DigiCMB

On Information Worls review, 23 November 2005: Thomson follows Google Scholar, Scirus and Scopus .... Thomson ISI expands services to includeOpen Access Institutional Repositories! "Thomson Scientific is releasing a single tool for searching and accessing online open access content. The Web Citation Index (WCI) from the abstracting and indexing (A&I) specialist will become part of its ISI Web of Knowledge platform and connect together pre-print articles, institutional repositories and open access (OA) journals, IWR can exclusively reveal" Trackback: http://www.iwr.co.uk/actions/trackback/2146510

The second part of the presentation title struck me and i just had to put it up on my blog: "utilizing the sloppy underbelly of the web to expose our collections and services" That's what we are doing with the Library Toolbar and Google Scholar, but there is more to be done ...... More "sloppy techniques": Bookmarklets Firefox Extensions User Scripting OpenSearch together with: Javascript Screen Scraping "Light" Web Services The presentation is straight, indeed monkeywrenching great techniques. I must dig in, because i know too little about some of these things and it could be very usefull! Most of the presentations of ACCESS 2005 are available IN AUDIO (MP3) This is nice because it is added value to the powerpoints. Ross Singer explains for instance their implementation of E-JOURNALS SUGGEST in SFX METALIB, just like Google Suggest. It was his experience that users of SFX / metalib got so many bad results (0 results) because of just typing in ...

Thinking and searching more about "Getting into the User Environment" again i can across a weblog-item of Lorcan Dempsey called "Bridging to user environments" Read this: " "At the Access 2005 conference Ross Singer impressed the audience with a compelling presentation of how one could stitch library services into user environments leveraging the 'sloppy underbelly' of the web. He showed firefox extensions, bookmarklets, scraping and scripting approaches, acknowledging that while they create real value they are in their nature often not as robust as one would like. This presentation clearly struck a chord in the crowd. A major strand of library activity needs to be to make hooks into library services available in such a way that we can more readily develop services and tools to build compelling user applications of the type that Ross suggested. This thought is behind my question at Access [ ppt ]: what would a library service which can only be ...

The Library Toolbar is developing into an asset, a little thing extra to connect the user to it's much valued resources like databases and e-journals. While the search options are still getter larger, the e-books section has expanded with sub-menu navigation! Also the "Handige Links" are grown into an overview and a direct link option to all major sections of our Library Website! An English version of the Toolbar is in production; i think this should be standard and maybe the only one ... The News-section is containing THREE RSS-Feeds: Library news, direct from the website (RSS) New publications from UMCG Staff in journals indexed in PUBMED : the option in Pubmed to make RSS-feeds of searches is GREAT! This feed is based on a search for all known namen and adress variables of the "University Medical Center Groningen" combined with AND to any new articles in Pubmed. All new publications in the TOP5 Journals as they appear in Pubmed . NEJM, LANCET, BMJ, JAMA and ...

Working on an abstract and searching for the literature about my subject, i decided to use CiteULike as my online citation-database instead of the usual Reference Manager windows client software. What do i like about it? The easy way to add citations (Post to CiteULike) : Searching in PubMed i can add a citation to my Library with ONE CLICK on a special LINK in my browser LINKS. The bookmarklet posts the citation into my CiteULike library. The visual way to add new keywords (the famous TAGS) or just use use the ones i have entered earlier. TAG: medicine to read articles somebody else has decided to put in his/her library, to read why (notes, abstracts etc) to see the RELATED ARTICLES with TOUCHGRAPH I already mentioned the use of this tool within HUBMED and i begin to like it even more. A great visual way to search for literature. to browse in recent headline artles of 6499 journals online! See the list of journals with "LIBRARY" in the title! the fact that i can make ...

I still do not understand most of this tagging stuff, but i am sure it will come back into this blog later on. For now i want to mention the "LIBRARY THING" a website where you can catalogue your own collection of books online. Use the shared books from other people who catalogued over a 800.000 books since August 29 2005. You can search the Library of Congress and over thirty major libraries around the world. Tag your books as on Del.icio.us and Flickr (eg., wwii , islam , judaism , magical realism , erotica , knitting ). Be sure you search the tags. How is that for a Library Catalogue? Have a look at the graphically arranged library on a virtual shelf ! Well this proves again that technology is changing lives ánd jobs

Just spotted on a old (01-10-2005) blogitem from Tate's Space (Tate Nunley) about the LITA 2005 where David Walker from California State University at San Marcos gave a presentation as part of the Custom MetaSearch Services using XML API session where he previewing RSS Creator . An application that he is creating that harnesses the power of Ex Libris. Just look at the demo and see how WITHIN METALIB (RUGCOMBINE at out organisation) the alert function can become more serious with RSS-feed technology

A blog on Federated Search Engines and Link Resolvers : progress reports of members of the Workgroup for Federated Searching at the Academic Information Service, University of Pretoria announced an evaluation of Federated Search Engines and Link Resolvers for Academic Libraries. A powerpoint presentation named: Power-searching the "3-click world ..." 8 September 2005 is available. The report itself is only available on request. For an overview of all sorts of stuff about FEDERATED SEARCHING AND SOFTWARE, you could try the following " The Library of Congres Portals Applications Issue Group" (LCPAIG), including a large list of articles about the subject "Federated searching". Mind you, the last revision was done on August 24th, 2004! But it's a good list for the "old" literature ....

Available from now on -still in beta-test, but pretty good already- GOOGLE SCHOLAR with automatic library HOLDINGS, in our case with RUGLINKS (our sfx-linkresolver from Ex-Libris). No extra bookmarklet needed anymore! Just use a computer with the network of the University or the UMCG, and you'll get an ADDITION to your search results in GOOGLE SCHOLAR, based on your IP-address: RUGLINKS FULLTEXT (if we really have the FULLTEXT online) or RUGLINKS Services (if a hit was found in ou OPAC/Catalogus) or nothing (no fulltext, no print) If you are OUTSIDE de RUG or UMCG you can search in SCHOLAR PREFERENCES for our LIBRARY. Just type "groningen" into the search box and tick the box! You can tick 3 libraries at once (if you want to). Your preferences will stay on that computer for at least 8 hours.

As many libraries already did, we now follow them in giving PUBMED our fulltext e-journals holdings to make it possible to show a Library-TAB of the Central Medical Library , University of Gronigen in the MyNCBI-section. We delivered an output from our SFX-database and submitted it to PUBMED. In about 48 hours it will be possible to : limit a search with fulltext available results ( really available) show a result-tab in PubMed from our Library But even more exciting is the NEW option to SHARE your TAB-selections with others. This makes it possible to alter your preferred Institution-link to PUBMED in such a way that everybody using THAT link will see the result-tabs YOU want them to see as a Library. And they do not have to login to MyNCBI to see them!!!! Read the details For the CMB this link will be: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?myncbishare=CMB&otool=inlugrmlib&holding=F1000 See for yourselves! Go to PUBMED with this link , try a search and see the results.

A Reference Desk or Information Desk in the library is one of the most important features of a physical library. Thé direct contact with your users. But in the future our users will come more and more to the digital library! I think equal services should go to both desks. While the physical desk could change/evolve to a more pro-active service, the digital service should get more attention in the meaning of: separate from the physical desk, more staff-hours and more interactive communication. Therefore the focus is on Digital Reference services. Especially today in the HanzeHogeschool in Groningen. The HanzeMediatheek , together with the University of Groningen (RUG) and the Public Library of Groningen , organised a meeting between their staff to talk about their digital information desks. They compared their current services, showed presentations of what software is used, held discussions in mixed groups about possible overlap and differences. Purpose of the meeting is to exchange ...

To show the idea of a library toolbars is not new, and indeed used in various situations, have a look at the Wiki "Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki" at the section Technology; Web Browser Extensions! The wiki is also a great source of information on what libraries are doing all over the world. I see a lot of new features we as a library could use.

On 10 and 11 october 2005 the 7th annual "Internet Librarian International" was held. Besides the interesting programme they also had a (unofficial) conference wiki to keep up with communications etc. Here's the programme: Conference At-a-Glance [PDF] PreConference Workshops - Sunday, October 9 General Confererence - Day One: Monday, October 10 • Opening Keynote: Digitising Library Collections • Track A: Blogs, Wikis, and Collaboration Tools • Track B (morning): E-Learning and Training • Track B (afternoon): Information Organisation and Discovery • Track C: Global Best Practices General Confererence - Day Two: Tuesday, October 11 • Keynote: Relevance and the Future of Search • Track A (morning): Digital Libraries and Resources • Track A (afternoon): Exploring Web Research Skills and Resources • Track B (morning): Innovative Information Environments • Track B (afternoon): Technology for Libraries Wiki's, Blogs, collaboration tools, digital libraries et...