ACL Board meeting

Today was the first full day of the ACL Board meetings. It was productive and challenging; I liked it. I have enjoyed my time on the board and will miss it. I pray I can get academic employment soon so I can serve again later.

Sociology - Doing archaeology part time

You can do archaeology part time too. With a history, sociology, or related degree, you could be an assistant on a dig, so it could be a hobby or part time job too. You can find a list of digs around the world at http://archaeology.about.com/od/currentdigs/Archaeology_Digs.htm. Many are done thru schools, so you could try one transfer credit. The organization I dug with, Associates for Biblical Research, has this dig and tour information listed on their website, http://abr.christiananswers.net/home.html.

Would archaeology interest you as a part time hobby or job? Why or why not?

Sociology - archaeology

My archaeology dig was physically demanding for the three and a half weeks I was there, and it was mentally demanding all year for the archaeologists. They spent the rest of the year planning for the next year’s dig, and evaluating and graphing the pottery and other findings to help date various parts of the site. The archaeologists used this data to write their reports and articles to prove Khirbet Nisya was a valid candidate for the biblical city of Ai. Have you ever held a job that was both physically and mentally demanding? Does this kind of work interest you? Why or why not?

Computers in Libraries 07 presentations

Most of the presentations from Computers in Libraries 2007 are now linked from http://www.infotoday.com/cil2007/presentations/default.shtml !

Vocal techniques in teaching

James M. Lang, "Perfecting Your Vocal Technique," Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 May 2007: C2-3.

Lang presents very good reasons on why and how teachers should use vocal technique in their presentations. Since our voices naturally trail off as we exhale, and since the important part of a sentence or paragraph comes at the end, we need to work at emphasizing all the important parts of the sentence. Lang gives two tips to improve ones vocal technique:

• Use your voice to emphasize the nouns, verbs, and key concepts of a sentence.
• "Build the sentence to an emphatic conclusion, rather than letting it trail away."

To help you be successful in implementing vocal technique, Lang recommends being aware and improving the vocal variations of your first five sentences, then, as you get comfortable with it, your first five minutes, and eventually you'll grow into using it throughout your presentation.

So start vocally emphasizing your key words and help your audience learn.

Computers in Libraries 07, Wednesday

Greg Notess, publisher SearchEngineShowdown.com, “Book Search Engines Update” (A305)

See his book search page (http://searchengineshowdown.com/booksearch) and his presentation (http://searchengineshowdown.com/booksearch/cil07)

Full text searching of books is for:

• Different information source
• Searching, not reading (usually)
• Verify citations and find mentions, such as first mentions of a term
• Consider other potential uses

Scanned/converted books:

• OCR quality varies
• Full content scans
• Electronic files conversions – may lose initial letter or special characters (such as apostrophes)
• Huge collections of data
• Multiple editions of a work because different library scan the same item

Book Search Engines:

• Amazon’s “search inside the book”
• Google Book search
• Open Content Alliance
• Internet Archive Text archive
• Live Search books
• Individual publishers’ initiatives
• Open Web

Amazon and A9.com

• When in Amazon, go to the books store to search
• A9, use the books box to search only books
• Search inside is different from look inside
• Currently published books
• Including reprints

Google books is “to help you discover books, not read them…”

• Books.google.com
• Scans of books or electronic copies from publishers
• The have agreements with publishers, and if no agreement, they are not included unless it is in Google Library.
• Google Library scans books from libraries
• Google considered items in copyright since 1923, even if it is not.
• They have three levels of viewing:
• Limited access
• Snippet view
• Limited view
• Full view
• No preview available
• One problem is older fonts were not made to be scanned or read online.
• Google provides links to: the publisher, stores and shopping sites, and OpenWorldCat and 14 other union catalogs.

Open content alliance:

• Internet archive, Yahoo, O’Reilly, Microsoft, and others.
• Some is in live.com books. Do a search, click “more” under tool/tab bar, then select “books” and it will search just books
• In Internet Archive, go to the “texts” section.

Flip books format is used by Open Library openlibrary.org

If you want newer, copyrighted works, start with Amazon, then try Google.

In the open web, see Project Gutenberg (Gutenberg.org) and online books (digital.library.upenn.edu/books) and many other hidden spots. To find the hidden spots, search the title as a phrase search, and maybe phrase search from content. You can look for lists of books my searching for title with no space and by searching for the authors’ last name.

See his presentation to create google and yahoo searches to find ftp sites of books.

Publishers sites may have enough info to get you what you need, may show where it is full text, or actually provide some electronically.

Computers in Libraries 07, Wednesday

Wisnewski and Cervone, “Federated Search: State of the Art” (A304)

Federated searching protocols: Z39.50, SRU/SRW, OAI, and XML gateways.

Most federated searches allow for simple and advance searches, combine results sets with deduplication, and some statistics.

Advanced features for federated searches: integration with other software, such as courseware and RefWorks; context sensitive linking.

Top players: Ex Librirs, Webfeat, all WebFeat partners, Total WebFeat.

Proquest CSA has metasearch by topic, so you can search multiple databases based on the subject (such as humanities).

Ovid SearchSolver: based on Muse technology, is hosted, and results are post-processed.

Medline has faceted browsing. (check it out)

Ex Libris (loves) Endeavor, and creates MetaLib, SFX, and Primo, all at www.exlibrisgroup.com/(name).htm

Metalib 4.0 has faced browsing, and its interface will eventually be replaced with Primo.

Aquabrowser is a unique interface that is part clusty type linked terms and part catalog.

III has Encore, which includes tag clouds which includes phrases (LCSH) as well as individual words (keywords)

WebFeat Express is a hosted version of WebFeat Prism price “affordably” at $8000. It has limited conform/adaptability compared to Prism.

Who else is in the game: AGent – Auto-graphics Inc and many others.

Other companies are marketing federated searches to large companies outside of libraryland to help their knowledge management. Inktomi (old name) has Universal Repository Interfacing, Siderian, with its Seamark Navigator, and Endeca.

Trends:

• Number of vendors is shrinking
• Migration to XML from Z39.50, tho Z30.50 still prevails
• Integrating content with external systems such as WebCT and RefWorks
• Increased use of visualization and clustering
• More off-site hosting possibilities
• Data pre-processing options
• Free versions with Google scholar and Microsoft Academic Live.

Their ending question is much like mine; why do a federated search when the big search engines have scholarly versions.