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You have to learn to let go. The idea that books, magazines, databases or any form of information source can and should be kept for perpetuity is laughable. Items in a library need to be weeded and space is the major reason why. I know all of you want to keep your precious books, and I do to. But who’s going to pay for it, you?... — the other me

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June 22, 2009

Google's 'Street View' Eyeballs College Campuses

The campus: a haven of green quadrangles and footpaths winding around academic buildings, largely inaccessible to car traffic—and to Google Maps’ “Street View” feature. It has been busy providing closeup photos—taken from cars—of buildings around the world.

Now through the genius of high technology—mounting a camera on a bicycle or pedicab—campuses are within Google’s reach. Today eSchool News reports that that pedal-powered vehicles have been trawling the grounds at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of San Diego, and the California State University at San Diego.

The streetscape service has raised hackles and concerns about privacy in other countries. Germany asked the company to erase faces, house and license place numbers from photographs, and Greece rejected Google’s request to photographs city streets until it received more reassurances about privacy.

The move to map college campuses may be a way to defuse these worries. Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the Web site Search Engine Land, told eSchool News that the effort sounded like good public relations. “This is a nice way for them to say, ‘Hey, look, Street View: It’s really warm and fuzzy,’” he told the newspaper. “It’s not just about taking pictures of people’s houses. We can find these footpaths that people want to go on and walking areas, places people will like.” —Josh Fischman

June 16, 2009

Springer Announces New Image-Searching Program

Springer Science and Business Media says it has created a new way for researchers and professors to search, download, and use its collection of 1.5 million images.

At the American Library Association’s conference next month, the company plans to introduce SpringerImages, a subscription service that will combine graphs, charts, drawings, and photos from books and journals published by the company and available on SpringerLink and Images.Md.

The new product will be able to search any text in the image, as well as its caption. Users will be able to edit the key words or tags corresponding to the image, and those with subscriptions to Springer’s online material will also find a link to the article. The new technology will make all images available for download in high resolution, and they can be sent to either a PowerPoint presentation or PDF document. They can be used freely, as long as there is no profit being made. Springer is looking for other image databases to incorporate, but only if the images will be available free.

While the company said the subscription cost for the image-searching software would be less than its print subscription, prices will vary depending on the customer’s institution size and whether the access to scientific images is full or limited. —Marc Beja

May 28, 2009

A Search Engine Could Help Colleges Earn Money

As gifts to colleges are beginning to dwindle every penny that can be collected counts.

That’s the belief behind GoodSearch and its sister site, GoodShop, founded by real-life siblings JJ and Ken Ramberg. The sites, powered by Yahoo, will donate money to nonprofit organizations, including colleges, sororities, schools, sports teams, and charities, each time consumers search or shop. More than 80,000 organizations are listed on the GoodSearch site, and users can nominate new ones.

Both sites track and direct their advertising revenue based on the number of searches and purchases made on behalf of each organization. From GoodSearch, users can search the Internet for sites, images, maps, or videos, earning about a penny for their chosen organization each time they do. On the GoodShop site, users can shop at any of the 1,000 vendors who sponsor the site and have up to 7 percent of the price of each purchase allocated to their charity of choice.

“Particularly right now when there’s just not a lot of money in people’s pockets to be spending for donations, this is a really easy way to give without spending extra money,” JJ Ramberg said.

Delaware Technical and Community College has used GoodSearch since September 2007, said Barbara Ridgely, the college’s associate vice president for institutional advancement. By making the search engine the home page of campus computers, the college has raised $6,664 for its library. The college hopes to raise $2,000 to $3,000 per year, a goal it has met each of the past two years.

“This is just one of several of our fundraisers for the library, but It’s not difficult, and because so much of the online searching goes on in the library, it’s a good match,” she said. – Erica R. Hendry

April 7, 2009

U. of Richmond Creates a Wikipedia for Undergraduate Scholars

Arlington, Va. — At what point does the volume of historical scholarship get in the way of our ability to make sense of history?

At The Chronicle Technology Forum on Monday, Andrew J. Torget, director of the digital scholarship lab at the University of Richmond, argued that we have already exceeded that point. He said that if a person were to read one book a day for the rest of his life, he would not even begin to approach the number of books that Google has already scanned into its database from college libraries. There is just too much information out there.

The current model for teaching and learning is based on a relative scarcity of research and writing, not an excess. With that in mind, Mr. Torget and several others have created a Web site called History Engine to help students around the country work together on a shared tool to make sense of history documents online. Students generate brief essays on American history, and the History Engine aggregates the essays and makes them navigable by tags. Call it Wikipedia for students.

Except better. First of all, its content is moderated by professors. Second, while Wikipedia still presents information two-dimensionally, History Engine employs mapping technology to organize scholarship by time period, geographic location, and themes. “When you’ve got too much information to be able to process it all, you’re not sure how to find meaningful patterns within it,” Mr. Torget told The Chronicle. “The idea is to build a digital microscope that allows students to focus in on what’s most useful and relevant for the question they’re asking.”

Also, the essays (called “episodes”) that compose the History Engine database are short in comparison to traditional scholarly essays—typically about 500 words. “The challenge of a digital age is that that writing assignment hasn’t changed since the age of the typewriter,” Mr. Torget said. “The digital medium requires us to rethink how we make those assignments.”

While some academics might groan about the perils of reining in scholarly commentary according to the standards of reader patience established by Twitter and text messaging, Mr. Torget said that the essay-length restrictions help focus students on what is most important and relevant when writing about their research. But the larger aim of the project is to encourage students to create and view their work in context of a larger body of scholarship—one that accounts for a wide community of scholars but is organized in a way that is manageable.

So far, Mr. Torget says that professors at eight colleges have agreed to use and contribute to the History Engine in their classes. The engine is free to any who wish to join. –Steve Kolowich

October 23, 2008

Reconsidering Authority in Wikipedia World

Simson Garfinkel takes a look at authority and sourcing in Wikipedia world with an article in the latest edition of Technology Review. He focuses on Wikipedia’s requirement to cite published sources in adding information to Wikipedia articles. Yes, with a mob-written encyclopedia, a requirement for citing published, vetted sources makes sense, he writes.

“But there is a problem with appealing to the authority of other people’s written words: Many publications don’t do any fact checking at all, and many of those that do simply call up the subject of the article and ask if the writer got the facts wrong or right,” Mr. Garfinkel writes. “For instance, Dun and Bradstreet gets the information for its small-business information reports in part by asking those very same small businesses to fill out questionnaires about themselves.”

This policy is particularly problematic if you are the authority on a particular topic, but you can’t use your own base of knowledge. Jaron Lanier, a futurist, had problems changing a statement on the Wikipedia entry about himself that said he was a filmmaker. He wasn’t a filmmaker, yet every time he removed that non-fact, someone put it back in.

He finally got the item changed, but was then criticized for editing his own wikientry. (PR directors who maintain their college Wikipedia pages, take note.) —Scott Carlson

September 12, 2008

Thinking About Truth, Lies, and the Power of Google

Amy Fry, a San Diego librarian, has a thoughtful little post on ACRLog called “Information Is Power — Even When It’s Wrong.” It’s basically a dissection of the United Airlines stock-value dive that occurred after a reporter from Income Securities Advisors posted erroneous information that he had gotten from a Google search.

For the average librarian, the event provides a series of lessons: that “proper metadata is important” or that “sometimes aggregators are misleading.”

But a big lesson for Ms. Fry: “Google is more powerful than we even realized.”

“If any one of you has been underestimating the role of Google in the information food chain, STOP,” she writes. “As more and more information is accessed through and archived by private companies …, librarians must take on greater responsibilities as watchdogs for the public interest. Even if our roles are changing, our mission must not.”

Now, could the headline of her item be applied to the current presidential race? People have already remarked on the power of the Internet in the current race — but to what end? —Scott Carlson

July 31, 2008

Sick Celebrities and Seasons Influence Internet Searches for Health News

With a tool from Google that tracks searches, researchers from Ball State University have uncovered a few patterns in the way that consumers search for health information.

The report, released yesterday and available free from the university, shows that the time of year and the health problems of the rich and famous influence what health topics people research on the Internet, according to the investigators from the university’s Center for Media Design.

The researchers used Google Trends, a tool that tracks public searches and holds data going back to 2004.

Information on diet and exercise peaked around New Year’s Day, says Peter Ellery, one of the researchers. That’s not shocking: it’s New Year’s resolution time.

The researchers also learned that illnesses reported by celebrities led to more searches about such diseases. People in the public eye have always been able to draw attention, and their health problems draw attention as well.

Barron Lerner, a medical historian and physician at Columbia University, has chronicled this pattern in his book, When Illness Goes Public. I asked him, a few years ago, why sick celebrities are so important to other people. “There’s a sense that celebrities have access to the best care and that you’d be wise to do what they did,” Dr. Lerner told me. “Would that work for me, people wonder? Lance Armstrong says that people write to him asking about everything he did and ate while fighting testicular cancer.” —Josh Fischman

July 29, 2008

Does Google's Web Search Go Deep Enough Into Scholarly Archives?

Many scholarly archives on college and public Web sites don’t show up in Google because the search engine doesn’t index them — they’re in what many call the “deep Web,” below the level that most search engines look. A new study found that fewer than half — just 44 percent — of a sample group of deep-Web pages from scholarly archives showed up in Google searches.

The study was done by digital librarians at the University of Michigan who are also involved in the Open Archives Initiative, an effort to help search engines find items deep in Web archives.

This year Google stopped supporting the Open Archive Initiative’s indexing standards. Google officials said in a blog post that fewer than 200 Web sites were using the standard, and that it was more trouble than it was worth to support it.

But the Michigan study’s authors argue that their findings show that “Google needs to do much more to gather hidden resources, not less.” —Jeffrey R. Young

July 28, 2008

New Search Engine Generates Buzz Among Librarians

Some former Google employees have introduced a new search engine that they hope will overtake Google in popularity. The search engine is called Cuil, (pronounced “cool”) and it has been generating so much interest that its home page could not be opened at various points today.

Tom Costello, a former Stanford University researcher and one of the founders of the search engine, said Cuil culls through 120 billion Web pages, more pages than Google searches, according to an article today in The New York Times. But Google tells the paper it has the largest collection of documents searchable on the Web, and that it welcomes competition.

Cuil displays search results a bit differently from Google. Entries are longer and there are more pictures with the entries.

Bill Drew, a librarian at Tompkins Courtland Community College in New York, writes on his blog today that he was impressed with Cuil results after doing a search on his name. “The search retrieved over 160 hits spread over 19 pages of search results,” he writes “All appear to be very relevant. I was amazed at the depth of the results as well. It included many book reviews I wrote back in the early 1990s.”—Andrea L. Foster

July 8, 2008

'Education' and 'Abortion' Are Hot Search Terms at Political Web Sites

“Education” ranks among the top five issue-related search terms that have led Internet users to the campaign Web sites of John McCain and Barack Obama in the second quarter of 2008, according to Hitwise, a New York-based company.

Hitwise analyzed the top 200 search terms that sent traffic to each candidate’s Web site. Education ranked second, behind abortion, in top political-issue search terms that sent people to Senator Obama’s campaign Web site. Education ranked fourth—behind health care, environment/global warming, and oil prices—that sent visitors to Senator McCain’s campaign Web site. In the first quarter of this year, education ranked fourth on Obama’s site and wasn’t among the top five listed on McCain’s site.

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