics for guides. That lead to a discussion on how you determine which topics need subject guides. Most librarians base guides on the disciple areas within their institutions. If you don't offer a major in European Studies do you really need a subject guide on that? This ends up being one of the major problems facing librarians as disciplines become more and more intertwined.
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