Search engine tips

At her search engine workshops, Karen Blakeman usefully asks her participants to name their top tips, and even more usefully she posts them online. Here is the latest one: she notes that Google Custom Search Engine was a new entry in the list. http://www.ukeig.org.uk/blog/2008/05/
top-search-tips-may-2008-liverpool.html
Photo by Sheila Webber, May 2008

Finding Dulcinea

New to me was the site Finding Dulcinea. "Dulcinea Media, Inc. is a Silicon Alley-based team of savvy Internet users. Our mission is to untangle the Web, clearing it of clutter and spotlighting only the sites that matter. We aim to provide a richer experience for every Internet user." They provide web guides in various areas, including a Web search guide in both English and Spanish (Fairly standard sort of guide to searching and key search engines). I must admit I originally found this because they also had a web guide to the Kentucky Derby. http://www.findingdulcinea.com/

Photo by Sheila Webber: Dandelions, Sheffield, May 2008.

Web Search: Multidisciplinary Perspectives

I'v been doing a lot of information literacy things over the last days and haven't had time to blog! I'll do some posts about that tomorrow, in the meantime, a recent book on information behaviour.
Spink, A and Zimmer, M. (Eds) (2008) Web Search: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Berlin ; London : Springer. ISBN: 9783540758280 3540758283
This has chapters from people doing research in different parts of the information science discipline (that is what seems to be be meant by multidisciplinary, rather than looking at searching from the perspective of people in different disciplines)
More information at http://www.springer.com/computer/database+management+&
+information+retrieval/book/978-3-540-75828-0

Libraries and mega sites

If you have 78 euros to spare then you can buy a new report Libraries & the Mega-Internet Sites just published by Primary Research Group. The market survey was of 120 libraries (mostly in teh USA), academic, special and public libraries about how they use and relate to the mega-internet sites such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace, eBay, Amazon, and others. ... This report provides hard data on exactly how libraries are dealing with the emerging internet giants, how they are adopting, negotiating, repelling, embracing and in every way developing strategies to provide the best possible information services to their clientele." It has chapters such as "The Library and EBay" and "Google Productivity Tools". You can order it from http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c81473
Photo by Sheila Webber: Yellow flowers, photoshop drygrain effect.

Search history

A nice tip from Greg Sheaf on the lis-infoliteracy discussion list for saving search histories (useful if you want students to present evidence of their searches, and/or analyse what they have done) Apparently if you use the Firefox browser the history is saved in a file called history.dat, which is stored in a "profiles" folder. Greg provides useful links: http://support.mozilla.com/kb/
Profiles#Profile_folder_locations and http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/
mozilla_history_view.html
Photo by Sheila Webber: my orchid has bloomed again!

Discussion on European IL meeting and ILI

Today there was a discussion in Second Life, the virtual world, in which I gave a brief report about the meeting I attended in Madrid, and Ishbel Hartmann (Vickie Cormie in RL) gave a brief report on Internet Librarian International, which also took place last week, highlighting a few presentations she had found particularly interesting. That is her in the first photo (and yes, that is a virtual squirrel by her feet, but I have now relocated it to the SL island)

The full transcripts are online. The one for the discussion about the Madrid meeting is at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=144 and the one about sessions at Internet Librarian International is at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=145 I am Sheila Yoshikawa in these chats, of course.

There were notecards for each of these sessions, which you can pick up in Second Life if you visit the CILR office. I have given the web references of the ppts from Vickie's notecard, below:

Who are the users and what are they doing? John Law, ProQuest (USA) http://www.internet-librarian.com/
Presentations/B203_Law.pps

Virtual Libraries Kitty Pope, Alliance Library Systems (USA)Barbara Galik, Cullom-Davis Library, Bradley University (USA)Guus van den Brekel, University of Groningen (The Netherlands) http://www.internet-librarian.com/
Presentations/#Monday_TrackA_PM

New Varieties of Search Tony Hirst, Open University (UK)
http://www.internet-librarian.com/
Presentations/C202_Hirst.pps

Closing Keynote: Facing the Challenge of Web 2.0 as a Disruptive Technology
Phil Bradley, Internet Trainer and Web Designer, SearchEngine Land (UK) http://www.internet-librarian.com/Presentations/
ClosingKeynote_Bradley.pps

Information collected by Google

I see from the Google Friends newsletter there is a video on Youtube which explains what kinds of information Google collects when you search it e.g. cookies. It is straightforward, with a female talking head and some writing on a flip chart, but nicely done and could provide a starting point for discussion on data privacy. Some of the comments are also thought-provoking (I wasn't thinking of the "She's hot!" comment, but I suppose that indicates that the video will appeal to a wide audience ;-)
Google Search Privacy: Plain and Simple http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLgJYBRzUXY

Google blogs

A reminder about about Google's main blog at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/, which also links to the loads of more specialist blogs they do, including the Librarian central blog aimed at librarians at http://librariancentral.blogspot.com/ and the Google news blog (about the Google news search) http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Beetles on a sort of cow parsley, Hailsham, July 2007.

Students use of web in Aboriginal studies

The latest issue of Webology has an emphasis on folksonomies and something on Web 2.0. There is also an article:
Aitken, W. (2007). "Use of Web in Tertiary Research and Education." Webology, 4 (2). http://www.webology.ir/2007/v4n2/a42.html
This is interesting in actually putting the case for use of the web by students. It describes the example of undergraduates in Aboriginal Studies (in Australia), who were originally discouraged from using the web, but this author explains the advantages. One of the things she raises is how discovering and reflecting on what search terms do, and don't, work can be valuable (e.g. that government agencies talk about air quality rather than air pollution). She also talks about how the usage of words such as "aboriginal" and "indigenous" in websites is interesting to study in itself, with social/political implications.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Passageway, Witham Road, Sheffield, Aug 2007.

Google things

Here is an article which does some quick evaluations and provides some thoughtful discussion, plus a couple of events.

White, B. (2006) "Examining the Claims of Google Scholar as a Serious Information Source." New Zealand library and information management journal, 50 (1) 11-24 http://www.lianza.org.nz/publications/journal/
files/TNZLIMJOctober2006v50i01.pdf (this is the web address for the whole issue)

Event on 6 June Beyond Google: Strategies for Finding Images Online in Bristol, UK, organised by TASI (Technical Advisory Service for Images). http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training.html

Three day events in June, Summer Institute June 2007 - Google IT, led by Google Certified Teachers, organsied by the California Technology Assistance Project (CTAP), USA, (see http://www.ctap4.org/infolit/ -they also have some resources including IL leaflets to download, aimed at children).

I hadn't come across the concept of a Google certified teacher before, so I did some googling. Here is the webpage of the Google Teacher Academy. This initiative is aimed at schoolteachers, and "only K-12 educators within a 90-minute local commute of an Academy event may apply" (so that cuts out anyone from, say, Peckham, participating in the Californian one). http://www.google.com/educators/gta.html

Phot0 by Sheila webber: wild rose, Sheffield, May 2007.

New semester, new search engine

Last week was week 1 of out Spring semester, and was a busy teaching time for me. I was starting off the undergrad and postgrad versions of the Business Information module (my colleague Kendra Albright is coordinating the latter this time around, but she's doing project work in Africa at the moment), leading part of the first session of our new Inquiry in Information Mangement module, having the first session of the Information Literacy research module and also doing a short session on blogging in our Educational Informatics module. The good thing was that all of these are smallish classes (though as in particular the PGs are changing their choices, there's the issue of establishing who is in/out of a class). We use WebCT, which of course means more work managing that, but although I have many criticisms of WebCT, I HAVE now come to rely on it as well as part of my approach to teaching.

In a number of these sessions, a key task was asking students to create group mini-presentations on their existing knowledge/interests in the area. So, in the Inquiry in IM module, our first year BSc IM students were, individually and then in groups, mindmapping their current concepts of IM. There were similar exercises (though not involving mindmapping) in the Business Information and the IL Research modules. The postgraduate Business Information module is at least 50% international students, so people were able to contribute their observations on issues with business information in China, Poland, Greece and Zambia (for example, that businesses in Zambia were mostly owned by external investors, or the different cultures and market characteristics in different regions of China). These exercises help to raise issues for further discussion, and enable us to get to know the perspectives and knowledge of students.

So, finally to the "new search engine". I've also been updating material for Monday's Business Information lab, which includes looking at what search engines are useful for. One place I recommend to students, and use myself, is Karen Blakeman's blog at http://www.rba.co.uk/rss/blog.htm. She regularly posts the "top ten tips" of the participants in her training sessions. This alerted me to a metasearch engine that I really ought to have known about & which I immediately saw the use of, as it enables you to switch between many of the useful engines quickly AND you can tweak your search at each individual engine easily. This is Crossengine at http://www.crossengine.com/

Photo by Sheila Webber: Catkins in the snow, Feb 2007 (snow has melted now).