All posts by Karen Blakeman

I have worked in the information profession for over twenty years and have been a freelance consultant since 1989. My company (RBA Information Services) provides training and consultancy on the use of the Internet, and on accessing and managing information resources. Prior to setting up RBA I worked at the Colindale Central Public Health Laboratory, and then spent ten years in the Pharmaceutical and Health Care industry before moving to the International management consultancy group Strategic Planning Associates. I edit and publish an electronic newsletter called Tales from the Terminal Room. Other publications include Search Strategies for the Internet. I am a Fellow of CILIP: The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, an active member of the UK eInformation Group (UKeiG) and a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP)
Reference, Search Engines

RefSeek for “academic information”

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RefSeek is a a new search engine that “aims to make academic information easily accessible to everyone”.  There is very little information on how it works other than it  searches more than one billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopaedias, journals, and newspapers.  A few test searches suggest that it searches just .edu. ac.uk,  .org web and .gov web sites but not .org.uk or .gov.uk.  Straightaway, those of us in the UK are missing out on a large chunk of scientific information and data as are other countries whose academic web domains do not include an organisation type such as. edu or ac. My searches on zeolites, for example,  failed to pick up papers on Zurich University’s web site (http://www.uzh.ch/).  Also, .org and .org.uk domains can be bought by anyone and are not guaranteed to carry quality, peer reviewed articles. A search on my husband (Rhodes) and zeolites came up with some of his papers on the Royal Society of Chemistry web site (http://www.rsc.org/) and his own home page that is normally advertised as www.fresh-lands.com, but RefSeek picked up on the alternative freshlands.org domain.

Search options are the standard double quotes around phrases, minus sign to exclude documents containing a term, plus sign to include stop words and the Boolean OR. Next to each entry in the results list is an option to “Search this Site” which does work well. Although searching is free, you may find that you have to pay for articles on some sites.

Overall, RefSeek does a reasonable job of limiting your search to more serious scientific and academic information but there are far too many omissions for it to be reliably used on its own.  There are several other science search engines that I would recommend you investigate and use along side of RefSeek: see Ten Science Search Engines at
http://hwlibrary.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/science-search-engines/

Business Information

SCoRe: national UK catalogue of printed company reports

SCoRe (Search Company Reports) is a catalogue of printed company reports, both current and historic,  held in UK libraries. The catalogue does not provide links to digitised documents but it is a very quick and easy way of  identifying libraries that hold hard copy reports.  The participating libraries include London Business School, the British Library, Manchester Business School, City Business Library, Guildhall Library, Strathclyde University and the University of Warwick. A full list is available at http://www.score.ac.uk/collections.asp .

Searching is straightforward: simply type in the company name and select a collection, or leave it as the default ‘All’. Non UK companies are also covered and you can restrict your search to a specific country by using the Advanced Search. The results give you name of the company and any variations, for example searching on Cadbury will find results on Cadbury Schweppes, Fry Cadbury, Cadbury Brothers etc. The libraries that hold copies of the reports are listed together with the earliest and latest years of a collection’s holdings.

An added bonus of this service is that it suggests you look at related companies. For example, clicking on Cadbury Brothers Ltd in my results lists came up with British Cocoa and Chocolate Co Ltd, of which Cadbury Brothers was a subsidiary, and Cadbury Schweppes. Cadbury Brothers, it tells me,  later to become Cadbury Group merged with  Schweppes to form Cadbury Schweppes in 1969).  In addition to locating historical annual reports, this service is a good place to pick up clues on past corporate relationships.

Business Information

British Services UK

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Owned and operated by Infoactive Media Ltd, British Services UK lists major governing bodies, government departments, associations and resources of over 100 industries in the UK along with non-profit organisations, charities, groups, clubs and businesses. My particular interest in this site was the list of trade associations and regulatory bodies at  http://www.britishservices.co.uk/associations.htm. Trade associations are often an excellent starting point for general information and key resources on industry sectors.

You can browse by service type, for example Trade Associations or Chambers of Commerce,  and narrow down your results by location.  There is no option to browse by industry sector and the absence of a proper site search engine makes it even more difficult to find information. Overall, the coverage of trade associations and regulatory bodies is good but not as comprehensive as the Trade Association Forum.

The search box at the top of the screen fails to pick up any results from the listings and at best only displays advertisements.  You could, of course, use Google Advanced Search to carry out a site search, but this was when I began to suspect the quality of some of the data. A search on my own professional body CILIP, which is also a registered charity, did indeed find the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals but it is listed under Bloomsbury Newspapers along with Benjamin Dent & Co, Northcliffe Newspapers, The Friend Publications and The Spectator.

This site has potential, but the navigation needs to be improved and a working search engine ought to be added. Some of the services are incorrectly listed and there are more comprehensive listings elsewhere. British Services UK has an advantage in that everything is in one place, but use with caution.

Business Information

Tapping into expert networks: email discussion lists

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With all the hype and fuss surrounding the newer Web 2.0 stuff one ‘old’ technology seems to have been forgotten, or has not even been noticed, by many people as a valuable collaborative tool. Email discussion lists have been around for years and are still one of the best ways of tapping into expert knowledge. (I refuse to use the Web 2.0 phrase “wisdom of crowds” as crowds – or should that be mobs? – are rarely wise).

Email discussion lists can be subject specific e.g. BUSLIB-L for business information,  profession specific e.g. LIS-LAW for information professionals working in the legal sector,  or activity related e.g. UKeiG Intranets for anyone involved in … er… Intranets.

My own interest is business information and the two lists that I read religiously every day are AIIP (The Association of Independent Information Professionals) and BUSLIB-L -the Business Librarians list. The former is only available to members of AIIP but the latter is open to all. For those of you unfamiliar with email discussion lists this is how they work:

1. You sign up to a list with your email address. The procedure used to involve arcane commands that had to be sent via email to a long winded address. Woe betide the person who inserted an extra space, missed a comma, or added extraneous text to the end of the message such as a signature. Nowadays, nearly all lists offer simple web based sign-ups.

2. You should then receive an email back form the list asking you to confirm. This is to stop people signing up on your behalf and an attempt to block spammers.  Click on the link provided or reply to the message and you are in!

3. All correspondence is conducted via email. When you post a query or a comment it goes to everyone else on the list, and you receive everything that everyone else sends to the list. If you feel overwhelmed by the number of individual messages hitting your mailbox, some lists have a daily or weekly digest to which you can subscribe.

Most lists have searchable archives so, before posting your query, investigate those first  to see if your question has already been raised and answered.

JISCmail hosts a wide range of lists and although it has an academic and research bias, it is open to commercial subscribers and worth investigating if you are new to email lists. Usually, though, good discussion lists are discovered by chance or recommendation.

For those of you who. like me, are interested in business information BUSLIB-L is a must-have. It is a US based list with a North American bias but there are  plenty of European researchers as well. Many well known business information specialists are members and willingly share their expertise. Post a problem and within an hour or two someone will have posted a response. It might be along the lines of  “I don’t think this can be easily answered – you will probably have to pay significant dosh for bespoke market research” or “Have you tried these free resources……”.

Even if you do not have a question yourself, it is worth following the list just to keep up to date with new search techniques, resources, and alternative approaches to locating information. Towards the end of a recent thread on ethics Barabara Quint, editor of Searcher Magazine, reminded us that she used to write editorials on the role of information professionals using the acronym R-A-T-S, Rigorously Aggressive Trained Searchers. “We get the cheese without getting caught in the traps”. Perhaps that should be BUSLIB-L’s motto? Or maybe the start of new professional body – only RODENTS need apply.  (Suggestions as to what R-O-D-E-N-T-S could stand for in the comments section please).

Business Information

Free Official Swedish Company Information

allabolag.se – Gratis företagsinformation på Internet is a quick and easy way to access basic official information on Swedish companies free of charge. That is the good news. The bad news is that it is only available in Swedish but it easy enough to navigate. On the home page there are two boxes: in the first you can enter a company or a person’s name, whereas the second is for entering components of the address. You can view contact details, key financials and executives free of charge and there is an option to order various reports. If you have the Google toolbar installed in your browser, the ‘Translate into English’ option works well enough to enable you to understand most of the headings and financial items.

Many thanks to Britta Nordström for the information.

Google translation of company information page
Google translation of company information page
images

TASI Tutorial: Internet for Image Searching   

TASI (Technical Advisory Service for Images) has launched a tutorial on Internet for Image Searching. This is a  free-to-use online tutorial that, according to the announcement, is “to assist staff and students within the education sphere in locating images for use in both teaching and learning”. I would recommend, though, that anyone who searches for images on the Internet either for personal or business use should work their way through this tutorial.

The tutorial starts off by demonstrating that just because you have found a photo or graphic via Google Images does not mean that it is free for you to use as you want, and it is not always easy to find copyright and ownership information.  Similarly it points out that although a Flickr photo may be given a Creative Commons licence It is not uncommon for people to upload images that are not their own and make them available under Creative Commons licences. And there is more than one form of Creative Commons: if you don’t know what they are follow this tutorial or go to http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons

As well as taking you through the legal issues, copyright and licensing models the tutorial list sites that offer free photos, Creative Commons images, royalty free and commercial stock photos. Note that some of the free photo sites are for personal non-commercial use only and that fees apply if you wish to use them for business purposes.

The emphasis of the tutorial is on “finding copyright cleared images which are available free; facilitating quick, hassle-free access to a vast range of online photographs and other visual resources”.

An added bonus is that as you progress through the tutorial you can add sites to a free ‘link basket’, which can be saved, printed out or sent to you by email.

Facebook

Bosses ‘should embrace Facebook’

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Bosses ‘should embrace Facebook’ says a report on BBC News. Demos, “The Think Tank for Everyday Democracy”, has apparently released the findings of a study that says:

Companies should not dismiss staff who use social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo at work as merely time-wasters.

The BBC report goes on to quote Demos as saying:

Attempts to control employees’ use of such software could damage firms in the long run by limiting the way staff communicate…. Social networking can encourage employees to build relationships with colleagues across a firm. However, businesses are warned to be strict with those who abuse access.

I wanted to read the original report on the Demos site, or at least the press release, but there was no sign of it at 8.33 am UK time on 29th October 2008. So we’ll have to make do with the BBC article.

Not much ‘everyday democracy’ going on here if Demos is restricting access to the study!

Search Engines

Update on MSE360

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Soon after I had published yesterday’s posting on MSE360,  I sent feedback to them on a couple of issues  including the lack of a ‘NOT’ command. They replied within a couple of hours and overnight have corrected a bug that had caused the problem.  So the Boolean NOT does work in MSE360.

I raised another question about a green icon that appeared to the left of some entries in the results list.  This was most obvious in my ego-surfing and I had hoped that that the icons next to my web pages and blog postings meant that they were highly recommended. Unfortunately it is not so.  The little green icon represents a site that you have visited before, but it is  a feature that only Firefox supports.  It is a really neat feature, though, especially for those of us who do a lot of desk research.  It is useful to be able to ignore those sites we already know about and have visited and, perhaps more importantly, to quickly track down the perfect site that we found yesterday but cannot easily spot in the results list.

Search Engines

MSE360 Search

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One search engine bites the dust (Accoona) and another one is launched. I picked up details of Search (MSE360) via Phil Bradley’s blog posting and so far am very impressed with it. The home page is minimalist as is the norm these days and apart from the search box the only other obvious search option is a pull down list of countries. Hidden at the bottom of the page is an Options link that allows you to set safe search for images, change the default country, enable/disable WOT, and choose a different style sheet for your results. WOT is short for “Web of Trust” and is a community whose members exchange knowledge of websites.  If a site has a bad reputation, WOT will warn you by inserting an icon next to the results. The colour of the icon ranges through shades of green, amber and red, red indicating sites about which you might want to exercise some caution. Hover over the icon and you can view the WOT ‘scorecard’.

The results page is ‘three tiered’. The centre panel contains the usual web listings, and the default style has images on the left, and  wikipedia and blog postings on the right. The layout can be changed by selecting a different stylesheet. I eventually decided to have both sidebars on the right hand side of the screen. There are the inevitable ads (Google) but these are in the sidebar and clearly labelled as Paid Results.

The quality of the results for my standard, basic test searches was excellent and compared favourably with Google.  What did concern me initially was that there is no advanced search screen: I include site/domain and filetype commands in many of my searches and, for me, a search engine without them is a non-starter. After some experimentation, though, I discovered that that you can use the commands as part of your search strategy, for example

“car ownership” UK site:gov.uk filetype:pdf

I also found that you can use Boolean AND, OR and parentheses but not NOT (reminiscent of Yahoo!) . The minus sign can be used in a simple search if you want to exclude pages containing term but it does not seem to work when combined with Boolean operators.

Moving on to general issues, MSE30 stores no private data The only stored data are customization cookies on your own computer.  Your IP is not kept, nor is any other identifiable information. To help combat spyware, they  use an internal spyware alert program to provide warnings next to sites that may host spyware.

MSE360 say that they are still a test site so there are bound to be bugs,  and no doubt some changes will be made to the interface. They say ” We’re not at a stage in which we can say we’re ready, but you still love hearing your feedback, good or bad”. My first impression is that they are very close to being ready and light years ahead of some of the appalling, over-hyped  search engines that have been launched recently.  I definitely recommend that you pay them a visit.