WoW! Wouter over het Web

Quite a year: 29,366 visitors and 49,255 pageviews. In the previous post I listed the most succesful posts.

Best wishes and happy New Year to all my readers, and keep on reading!

Labels: English

Lijstjes- en statistiekentijd alom. 29.351 visitors bekeken maar liefst 49.299 pagina's. Wel aardig om te weten is dat ongeveer 44% van de bezoekers via Google binnenkwam, 18% kwam direct naar de site, en 7% verliet er zelfs bloglines voor. Maar daar gaat het in deze post niet om. Wat lazen ze?

1) De Nederlandse biblioblogosphere in kaart, alle 20 goed, 5/02/06, 3013 pageviews, 24 commentaren.
De post blijkt nog steeds veel belangstelling te trekken. Ook al is mijn lijstje van biblioblogs aan de aan de linkerkant completer van dit blog. Het wordt eigenlijk wel weer tijd om deze posting eens grondig te herzien.

2) Luchtfoto's van Nederland? Just Ask, 21/03/06, 1001 pageviews, 1 commentaar
Alles wat over lucht- of satellietfoto's gaat trekt veel belangstelling. Hoewel dit blog daar niet speciaal voor rankt in Google toch veel bezoek.

3) Le Tour de France ook live in Nederland op het Web, 28/6/06, 908 pageviews, 5 commentaren.
De Tour de France heeft over de zomer heel wat bezoekers getrokken. Ook op dit blog, samen met de volgende post goed voor ongeveer 1900 pageviews. Heel veel bezoekers kwamen via Google op deze posts af.

4) De Tour de France in Google Earth, 26/5/06, 801 pageviews, 4 comentaren
De magie van Tour werkte ook bij deze post. Samen zorgden deze posts ervoor dat er vooral in de zomer toch nog behoorlijk wat bezoekers waren.

5) Nederlands bibliotheekbezit vindbaar in Open Worldcat, 21/02/06, 737 pageviews, 2 commentaren
Dit was een post die wel hier en daar besproken is geworden. Dit was echt een nieuwtje. OCLC-PICA is tot nu toe niet zo sterk in de communicatie geweest, helaas hebben de bloggers daar nog niet veel aan kunnen veranderen.

6) Gelezen lijst 733 pageviews
Deze lijst staat er puur voor eigen gebruik, maar trekt toch veel belangstelling. Ik denk dat er ook via Google behoorlijk wat gebruikers binnenkomen omdat het een relatief lange lijst is met veel termen die er uniek voorkomen.

7) De Olympische Spelen on-line 12/02/06, 579 pageviews, 2 commentaren
Ik denk dat deze post goed liep omdat ik van de deelnemende Olympiers de weblogs verzameld had.

8) De beste luchtfoto’s van Nederland nu bij Google, 8/09/06, 450 pageviews, 0 commentaren.
Met dit bericht was ik net voor de meute uit in de aankondiging van de update van Google Earth en Maps met satelliet- en luchtfoto's. Deze post valt onder de noemer van de populariteit van satelliet en luchtfot's van Nederland.

9) Zotero promises to be the crossbreed between EndNote and Del.icio.us 3/10/06, 421 pageviews, 3 commentaren
De eerste Engelstalige blogpost die zich een zekere mate van populariteit mocht verheugen. Crossposten op de EndNote lijst hielp natuurlijk behoorlijk.

10) Ontgoocheld over ontgoogelen, 20/02/06, 410 pageviews
Een van de weinig onderwijs gerelateerde posts die het goed deed. De kop zal er zeker mee geholpen hebben.

Labels: Dutch

Gisteren was ik op de website van de lokale bioscoop op zoek naar een geschikte film om met de kinderen te bezoeken. Tot mijn verbazing zag ik bij de uitgebreide link-collectie van de films ook een linkje naar de plaatselijke bibliotheek. Links naar IMDB, cinema.nl had ik wel verwacht. Maar de lokale bibliotheek is toch leuk. Vooral wanneer je een film als Kruistocht in spijkerbroek hebt, heel relevant om dan ook meteen het boek in de plaatselijke bibliotheek te zien zodat je het kan reserveren of op de terugweg van de film het boek meteen kunt gaan halen.
De link is een zoekactie op titel in de catalogus. Het werkt in veel gevallen goed, zoals bij Charlotte's Web, Eragon of zelfs Casino Royale (wel wat grote letters, maar die zijn ook best te lezen). Bij La Tourneuse de Pages gaat het verkeerd. Althans er wordt niets in de lokale catalogus gevonden wat er ook maar enigszins op lijkt. Wel kan je verder door naar de Aquabrowser resultaten op bibliotheek.nl, helaas mag ik de recensie uit de NRC pas in de bibliotheek zelf lezen. Daar zouden ze nog iets meer hun best op kunnen doen. De plaatselijke bibliotheek dan, of bibliotheek.nl. Ik ben toch lid, dan zou ik toch wel resultaten uit de krantenbank mogen inzie?
De bioscoop verleent een geweldige service op deze manier. Een mooi voorbeeld op de bibliotheek daat te brengen waar je gebruikers zijn. Echt bibliotheek 2.0. Waar? Gewoon in Wageningen ;)

Trouwens het werd Flushed Away. Heerlijk gelachen. Een aanrader voor mensen met kinderen.

Labels: Bibliotheek 2.0, bibliotheken, Bioscoop

In Wageningen hadden we tot voor kort de nummer 1 hit in Google met Wageningen Desktop Library. Tussen kerst en oud en nieuw hebben we die afgeschaft. De bibliotheek komt niet meer op je desktop, maar is tegenwoordig gewoon een digitale bibliotheek. Behoudens de naanwswijziging zijn de onderliggende veranderingen nogal ingrijpend.
Voor de gebruiker lijkt het in de eerste instantie alleen een wijziging van het uiterlijk. De bibliotheek pagina's zijn eindelijk aangepast aan de huisstijl van Wagenignen UR, maar wat veel wezenlijker is, is dat alles onder de motorkap ook gewzijzigd is.
We zijn voor het front-end af van minisis als bibliotheek systeem, en draaien nu volledig op een Oracle database. XML en XSLT zijn nu belangrijke ingredienten van het systeem. De hele database structuur van de catalogus en de diverse documentaite bestanden, tijdschriften administratie, leners database etc. zijn compleet op zijn kop gezet. Allemaal in-house ontwikkeld. Voor de echt geinteresseerden, een en ander over de onderliggende techniek is terug te vinden op onze wiki.
De web interface is op dit moment nog niet echt vernieuwend, maar we zijn nu eindelijk klaar om nieuwe dingen te gaan doen.

Labels: Dutch

The excellent German blog netbib has a very interesting entry on libraries that are making use of Del.icio.us. They have compiled a list of a few USA libraries that make use of tagging systems such as Del.icio.us. Recently they discoverd the impressive collection from the Sorbonne University Libary with nearly 2000 tagged items.
Now we have libraries that blog, podcast, wiki, use flickr and or tag as well.

Labels: English

Great promotion for the UK higher education search engine/web directory Intute in the Education Guardian. What I didn't realize is that Intute is compatible with Blackboard (and Mooter). Perhaps we can make use of that knowledge.

Hattip: Gwen Harris

Labels: English

The language thing is becoming trilogy on my blog. You are reading the third installment of the sequel. The first part introduced the language musings of a non-native english blogger. The second installement announced more frequent posts in English. This third part of the trilogy is at the request of Edwin who quizzed me about the statistics of this blog since I started blogging in English. I was looking into the statistics of this blog anyway. It is the end of year. I have collected just over a year of usage data with Google Analytics. A program I seriously recommend to any serious blogger. So I was considering some posts on this subject anyway. This is the first to start it all off.
So the question posed by Edwin was "Have u seen any changes in your blogstats since u've been written a lot of posts in English?"

I made a start with blogging in English on August 26th. So I have looked at the 4 months prior to September and the 4 months from Spetember till now. Okay the month hasn't been finished yet, but with the holiday season traffic is slow anyway.

For the short answer: In the period May-August I had a 9,693 pageviews from 68 countries. In the period September-December I had 11,102 pageviews from 85 countries. From these figures I can't conclude that the readership of my blog had grown because of the language thing. If I had continued to blog in Dutch the audience was likely to have grown as well. What I can't measure is the missed impact because of the language shift.

In the period prior to the change 87% of the pageviews were from the Netherlands and since September this share has dropped to 77%.

Please scroll on, this post continues, but it si Blogger which can't handle tables..............

Country	Pageviews Sep.-Dec.	Pageviews May-Aug.
All	11102	9693
No. countries	85	68
in detail
Netherlands	8574	8406
USA	726	209
Belgium	703	623
UK	187	69
Canada	80	11
Germany	76	59
Australia	72	20
France	61	39
Spain	54	36
Switzerland	42	7

Looking at the details, you see a clear stabiliazation of pageviews from the Netherlands, and the growth over the last four months is all due to a larger number of international visitors.

Grasping it all together, I have probably lost quite a number of potential Dutch visitors. But luckily the remainder came along and passed by. On the other and the international pageviews have increased considerably. These are probably not only due to visits through Google, but due to selectively seeding interesting stories and receiving inlinks from popular English language blogs, such as Catalogablog, The kept-up Academic Librarian, Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog, or Open Access News. But the direct referals from these sites don't account for all the increase in International traffic.

It is an interesting exercise to start to build an altogether new audience once again.

And Edwin did this answer you questions?

Labels: English

Sometimes it takes ages before Google actually listens to the blogosphere. Hhow long did the improvements on Blogger take, yout might wonder. On other occasions Google is swift to make changes.
Pandia had a very interesting Christmas wishlist for Google. Matt Cuts was pleased by the well balanced tone, sympathetic suggestions and politness breathing through this post. And Google reacted as well! Last Frinday, the Google.com version now comes up with a small pop up screen when you hit the 'more' button. At Pandia they have a real merry Christmas.
Now we only ave to wait before it will be impleeted in Google.nl as well.
Google Benelux, do you listen as well?

Labels: English

With or without snow,
With or without venison,
Or meat altogether.
Merry Christmas for all my readers!

Labels: English

The last issue of New Scientist (23/30 december 2006) had an interesting take on the feel good factor underlying the popular Web 2.0 sites. Celeste Beaver based her article on an interview with B.J. Fogg from Stanford University's Captology Lab or here.
Fogg and his compatriots have studied the behaviour of web surfers on the participation on popular website such as Flickr or YouTube. Their findings can easly be applied to your weblog. Or mine. How do you persuade users to contribute content?
Simple said Fogg "You offer someone a context for gaining status, and they are going to work for that status". "The secret is to tie the acquisition of friends, compliments and status to activities that enhace the site, such as inviting new users and contributing content" Biever concludes. It is and interesting news item because it applies to weblogs as well. How do you build a community? How do you get you users to comment? Worthwhile to get your hands on this article and have a look at it.
I think I have to start neogtiations with my blog software provider, or shoulf i finally swith over to Word Press, this holiday. Well, at first I have to install a new modem on this PC.
Interestlingly, the research hinted on in the New Scientist hasn't been published yet. Fogg wrote me in an e-mail, that they will present some of their findings at Persuasive'07. Late april 2007 in California. That is a persuasive location!

Literature:
Biever, C. (2006). Web 2.0 is about the feel good-factor. New Scientist 2583/84: 30.

Labels: English

Ik wilde echt niet per se een spelbreker zijn, maar Edwin je posting was toch heel nuttig. In de laatste post waarin hij mij vroeg om mee te spelen, en ik beleefd weigerde, leerde ik toch weer wat. Marina Noordergraaf heeft nu ook een weblog (Zoals gewoonlijk met Blogger, geen rss/xml feed, maar die laat zich makkelijk raden).
Ik ken Marina niet, maar ergens balanceert ze op de rand van mijn waarnemingsvermogen. Een collega van mij ging een jaar of vijf geleden bij haar op bezoek, tijdens haar zwangerschapsverlof, om de nitty gritty van SciFinder nader te bespreken. Later kom in Utrecht inmiddels ex-collegae van haar tegen die haar vertrek bewenen. Ze ging naar Oss. En onlangs kwam haar cursuservaring mij weer te ore.
Misschien niet alleen bibliotheek, maar wanneer ik haar jonge blog bezie, een hele hoop informatieoverdracht. Dat is ook een aanwinst.
Een goede biblioblog erbij dus.

Labels: Dutch

Over deze post heb ik iets langer na lopen denken dan gemiddeld. Zal ik meedoen of niet? Al drie dagen wordt er tikkertje gespeeld in de Nederlandse blogosphere. Je ziet dan wel aankomen dat je vroeg of laat getikt wordt. Iedere blog moet weer vijf andere blogs tikken, en dat gaat heel hard met zo'n vijfde macht.
Pierre reageerde gisteren nogal negatief op dit initiatief. Op dat moment zag ik de humor er nog wel van in, maar Pierre had wel een snaar geraakt bij mij. Toen ik op zoek ging naar de bron in Nederland (in de VS loopt het al wat langer) kwam ik op enthousiasmeren uit. En tot mijn verbazing, was die Erno Hannink gewoon zelf een Nederlandse tak begonnen. Dat bevreemde me wel een beetje. In mijn ogen begon het hele kaartenhuis dus met een party-pooper. Iemand die niet even netjes zijn beurt kon afwachten en dus gewoon voor zichzelf begon. Ik wist gisteren nog niet zeker of ik nu wel, of niet, aan dit spelletje mee zou doen.
En jawel, vandaag kwam Edwin op het lumineuze idee om mij te tikken. Op zich vind ik het spelletje razend interessant, hoe snel wordt iedereen in de blogosphere getikt/getagged? Met een vijfde macht (iedere keer wordt er vijf keer vertakt) heb je binnen de kortste alle 60 miljoen blogs die bij technorati bekend zijn met elkaar verbonden. Dat gaat supersnel. Ik was benieuwd hoe snel dat vuurtje door de Nederlandse blogosphere zou gaan.
Toen ik mijn vertwijfeling verder wilde wegnemen en het lijntje even terugvolgde van Edwin naar Willem en Hans naar de niet werkende link op enthousiasmeren werd het mij te dol. Gelukkig bestaat er nog iets al de Google cache, daar staat de pagina gewoon gearchiveerd. Er valt duidelijk te achterhalen dat niemand hem tagde, gewoon dus voor zijn beurt ging. Wanneer die party pooper er vervolgens zelf de stekker uit haalt, door de pagina van zijn site te verwijderen, dan speel ik ook niet meer mee. Dan worden het zulke flauwe spelletjes. Nee daar hou ik niet van.

Update (24/12): Ondertussen is de link naar betreffende post op de site van Erno weer werkend.

Labels: Dutch

At Utrecht University Library they have gone through a lot of effort to compare, the new entrant in the market for comprehensive bibliographies with citation data, Scopus with, the sleeping giant in this field, Web of Science. Their findings were presented and report was published a while back already. But it was all in Dutch. Today the English version became available. In their impressive excercise they also looked at Google Scholar and their in-house developed AI system 'Omega'. From the abstract:

Scopus is a new entrant in the market for multidisciplinary citation databases. This report analyses the coverage and functionality of Scopus and compares it to ISI's Web of Science and Google Scholar. Scopus comes out as a user-friendly product with an overall broader coverage of life sciences and physical sciences, compared to Web of Science. In social sciences coverage is not yet fully convincing. There are some volume/issue gaps in Scopus coverage as well.

From the summary:

Research results on coverage

Number of records, titles. Scopus has almost 28 million records; the number of records in our version of WoS, at 19 million, is smaller, but the number in the full WoS (with backfiles stretching back to 1945) is larger, at 37 million. Scopus covers over 15,000 journals, versus 9,000 in WoS. Scopus covers 64% of our digital journals, as against 53% in WoS.
Period covered. Scopus is 5-15% smaller prior to 1996, and 20-45% larger than WoS after 1996 on the basis of the number of records. For publications before 1996, the coverage offered by Scopus for the various subjects is highly uneven.

Types of documents. 95% of the total database of Scopus consists of the records of descriptions of articles in journals. For the years prior to 1996, the number of non-journal articles in Scopus is low, subsequently rising to over 10% in 2005. That means that for recent years the proportion of non-journal articles is significantly higher than in WoS (4%).

Subject-specific. Scopus covers only scientific fields. WoS additionally covers the classics. The coverage provided by Scopus is 4 or more percentage points higher than that of WoS in 16 of the 18 UBU subjects on the basis of the numbers of titles of journals in the range carried digitally by the UBU. The two subjects in which WoS is stronger are both in the arts/humanities. On the basis of a number of searches, Scopus appears to be relatively weak in sociology, physics and astronomy (but caution is in order here, as further investigation is required), but very good on biomedical and geosciences.

Up-to-dateness. In terms of the inclusion of issues of journals and on the basis of the ‘progression percentage’ for coverage of the current year, there is hardly any difference between WoS and Scopus as regards the speed with which new publications are included.
Nature of data per record. Scopus has more keywords, for authors but often also from ‘controlled vocabulary’ (e.g. MeSH). Besides author keywords, WoS has no keywords from controlled vocabulary but it does have Keywords-plus: keywords generated from references.

Citation data. The difference between Scopus and WoS in terms of citation data is comparatively slight, there is a strong overlap. A count on the basis of references to 64 articles from 1995 and 2000 shows that WoS has 6% fewer references to citing articles. The difference between these two and Google Scholar is larger. While Google Scholar has 2% fewer references to these articles than Scopus, it does on average include 5 times as many ‘unique’ citing publications. For socio-economic sciences in particular, including economics, Google Scholar has many more and more unique citations.

Research result functionality

Difference in capabilities. Scopus is slightly more versatile and has a few clear advantages in functionality in the form of default refine, the table format of results of the Citation Tracker and author identification. WoS has slightly more extensive options for citation analysis for institutions. Note: In June 2006, WoS also included a Refine tool and ISI also announced author identification for WoS.

Speed. There is above all a substantial difference between WoS and Scopus with GS, which produces virtually instant results, and also, depending on the type of search, with the Omega search engine, which is also often very quick. This can (subconsciously) be a major reason for users to choose Google Scholar. While there is little to choose between
WoS and Scopus in terms of speed, Scopus is slightly faster.

User ratings

Interviews. Heavy users from the faculties rate the clarity of the Scopus interface and refine and the citation tracker particularly highly. The majority of interviewees values Scopus more highly than Wos, but also ‘demands’ that JCR has to remain available.

Survey. A survey among 81 users shows that Scopus and WoS are less well-known than Google Scholar, but the results generated by Google Scholar are rated less highly, especially among research trainees/researchers, and among those, largely the scientific disciplines. Scopus is rated best in use, followed closely by Google Scholar. According to the respondents, WoS clearly has some ground to make up here. In terms of the relevance of the results, Scopus is likewise rated most highly of these three citation databases.

Reference
Bosman, J., I.v. Mourik, M. Rasch, E. Sieverts & H. Verhoeff (2006) Scopus reviewed and compared : The coverage and functionality of the citation database Scopus, including comparisons with Web of Science and Google Scholar. Utrecht, Utrecht University Library. 63p. http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/DARLIN/2006-1220-200432/Scopus%20doorgelicht%20%26%20vergeleken%20-%20translated.pdf

Labels: English

It is the time of year that overviews of 2006 and prospects for 2007 are presented. Time grabbed all the headlines, but that's too boring to repeat here. We bloggers, and you readers and especially the commenters are part all those elected by time. Thank you.
Much more interesting I find the overviews of Search in 2006. Not the ones, like the most popular searches such as those in Live , Yahoo, Google or (actually always the best source for interesting tid bits) Lycos. Who is really interested in yet another competition between Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears or Shakira?
More interesting are the reviews that deal with raw search. They are more difficult to write up. Who oversees it all?
One of the first 2006 overviews, came in two installments at Read/Write web. Their first post was a true overview of web technology in 2006, but its was not the most interesting overview. Their follow up, not dubbed as such, was an overview of Search 2.0 posted a mere week ago. It was was much more interesting. I don't want to go into detail on all accounts but I was amazed by the first two items. Snap was highlited because of the preview powered search of the links on websites. But on the site where I encountered it for the first time, it annoyed me too much to be taken seriously. When there is an interesting link Snap virtually blocks the possibility to clickthough (and that was not caused by the lack of bandwith, or PC processing cycles). Luckily Edwin took it down humbly. Hurray for his users/readers! True to Web 2.0 spirit he listened to his users.
The other item on the Read/Write list that amazed me as well was SearchMash. So far I had never looked into it really seriously. But reading the Read/Write Web overview I only realized that it was a new toy of Google. Where all previous experiments are tried and tested in Google Labs, SearchMash has completely bypassed Google Labs. It makes you wonder what else is out there?
I am not very good at year end reviews, or predict the future of search. What I know at this moment though is that search is hot. That a lot of innovative spirit is around. And it feels like 1995. The Web is vibrant again!

P.S. Edwin did an interesting overview of 2006, albeit in Dutch.

Profusion has always been on my list when teaching students about deep web resources. In due course it had changed a bit. But in the preparation of the my most recent Internet class, I noted that Profusion had become defunct. The standerd search interface was just a simple metasearch engine. But their directory with deep web search possibilities is what I liked most. But it doesn't exist any longer.
So even at times when search seems to be a hot commodity again, some trusted and reliable sources cease. A real pity.
Along these lines. A while back ago I found out that the companion website to the Invisible Web book by Sherman and Price (2001) went down. (After Gary left Search Engine Watch?). Nowadays the site bears a remark that they will be back. If the current notice will function as an example for the quality of the refurbished site, I have my doubts. We have to wait and see.

Labels: English

It was only 5 days ago that I published a list on the various collections of Open Access (OA) journals. I had checked the numbers, 2492 journals in the Dorectory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Last Friday however, they reached the 2,500 peer reviewed OA journals milestone.
There are other collections of OA journals that boast larger numbers of journals, but the DOAJ is amongst the most prestigious collections. From DOAJ:

This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 2500 journals in the directory. Currently 743 journals are searchable at article level. As of today 123095 articles are included in the DOAJ service.

Source: Biomedbiblog; OA News

Labels: English

We are librarians. David's post on the new developments in Libworm is really an encouragement to tag your posts. Perhaps, try Keotag to generate them for you.

Labels: English

Tijdens de laatste CWIS bijeenkomst waren er een aantal aardige presentaties. Als ik niet zelf een cursus aan het voorbereiden was, was ik er graag naar toe gegaan. Gelukkig staan alle presentaties al on-line. Ik was snel door de PPT van Eric Sieverts heen gegaan. De Search-guru van Nederland ;) 77 slides maar liefst. Maar het leukst was wel om vanmiddag tijdens et werken gewoon op de achtergrond ook even naar zijn verhaal 'op de buis' te luisteren. Het blijft wat traag dit soort sessies 'undeditted' te zien, maar wanneer je gewoon verder kunt werken is het draagbaar. Wanneer CWIS deze service blijft bieden hoef ik er niet meer naar toe. Nu nog de vraag wat de volgende presentatie is die ik ga bekijken.

Labels: Dutch

For our library the catalogue is the ulitmate backbone of many services. Only as an example, our portal pages are rendered straight from our catalogue. It is therefore of interest to note the new working group from the LOC that has the task to say something wisely about the future of our bibliographic ontrol, especially catalogues.
Does the catalogue remain a derivative of our old card systems, or can they come up with new revolutionary insights? Do we need a new record for each representation of a work, or is a single record with a set of ISBNs or ISSNs for hardcovers/paperbacks or electronic versions sufficient?
There are many questions one can ask about bibliographic control, perhaps it is better to discuss bibliographic liberation (I am agreeing with Bill Drew here) . The National Library in Netherlands has taken some bold steps in this respect. In their new datamodel they have adopted DC, rather than the much richer ISBD rules (Unfortunately their website and reports on these developments are in Dutch).
I looked through the minutes of the working group's first meeting. What struck me most was the combination of people that LoC put together. I liked the diversity of that group. Also the fact that there were people from outside the library scene was an encouriging sign. Although the majority are still properly trained MLS graduates. But still they have looked for new opinions.
A few quotes, and remarks, that I thought are worth to share.

Clifford Lynch is on of those examples from outside the library scene, more or less, "is a computer scientist, not a librarian". He noted:

He is interested in how descriptive practices translate into access practices, particularly in the current environment where increasingly we must describe physical objects that have digital counterparts.

I want to add the increasing number of occasions where we only have digital versions, and the paper no longer exist. And the number of digital objects is about to explode and we are running into the problems of information overload for our collection specialists and catalogers.

Daniel Clancy is engineering director of Google Book Search, is also on the team. Not so much a quote, but what really interests me is in how far is Google is willing to change as a result of his involvement in this workgroup. In such a way that libraries can improve their services a lot. The Google Library team is doing good work, that is allright. But thinking along the lines of Clifford Lynch, with the current mass digitisation I want an easy solution to link from copies in our legacy collections to the fulltext scanned by Google that are possibly available in Google Booksearch (and its competitors). These older copies don't have an ISBN, so it has to be done on titles and author names. The linking should be done preferably through our link resolver, or just directly with standard openURL. So Dan, where LoC has asked for your input, please bring back some inspiration from libraries to Google as well. I know you are listening to Blyberg for instance, but we need more than ISBNs to charge ahead (and it looks like John is still waiting for a solution).

Lorcan Dempsey is also in this working group. He has shown so many times already in his blog that he has some very deep and provocative thoughts on the improvements we can make with library catalogues. Just keep track of his blog, and you know why I am fan. (Please go ahead and improve on his wikipedia lemma, that is what he likes).

I am really interested in the papers dustributed by Janet Swan Hill. Couldn't find them om E-Lis or DList, Scirus or Google Scholar though. So please Janet, deposit them somewhere where we can get hold them.

Brian Schottlaender, the university librarian at the University of California, San Diego, "noted the importance of maintaining a sensitivity to the politics of cataloging" . This is one of those remarks that make me wonder. The politics of cataloging? What did I miss so far? It is a very special profession indeed. But politically sensitive?

Gray Price could not attend (and send a replacement), but he is in this group as well. I think Gary really is the users advocate. Gary of course, is known for Resourceshelf and Docuticker. And is nowadays also on the board of Ask. And oh yes, Gary has some pretty strong opinions on the efficiency of all those separate book scanning programmes.

Interesting set of people, on a very interesting subject. See if they can enlighten us. The renaisance of the catalogue?

Technorati tags: cataloging catalogues catalogs bibliographic control future

Labels: English

De GOO (Gemeenschappelijke Onderwerpsontsluiting) is oorspronkelijk ontwikkeld voor de inhoudelijke ontsluiting van wetenschappelijke bibliotheekcollecties. Er zijn op dit moment 23 deelnemende bibliotheken. De nieuwe website is bedoeld om actuele informatie rondom GOO overzichtelijk aan te bieden. Ook zijn hier de handleiding GTT en de NBC (in PDF) terug te vinden, evenals een overzicht van alle deelnemende bibliotheken, inclusief de contactgegevens. Hiernaast is het de bedoeling dat deze site gaat fungeren als vraagbaak, en een rol gaat spelen bij de kennisuitwisseling tussen de vele GOO-ers in het land.

In Wageningen doen we niet mee, ooit in een ver verleden wel. Toch klasseren we hier wel. Annoteren we. Zonde dat we dat niet delen, of makkelijker kunnen ontlenen.

Bron: KB

technorati tags: GOO; Gemeenschappelijke Onderwerpsontsluiting

Labels: Dutch

This afternoon I did the first version of a web search class concentrating on the scientific, or scholarly, part of the Web. We dubbed the course 'searching for science'. Perhaps not the best name. "Searching for free scholarly information on the open Web", however is such a mouth full.
The programme was a triffle overloaded. The advanced search engine techniques and the explanation of the deep web took a bit more time than I had anticipated. The rest of the programme went swell, albeit, they were not really interested in the tagging, wiki's or blogs let alone the latest Digg clone for scholars. They just wanted plain vanilla Web Search.
Today was actually a tryout. Based on my experience, I will improve the course material shown in the wiki. Add the excercises as well. The wiki will certainly grow a lot. I'll keep you posted on that.

Technorati tags: Course material; web Searching; Deep Web

Labels: English

Interesting news from Thomson Scientific (can't trace the exact release data though). Biosis has made their backfiles available. For us, as a life science university an important addition for resource discovery in this field. Biological abstract is one of our most intensively used databases, so the archives need to be seriously considered. We only have to wait for the moment that they will be offered on Ovid as well. For a reasonble price that is ;)

Technorati tags: BIOSIS; BIOSIS archives;

Labels: English

Wageningen UR library offers a comprehensive set of electronic journals. However, most of these journals are subscription based and do cost a "small" fortune. The open access movement tries to free access to scholarly material. One example of the OA movement is the creation of new free accessible journals. Some collections of OA journals are listed here. The other sollution to gain OA is self-archiving by researchers of their publications in repositories, which will be covered in another post. A primer on OA is provided by Peter Suber, who reports daily on important OA news.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) http://www.doaj.org/
A collection of 2491 free full text, peer reviewed Open Access Journals. Currently 741 journals searchable at the article level on the usual bibliographic metadata.

Open J-Gate http://www.openjgate.org/
A larger collection of open access journals. Covers 3804 journals of which the peer reviewd section can be searched separately. Searching takes places on bibliographic metadata only.

LiVre! http://livre.cnen.gov.br/Default2I.asp
LiVre! is the a journal portal developed by CNEN - Comissão Nacional de Energia Nuclear(Brazilian National Nuclear Energy Commission), through its CIN - Centro de Informações Nucleares (Nuclear Information Center), aiming to ease the identification and the access to free journals available on the Internet. The portal covers more than 2500 scientific journals, magazines, bulletins and newsletters but you can easily limit the selections to peer reviewed scientific journals.

Highwire Press http://highwire.stanford.edu/cgi/search
Highwire Press hosts a repository of high impact, peer-reviewed content, with 1008 journals and 3,904,956 full text articles from over 130 scholarly publishers. Since many important journals make their content availble free online HighWire containes 1,491,300 free articles. What is really important is that Highwire hosts some of the most important (cited) journals.

The Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek EZB
(Electronic Journals Library) http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/index.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=7〈=en
Covers some 4500 OA journals. The collection is therefore one of the most comprehensive free journal collections. Just select only the "green" journals and you can browse or search through this impressive collections.

Jan Szczepanski's lists of OA-journals http://www.his.se/templates/vanligwebbsida1.aspx?id=20709
Jan Szczepanski, a librarian at Göteborg University, has collected links and information on Open Access journals for years. His lists contain over 4500 current OA-journals and 757 historic. You will find more information on the OA Librarian blog

Walt Crawford's overview of early E-zines http://citesandinsights.info/civ6i12.pdf
In Cites & Insight 6(12) Walt Crawford provides an overview of early OA Journals "They weren’t generally called Open Access journals in 1995: If that term existed before 2001 or 2002, it certainly wasn’t the standard name for free online scholarship. But there were examples of free online scholarship, some dating back to 1987."

Additional information
Archivalia http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/2963132/ (in German)

Technorati tags: OA journals; Open+access

Labels: English

Another preprint

Purpose: To provide an overview of new citation-enhanced databases and to identify issues to be considered when they are used as data source for performing citation analysis.
Design/methodology/approach: Reports the limitations of Thomson Scientific’s citation indexes and reviews the characteristics of the citation-enhanced databases Chemical Abstracts, Google Scholar and Scopus.
Findings: Suggests that citation-enhanced databases need to be examined carefully, with regard to both their potentialities and their limitations for citation analysis.

Citation data yet again. Interesting viewpoint in this analysis, is the inclusion of subject specialised databases such as PsychInfo and Chemical Abstracts.

Hattip: Recherchenblog

Technorati tags: citation analysis; WoS; Google Scholar; Scopus

Labels: English

The following article was deposited in E-Lis just the other day: Citation Analysis: A Comparison of Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science, by Kiduk Yang and Lokman I. Meho from Indiana University.
On scanning their paper, they use the citation counts of two important LIS researchers to draw some conclusions. The citation counts reported in WoS can be boosted by using additional information from Scopus or GS. Who will be amazed by this finding?
We need some benchmarks though.
At this moment it is only ISI/Thomson Scientific who delivers those kind of benchmarks. Citation data is nice to have, but benchmarks are a necessity to make them comparable.

Technorati tags: citation analysis; wos; Google Scholar; Scopus;

Labels: English

Today I received a mail from a collegae with link with to the BBC story that Windows (Live) Book Search will go live tomorrow. How fortunate I was. It was up and running already this afternoon. On the Liveside blog the news was confirmed, albeit a bit unclear on the exact time of the launch. It is up an runing however.
The searches I tried all delivered really old stuff, but that happens when you're testing whether Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica had been scanned within this project. Not the book itself thought. But another eight books that mention Newton's Principia in full are retrieved. It is also a consequence of MSN's principle to scan only books without of copyright. Perhaps a bit too strict, but a wealth of 18th and 19th century will become available through projects as these. Okay, some early tentieh century books, but nothing more. Over at Google Book Search you'll find a lot more when searching for Newton's masterpiece. More modern stuff that you can't access because it is still under some sort of copyright.
It will be interesting to see te comparisons like these between Goole Book Search and Live Book Search appearing in the blogosphere over the next few weeks.

Technorati tags: book search; Live book search; Google book search

Labels: English

Scobble is around, in The Netherlands, in Amsterdam to be exactly, and is interested in meeting with some fellow bloggers. So stop your blogs and hurry over to Amsterdam. I am quite happy to sit and wait. Read your reports, with interest, in the blogs.
Enjoy.

Technorati tags: Scoble

Labels: English

Last Friday I was surprised by the inroads that Library 2.0 has made in the catalogue of my public library already. They are using the Bicat system, so this possibly is the case in many other public libraries around as well.
The first thing when I checked out the availability of Music CDs by Keane, I was surprised by the fact that the newest CD which they had ordered, but wasn't available yet, was already shown in the Libray Catalogue. Have a look at this catalogue record.


It is all in Dutch of course, but the picture shows you an item that has been ordered rather than it is available in the library.

Subsequently I checked for CDs by Jamie Cullum, which I couldn't find by browsing. So I had to check the catalogue again. They had placed his CDs in the category of Jazz, rather than pop. But at the same time I noted that the suggestions that were made. People who borrowed this also borrowed ..... Look at the following record:


Chet Baker or Trijntje Oosterhuis....

Really neat. These are two examples of catalogue improvements I suggested last March in a worshop for our staff to apply to our catalogue as well. But we haven't been able to implement these functionalities (yet), and thereby not everybody on our team was convinced of the service to our users to publish ordered items in our catalogues. For me it worked last Friday though. I made a reservation for the Keane CD.

So Please slam me for my dreadful taste in music, but this cataligues has some really cool features.

Technorati tags: library2.0; catalogue; Wageningen

BTW, cleaning the cache helped to get the posting menu back in Blogger.

Labels: Bibliotheek 2.0, catalogus, English, wageningen

Don't know what's happening out there. But I am badly missing my Blogger Toolbar in Blogger Beta, to post some interesting pictures with a new post. Anybody else noted this as well? Or even better who has a solution?

Technorati tags: Blogger Toolbar

Labels: English

Dit turfje is weer een paar plaatsen gezakt op de Marcom top 100. Dat verbaast me eigenlijk in het niets. Maar ik wil vooral langs deze weg die ene stemmer, die op mijn blogje gestemd heeft bedanken. Welk een eer. Dank, dank, dank.
Over een tijd, wanneer ik mijn Pagerank geboost hebt naar de volledige 10 punten, dan wordt het leuk om weer naar deze hitparade te kijken. Nu is het vooral de PR die de ranking bepaalt, en wat andere factoren die de widowdressing verzorgen.
Maar het blijft al met al een grappige excercitie.
Het lijstje Feedburner statistieken in de commentaren vond ik natuurlijk wel aardig. Daar kom ik dit weekend waarschijnlijk nog wel op terug.
Ondertussen wel een hele slimme actie van MF, ze verdienen er gaandeweg weer een hoop linkjes mee. Het zei ze gegund.

Technorati tags: marketing blogs; marcom100

Labels: Dutch

Ik blog dit nieuws natuurlijk wel, zij het met tegenzin. Ondertussen ben ik stinkend jaloers op de UB in Groningen. Het zijn mijn Groningse collegae die daar zomaar een blog lanceren. Voor mij lijkt het uit het niets. Maar ondertussen hebben zelf al een half jaar intern proef gedraaid, en zijn ze vandaag uit de kast gekomen als het ware. Dit is nu exact het type blog dat hier gelanceerd wordt als ik voor ogen heb dat wij in Wageningen ook als afdeling moeten gaan produceren. In Wageningen zouden we misschien de voertaal Engels verklaren, maar dat doet er niet toe aan af. In Groningen moeten ze nog een plaatsje vinden op de homepage van de bibliotheek, maar dan heb je er wel een prachtig communicatiekanaal bij als bibliotheek.
Even terugkijkend in de wat oudere posts was ik natuurlijk blij verrast met die complimenten die Jan-Arjen Mondria besteedde aan de presentatie over de Wageningse Portals tijdens de OCN. Trouwens voor de hele OCN geldt dat er weer drie verslagen zijn bijgekomen die ik maar even gegroepeerd heb onder de Technorati tag voor de OCN 2006. Ondertussen begint die conferentie toch zijn indruk achter te laten in de biblioblogosphere.
Kortom we hebben er weer een Groningse blog bij die meer dan de moeite waard is om te volgen.
Peter c.s., gefeliciteerd. Zet hem op, en maak ons jaloers.

Technorati tags: Biblioblogs; Biblioblogosphere

Labels: Dutch