DigiCMB

Do not expect any posts before August 19th, because i am off for a holiday to Spain! Almost three weeks surrounded by the mountains of the Pyrenees, i am looking forward to it. First issue in August will be about the scientific program of the next Eahil Conference in Cluj , Rumania! Second one will be about the brand new Medical Building of the Second Life Medical Library 2.0! Third one, oh, we'll see about that later!

You can now listen to the Internet site of the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) The UMCG is the second Dutch Hospital that offers this ReadSpeaker-software. The Utrecht UMC was the first in June 2006, but with a somewhat limited version of ReadSpeaker. The remarkable thing is that the texts are not previously recorded, but converted by the software and send back to the visitor as a sound file. It not just reads out the pages, but also downloaded pdfs, like patient brochures..

With a title like this I should attract a lot of hits -;) But to call me a Black Hat spammer right away, I don't think so. I believe this reseach deserves a lot of attention. I wonder if Jeroen Bosman will publish his report "Scopus doorgelicht en vergeleken : de dekking van de citatiedatabase Scopus inclusief vergelijkingen met Web of Science and Google Scholar" on this subject also in English. (He just confirmed to me he will, so be patient!) In the ongoing debate about the language of blogging/publication, I am convinced that in this case the language of publication is a negative impuls. Making it available in a open repository is on the other hand a very positive point. There is certainly international interest for this! In a free translation it would be: "Scopus examined and compared: the coverage of citationdatabase Scopus with Web of Science and Google Scholar ." There is also a powerpoint available. This presentation is also in Dutch, but will give you...

Just a few days ago I had a discussion about our OPAC with a colleague. I told her that the overviews we are making of our medical library collection by subjects and by publication type should be possible to generate easily from within our Library Catalogue. And not only by us, but of course by the users. The overviews are only useful if the Catalogue is properly maintained and if all records get proper subject keywords. Our Catalogue it the typical example of a by-product of a acquisition system, a traditional library system with modules that focus on administrative functions instead of functional services for the users. Tomorrow I am going to show her the new Catalogue of the North Carolina State University (NCSU) and let her read the column of Roy Tennant in LibraryJournal.com of a few days ago. Fixing Library Discovery By Roy Tennant , LibraryJournal.com, June 15, 2006 http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6341887.html Roy mentions s he is "seeing some major new interfac...

The following text can be used to "brainwash" new library staff, library school students and in certain cases to give existing library staff a new "mindset" if they seem to be stuck in a 20th-Century mindset. Print these lines on a Virtual Librarian Trading Card and pass them around in Library World. They can be used as meditation Chant. Wake up and practice every morning. Gather your staff each morning around the coffee machine and chant for 5 minutes. Never leave the library if you haven't read them outloud at least once a day. These are the first lines: All technologies evolve and die. Every technology you learned about in library school will be dead someday. You fear loss of control, but that has already happened. Ride the wave. You are not a format. You are a service. The OPAC is not the sun. The OPAC is at best a distant planet, every year moving farther from the orbit of its solar system. The user is the sun. The user is the magic element that transform...

Do we say "NOUGHT or Oh"? During the last IP-lecture about "Zoekmachinaties / "SearchMachination" there was short and not conclusive discussion about how to pronounce Web or Library 2.0 . According to the typical british Simon Lande it should be "TwoPointNOUGHT". In fact that was the only way he ever heard it, if I remember correctly. What I suspected that day was confirmed yesterday while listening to a group Americans in an OPAL session. It must be a UK versus US-english thingy. I cleary heard Michael Stephens say it numerous times: Web TWOPoint OHHoe. So if you are planning on presenting about this, make your pick -;) Technorati: Categories: OPAL , programming , libraries , Secondlifelibrary , web2.0

What is happening with Ask.com? They certainly decided to put some extra effort (and money) in it. Not only did they started a new search service for blogs , it is now also possible to make a connection to your our own collection of search databases & resources. The default search engine for the Effectivebrand.com Toolbar is Ask.com. If you have an EffectiveBrand Toolbar like the QuickSearch CMB Toolbar you can add (almost) ALL of your exclusive databases to search via the Toolbar. In that case all users HAVE to install the Toolbar. However, there can be a lot of reasons why someone is not able (or allowed) to install it at their work. Now they can use -for the search function of the Toolbar at least- the following link: http://search.platformaonline.com/Results.aspx?q=patellar+tendon+rupture&ctid=CT142118 This link merges the Ask.com search engine with the databases from the CMB Toolbar via the EffectiveBrand site. The result is that anybody can see and use all "...