SPARC

NMAH Reopening Pix

After 2.3 years being closed to the public, the NMAH museum will reopen Nov. 21.  Here are a few pictures of the Constitution Entrance of the newly renovated center core of the museum and the "skylight."  It's a dramatic difference from the previous space.

To see a larger version of the photos, just click on them and they will open in a new window.

See more pictures after the jump! (click the link below)

Search Tips

Search Tips for the visible web (Google, Yahoo, ASK, etc):

Do you ever need to search for documents by type (for example a .pdf, excel document, word document, rss feed, etc. Try adding these search functions in front of your search term in Google, Yahoo, and most other search engines. If you want to find out what sites are linked to your website, blog, wiki, etc. then just put link: with your website address in the Google search box and hit search. For example type link:http://www.sil.si.edu/research/ and hit search and you will get a list of all the sites that link to http://www.sil.si.edu/research/  For all of these examples you can use a –  dash or a : colon. For example, you can type link:http://www.sil.si.edu/research/ or you can type link-http://www.sil.si.edu/research/  Just make sure you do not leave any spaces in the search or it will not work. Try some of these but put in your own websites, terms, .pdf, .ppt, etc to search. Just remember no spaces and use either a colon or a dash.  For .htm-, .pdf-, .xls-, .ppt-, .doc-, .xml-, .rdf-, .rss-, and .txt- make sure you put a dot or period in front of it as well as the dash or colon after it. For site:, hostname, link, etc. do not put a period or dot in front of the search.  One of my favorites is to find databases on topics I am interested in searching. For this I just put database:math or database:art in the Google or Yahoo or other search engines.

.htm, .html—Standard HTML Example (htm-science or htm:science)

.pdf—Adobe PDF (pdf-botany)

.xls—Microsoft Excel (xls-horticulture)

.ppt—Microsoft PowerPoint (ppt-anthropology)

.doc—Microsoft Word (doc-science)

.xml- .rdf- .rss—RSS or XML feeds (xml-geology)

.txt—Plain Text Format (txt-genetics)

site: This allows you to find all documents within a particular domain and all its subdomains. Example:

site:yahoo.com

hostname: This allows you to find all documents from a particular host only.  Example:  

hostname:science.yahoo.com

link: This allows you to find documents that link to a particular URL. Example: link:http://science.yahoo.com/

url: This allows you to find a specific document in the index.  Example:

url:http://edit.science.yahoo.com/research/tree/0.html

inurl: This allows you to find a specific keyword as part of indexed URLs. Example: inurl:horticulture

intitle: This allows you to find a specific keyword as part of the indexed titles.  Example: intitle:botany

Database: Find databases. Example: Database math

 

When you are searching the full text of web pages. Use specific terms.

Example: avian influenza causes, not just avian influenza.

Use quotes to require an exact phrase.  Example: "one small duck for man"

Use capitalized OR to get either word. Example: (avian influenza OR avian flu) ducks

Use - (dash) to exclude a word. Example: proliferation -nuclear

Use "site:" to specify a particular website or Internet domain.  Example:global warming site:whitehouse.gov

 

 

Deep Web Search and Social Bookmarking

 

Tired of Google and Yahoo and all the same old stuff, then try…

 

For a search of the visible web (visible web includes Google and Yahoo for a total of 15/20% of the web) try:

 

http://demo.carrot2.org/demo-stable/main  Carrot2 a Clustering search engine. Do your search and the results are clustered into similar topics or themes.

http://www.etools.ch/  Etools a multi or metasearch  engine.  Etools searches Altavista, ASK, Bluewin, Entireweb, Google, Live, Lycos, Search, Seekport, Webofant, Wikia, and Yahoo with each search that you perform.   

For a search of the invisible web (the other 80/85% of the Web) try…

 

completeplanet.com A comprehensive listing of over 80,000 dynamic searchable databases. Find databases with highly relevant documents that cannot be crawled or indexed by the surface or visible web search engines.

 

http://alltheinternet.com/ All the internet, what more can you say.

 

http://bubl.ac.uk/  Selected Internet resources covering all academic subject areas and arranged in Dewey order.

 

Access your documents anywhere, anytime…

 

Want to create all your documents on the web and share them with colleagues and have access to them at home, work, on the road, anywhere? Adobe Buzzword  is a new online word processor, perfect for writing reports, proposals, and anything else you need to access online or work on with others. It looks and behaves like your normal desktop word processor, but it operates inside a web browser, so there's no installation required. It's free, try it http://www.adobe.com/acom/buzzword/  You can also do this with Google Documents.

 

Access your bookmarks anywhere, anytime….

 

Delicious (http://delicious.com) is social bookmarking that allows you to save your bookmarks online so that you can access them from any computer with an internet connection. Delicious is an extension or addon to Firefox. Delicious also supports importing bookmarks from most web browsers, so if you already have a collection of bookmarks on your computer you don’t have to start from scratch when you set up a Delicious account. Once you have added bookmarks to your Delicious account (either by posting or by importing), you can use tags and bundles to organize them into categories. Delicious also makes it easy to share your bookmarks.

 

You can also do the same with MyYahoo bookmarks or when you sign into your Google Accounts.

Google, If Built by Librarians

For those of you who attended (or even those who couldn't make it) R. David Lankes lecture, "Not Done Yet: Charting a new Course for Librarianship" one of the SIL's 40th anniversary series of speakers...   you might be interested to know that he is the project partner of Reference Extract. 

Though Reference Extract has been fondly referred to "what Google would look like, if it were build by librarians,"  Lankes points out that the engine isn't really trying to compete directly with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo or even Wikipedia as an everyday search tool.

The project's goal is building a web search engine where the weight of the search results aren't determined by any sort of algorithm like PageRank but rather by the expertise and creditability judgments from librarians around the world.

The Reference Extract project is being developed by OCLC and the information schools of Syracuse University and the University of Washington through a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Reinventing Science Librarianship: Models for the Future Pt. II

     In the closing session entitled "Education for New Roles," there was discussion of requirements for librarians who will serve researchers in the future. The major goal of open access faces several challenges including the variety of data formats. Librarians must link to the institutional mission as SIL does so well, serve on disciplinary research teams, and lastly, measure, assess and revise information in many formats, thus providing "value-added services." By matching people and skills, more specialized data librarians will bring diverse communities together in the digital age. Skills required here will include the abilities to read data and interpret it and the ability think about data like a researcher within a discipline. Experimentation with librarians teaching researchers to enter research results directly onto the web is occurring in universities and other institutions throughout the country and abroad. In such efforts, researchers will continue to need librarians to develop reliable management, preservation, and use standards. Skilled library staff, providing "added value" can help researchers discover more data than the researchers know exists. For example, in regard to some Life Sciences data (health information created by healthcare providers), some major questions we face will be "What data should we save?" and "Who will pay for it?" In preserving long-term research data, for the year 2007, the data exceeded the available storage! The financial considerations of data storage require economically sound and sustainable digital preservation.

Librarians of the future will do many of the same things, perhaps in more advanced ways, that they do now – including acquiring data directly from the researchers and collectively identifying more resources. Partnerships of this kind are and will continue to be essential.

(Submitted by Angela Haggins, 11/10/2008)

Reinventing Science Librarianship: Models for the Future, Pt. I

This Fall Forum sponsored by ARL and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) was held in Arlington, VA on October 16th -17th with over two-hundred attendees. The agenda included an Opening Program entitled "E-Science: Trends, Transformation & Responses," presentations by twenty-four speakers from as many institutions, and more than a dozen poster sessions by universities as close as Johns Hopkins to as far away as the University of Guelph (Canada). Both education and policy trends were the foci of the sessions. The reinvention of science librarianship requires the commitment of institutions, a well-defined user community and the right library skills. Sessions on Data Curation, Supporting Virtual Organizations, and Lessons & New Roles were each followed by a Reactor Panel which "asked questions for the speakers and audience to discuss and to highlight examples" of strategies and services in support of e-science.

Several of the posters were of special interest to me as librarian at SERC Branch Library. SERC has an education department that offers learning experiences for both teachers and students K-12. UNC, Chapel Hill science librarians offered a poster session on the effort to encourage and prepare science majors to become teachers. Because SIL offers such excellent e-resources to our users, foot traffic, at least at SERC, has dwindled over the years. Brown University librarians presented a poster on their innovative "Librarians in the Lobby: Engaging Engineering and Physics Faculty in Their Space." This effort, aimed at increasing interactions between the library staff and their users, successfully included the physical relocation of the physics and engineering librarians to the heavily-traveled lobbies of the buildings that house their users.

(submitted by Angela Haggins 11/10/2008)

An Easier Way to Schedule Meetings

Have you spent more time trying to arrange a meeting than actually attending that meeting?

If you are willing to try something else, there are a number of web based services you can use to find a time that works for everyone.Whenisgood, Doodle, Presdo, and Diarised are a few of the ways you can set up a meeting, send out possible available times, and have your fellow meeters reply with when they are available. 

Outlook also has an option for Scheduling, which compares the availability of the list of attendees you enter based on their Outlook Calendars.  Ctrl+Shift+A will open a new appointment.   There is a Scheduling tab where you can add your attendees and see when everyone is available. (Of course that assumes everyone enters their information into their own Calendar consistently.) Alternately, you can try this.

Finally, if these don't float your boat, you can also try an oldie but goodie approach of passing around an actual piece of paper with dates and times, and have everyone block out when they are not available.  Something like this:

Download schedule.doc

I must give credit to Lifehacker, where I first came across whenisgood.net 

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