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, a member of the UK eInformation Group (UKeiG).

Business Information, workshops

Top tips from the latest business information workshop

September 20, 2013 Karen Blakeman

Delegates at yesterday’s business information workshop in London came up with an interesting combination of websites and search commands for their end of day top tips.

OFFSTATS – Official Statistics on the Web http://www.offstats.auckland.ac.nz Excellent starting point for official statistical sources by country, region subject or a combination of categories. All of the content in the database is in the public domain and available through the Internet.
GMacker http://gmacker.com/web/content/gDateRange/gdr.htm Google’s Verbatim in the search options menu on the results page is great. Google’s date option from the same menu is great. But you cannot use both together. You can use the daterange: command, though, with Verbatim but it’s complicated. GMacker is a much easier way to do it. Type in your search on the GMacker page, select your dates from the calendars and click on ‘Google Search’. When the results appear on Google simply apply Verbatim in the usual way.
Domain Tools http://www.domaintools.com/ A useful tool for identifying who owns the domain name of a website.
7 side http://www.7side.co.uk/ was recommended for its International company information services.
Zanran http://zanran.com/This is a search tool for searching information contained in charts, graphs and tables of data and within formatted documents such as PDFs, Excel spreadsheets and images. Enter your search terms and optionally limit your search by date and/or format type.
News alerts, news curation services and automated newsletter generation. Use Google alerts, RSS feeds and newsletter generation sites such as Paper.li (http://paper.li/) and Scoop.it (http://www.scoop.it/) to keep up to date and share news with colleagues.
site: command Use the site: command to focus your search on particular types of site, for example site:ac.uk, or to search inside a large rambling site. You can also use -site: to exclude sites from your search.
Numeric range This command is unique to Google. Use it for anything to do with numbers – years, temperatures, weights, distances, prices etc. Simply type in your two numbers separated by two full stops as part of your search. A good way of limiting your search to pages or news covering a company’s activities over two or three years in the past.
OpenCorporates “The Open Database Of The Corporate World” http://opencorporates.com/ Provides access to open corporate data on 55 million companies in 75 jurisdictions. You can search all jurisdictions at the same time or select just one. Results can be filtered by type of data held, current status, company type, SIC. A link to the original registry page for a company is always included with the displayed information.
DataMarket http://datamarket.com/ A portal to thousands of free and priced datasets. Free to search, and create charts and visualisations of the free data.

Google

Google expands define but drops dictionary

September 2, 2013 Karen Blakeman 1 Comment

Google has added extra information to its web definitions. When using the ‘define’ command, an expandable box now appears containing additional synonyms, how the word is used in a sentence, the origins of the word, the use of the word over time and translations. At the moment it is only available in Google.com and you no longer need the colon immediately after define. So, for definitions of dialectic simply type in define dialectic.

The box gives definitions and synonyms of the word and the ‘More’ link gives you an example of its use in a sentence.

Click on the grey, downward pointing chevron to open the box and see information on the origin of the word, translations (beware – some are rather bizarre!), and use of the word over time. The last is powered by the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which shows the frequency of words in Google Books. Click on the graph, and you are taken to the Ngram Viewer where you can drill deeper into the data and see the use of the word in context.

Compare this with the old version of define results that are still displayed in Google.co.uk:

Google Define UK

The new ‘define’ box in Google.com certainly gives you much more varied information, but the Dictionary search option that provided extra definitions has been dropped. It used to be under ‘Search tools’, ‘All results’. It can still be seen in Google.co.uk.

The new define only works on English words or words that have been absorbed into the English language. It can cope with schadenfreude and correctly defines tikka as “an Indian dish of small pieces of meat or vegetables marinated in a spice mixture”. When I asked it to define balti, though, it came up with a simple web definition of it being a city in Moldova. The standard Google web search results came up with the common UK usage of it as a type of curry served in a steel balti bowl. Our (UK) use of the word is probably too local for it to be have been picked up by Google. Similarly, phrases such as “chicken tikka” generally pull up a single web definition although some do trigger the translation options, for example “climate change”, “global warming”.

Overall, I like the new ‘define’ but I regret the loss of the extra definitions that the Dictionary search option offered. Sometimes, the definitions that ‘define’ offers are somewhat impenetrable. The Dictionary option provided a list of alternatives that were more understandable.

Business Information, Government, Legislation, workshops

Does price guarantee quality of information?

August 30, 2013 Karen Blakeman

I recently co-presented a webinar on researching legal information. The event was organised by TFPL, and Alan Blanchard and myself reviewed free and paid for resources together with key search techniques.

Throughout the session we polled the audience on a number of issues, the first question being “Does price guarantee quality when you are purchasing information?”. Surprisingly, given the topic of the webinar, 70% voted ‘No’ with the remaining 30% opting for ‘I don’t know’ rather than ‘Yes’. When we asked about their opinions on free information, though, 79% said they would need a result from a free source to be validated with a paid resource.

The audience could not qualify their answers – it was a simple yes/no/don’t know – but there were some interesting discussions on the issues after the event. The priced services certainly have to work hard to prove value for money and they cannot assume that their users will automatically renew each year. Free information has a big part to play in legal and business research but it is vital that one is aware of the limitations of free. For example, do you know how up to date legislation.gov.uk is and if it carries revised legislation? (See http://www.legislation.gov.uk/help#aboutRevDate for the answer). And then there is the issue of making Google run your search the way you want it run, without personalisation or deviation.

I am running two public access workshops this autumn for TFPL that look at free versus fee resources for business and legal information. The first, on 19th September 2013, is Business information: key web resources and covers:

Portals and key starting points
Company information
Industry information
Official statistics, market research
News sources, RSS and alerting services
Social media and professional networks

The second is Free resources and search techniques for EU and UK legislation and is on 13th November 2013. It will be looking at:

How to use advanced search commands to find news and information on legislation
How to use reading level and date ranges to focus the search
Searching foreign language pages
Options for searching journals, research information, grey literature
Alternatives to Google, specialist tools and sites
Assessing quality and relevance

Both days include practical sessions and places on the workshops are limited. Contact TFPL for further information and bookings.

Travel

Dunkirk little ships and the Reading Festival

August 23, 2013 Karen Blakeman

Reading_Festival_Queue_20130822_4_Signed_Blog — Reading festival fans queue for boats

It is August bank holiday weekend and in Reading that means Reading Festival (http://www.readingfestival.com/). Festival goers started arriving in dribs and drabs on Wednesday but yesterday (Thursday) the main invasion started. The stages and campsites are upstream from Reading town centre and most of the fans arrive by train. A few walk to the campsite, many pile onto the extra buses laid on by Reading Buses, but it appears that the majority use what has become, over the last few years, the traditional means of transport – boats.

Every year boats ferry people to and from the festival site and among them are usually a couple of Dunkirk little ships. The emergency evacuation of Allied soldiers from the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk in France took place between 27 May and 4 June 1940. What were needed for the evacuation were boats with shallow draught, and hundreds of pleasure boats, private yachts and launches on the Thames and estuaries along the South and East coasts were involved in the evacuation.

Some of the “little ships”, as they came to be called, are still around and last year I saw the Princess Freda and Devon Belle at work over the festival weekend. I’ve already seen Devon Belle (pictured left) this year.

The Association of Dunkirk Little Ships (ADLS) was founded in 1966 following the 1965 25th anniversary commemoration of the Dunkirk evacuation. The ADLS web site (http://www.adls.org.uk) has a section that lists the specifications and history of the surviving little ships. The entry for Devon Belle, previously Seymour Castle, can be found at http://www.adls.org.uk/t1/content/devon-belle-previously-seymour-castle. It does not yet record the purchase of the boat by Thames Rivercruise (http://www.readingchronicle.co.uk/news/reading/articles/2010/05/20/46728-little-ship-sails-again/).

Check the ADLS database next time you go on a river trip. You may be cruising on a piece of history.

energy

How the UK’s electricity is generated

August 21, 2013 Karen Blakeman 1 Comment

Gas and electricity supply, and energy in general, are constantly in the headlines in the UK. Reports on the anti-fracking protests at Balcombe recently dominated discussions on the topic but the central issue remains. How do we meet our energy needs in the future: gas, coal, nuclear, renewables? Looking at the level of current consumption and how it is generated is key to understanding the nature of the problem. For electricity, there is detailed data available on the status of the UK National Grid and can now be viewed via a service called Gridwatch.

Gridwatch (http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php) shows the demand for electricity in the UK at any one time, the source and how it is being generated. The site is maintained by Templar Consultancy and uses near real-time data from BM Reports on what the UK’s electricity grid is doing. The data is updated every 5 minutes.

The data is presented as a series of dials so that you can easily see how much energy is generated and how that changes throughout the day. Most of the screen is taken up with dials for demand, coal, nuclear, CCGT (gas) and wind.

The right hand area of the screen shows how much electricity is generated through pumped hydro, hydro, biomass and oil, and the level of imported electricity.

Move your cursor over a dial for further information on the different technologies and sources of generation. Coal and nuclear power stations are always switched on and provide most of what is called the base load of electricity required throughout the day. Gas makes up the difference and covers peak demand and balances the variable output from renewables such as wind.

Not much changes during the summer months but the demand can increase dramatically during very cold weather in the winter. It is interesting to see how the dials shift as soon as people get up in the morning. Also, the amount of electricity produced via wind turbines drops to almost zero during stormy weather. The turbines are switched off in high winds to protect them from damage.

Warning: this site can be addictive, especially if you start monitoring it during late autumn and winter!

For more data and statistics on UK energy go to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) at https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-of-energy-climate-change/about/statistics

Alacra, Google, Search Engines

Google adds in-depth articles to results

August 15, 2013 Karen Blakeman 1 Comment

Google is rolling out a new addition to search results called “In-depth articles” (http://insidesearch.blogspot.ca/2013/08/discover-great-in-depth-articles-on.html):

“To understand a broad topic, sometimes you need more than a quick answer. Our research indicates perhaps 10% of people’s daily information needs fit this category — topics like stem cell research, happiness, and love, to name just a few. That’s why over the next few days we’ll be rolling out a new feature to help you find relevant in-depth articles in the main Google Search results.”

The articles appear as a block of three at the bottom of your results, if you only display 10 results per page, or in the middle of the page if you display more. As Google says, they appear if your search is fairly broad and they do not appear for every query. I had to run several different searches before I found an example. At present it is only available in Google.com

My search on thorium reactor started with a Wikipedia article at the top, which seems all too often to be the default.

Further down the page was a block of three “in-depth” articles from Wired, Cosmos Magazine and Nature.

They do not appear at all if you use a Chrome Incognito window or your browser’s private browsing option. They also disappear if you apply Verbatim to your results.

How useful are these articles? They are certainly lengthy and in depth but only the one from Nature was fairly recent (December 2012). The one from Wired was published in 2009 and the Cosmos Magazine article appeared in 2006. I tried limiting my search to articles published in just the last year using Search Tools, Any time, Past year. The documents in the main results changed but the in-depth articles remained the same. The Nature article is highly relevant but there are more recent documents to be found than those from Wired and Cosmos. This raises the question as to how these articles are selected. I have not yet found any reliable information on how it is done, although Google’s Webmaster Central Blog has provided a checklist that may help get an article into the triumvirate (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/in-depth-articles-in-search-results.html). The Moz Blog has run an analysis on 352 searches and found that the major news sources feature heavily (see http://moz.com/blog/inside-indepth-articles for further details).

In theory, in-depth articles are a good way to find an overview of a topic but do check the dates. They may be horrendously out of date.

Business Information, Statistics

Statista: statistics, industry and market data

July 28, 2013 Karen Blakeman

Statista (http://www.statista.com/) is a portal for statistics, market data, market research and survey results. It aggregates data on over 600 international industries from more than 18,000 sources, including market researchers, trade organizations, scientific journals, and government databases. You can get a rough idea of what the service covers from the list of topics at http://www.statista.com/topics/, although this does give the impression that it is heavily US biased, which is not the case.

Searching Statista is straightforward. The default is to include what it calls word fragments, so a search on the term bank will also find banking. This can be changed to identical words if you require an exact match. To search for phrases place double quote marks around your terms, and documents containing a specific term can be excluded by prefixing the word with an exclamation mark. You can ‘OR’ terms by inserting the vertical bar symbol (|) between them, for example dog | cat. To refine your search further use the options on the right hand side of the results page. These include date of publication, region, free/fee-based/all, and category.

Trying to view the data and charts that you find can be a frustrating process as most of the information is only available on subscription. There is a limited amount of free information but you still have to register for what Statista calls its basic free access. The premium account for an individual user is USD 49/month and runs for a minimum of 12 months. This is automatically renewed so make sure you cancel before the year is up if you no longer wish to use it. The corporate subscription is USD 199.90/month. Again the subscription runs for 12 months. A free trial is available for the corporate service but not for individual users. Prices for universities, libraries and education are available on request.

On the results page you can easily identify the subscription content by the red plus sign next to the chart icon to the left of the result. A red ‘P’ indicates a priced report that is free to corporate clients but can be purchased by basic and premium account holders.

Clicking on a result takes you to a page where the data is displayed as a chart or graph depending on what Statista thinks is the most appropriate for that statistic, but you can change the representation if you wish. There are also options for downloading the data in various formats and links to the original source.

Information is provided on the source and includes title of the original document, the publisher, publication date, time period covered by the survey and the geographical regions covered. Statista also adds notes such as definitions of terms used in the original report and observations on possible missing data.

Much of the information on Statista can be found by via Google or Bing using advanced search commands and options, but you will probably have to wade through a significant amount of irrelevant information before you find the data you need. Statista can certainly save you a considerable amount of time, and the data displays are a great way of helping you identify the potential usefulness of a report, as can the metadata and notes.

Is the subscription worth it? It is definitely cost effective for corporates in terms of saving search time and ensuring accuracy and quality of information. I have had good feedback about Statista from several of my clients. I am not so sure about individual users. Some of my own research is highly specialised and I am not convinced that Statista covers all of the areas of interest to me. It is difficult for me to assess its value without trialing the full service first, and there are no pay as you go options such as a day or weekly rate. I might even consider paying for a month’s access for a project but it is a full year’s subscription or nothing. Nevertheless, I recommend you take a serious look at it and if you are contemplating a corporate subscription you can ask for a free trial. It is now on my list of essential research tools.

Bing, Google, images

Bing adds Creative Commons search to images

July 27, 2013 Karen Blakeman

Bing has added public domain and Creative Commons options to its image search but only if it thinks you are in the US. This is a feature that Google has long offered as part of its image advanced search but Bing have only recently added it as an option. If you are looking for an image to include in a presentation, article or promotional literature you have to make sure that the copyright license allows you to do that. Get it wrong and you could be on the wrong end of a very expensive law suit (Bloggers Beware: You CAN Get Sued For Using Pics on Your Blog http://www.roniloren.com/blog/2012/7/20/bloggers-beware-you-can-get-sued-for-using-pics-on-your-blog.html). Images that are in the public domain give you free rein to do whatever you want with them but it can be difficult to find photos that match your requirements. You may have more luck with Creative Commons images.

Bing image search now has an option to restrict your search to a specific license, but only if you are using the US version of the search engine. For those of us outside of the US we have to change our ‘country/region’. Bing frequently introduces new search options that are only available on the US version. They obviously think that the rest of the world is irrelevant.

On Bing’s home page you should see in the upper right hand corner of the screen a ‘Sign in’ option and a cog wheel. Click on the wheel to go to the settings page where you will see an option to change your location. Click on ‘Change your country/region” and select ‘United States- English’. Then head off to Bing images.

Run your search and running across the top of the results page you should see a menu with ‘License’ at the end of it. Click on this and a drop down menu will appear with options such as ‘Public domain’, ‘Free to share and use’, ‘Free to modify, share and use commercially’.

Select the license you need and only images with that license will be included in the results. In the example below I have run a search on Caversham, which is where I live, and selected the ‘Free to share and use’ license. The results include one of my own Flickr photos of Queen Anne’s school.

I have a major problem with the terminology used by Bing to describe some of the licenses, and it is also a problem with Google. Misunderstanding the terms of the license could land you in serious trouble and both Bing’s and Google’s descriptions can be confusing and misleading. ‘Free to modify, share and use commercially’ is straightforward. You can modify the image, share it and even use it as part of commercial publication, brochure, website or whatever. But what about ‘Free to share and use’? I often run this one past people in my workshops and seminars, many of whom are not familiar with copyright. Usually, their immediate response is that they can share and use it however they want, even commercially. Then there might be a pause and someone will ask “What’s the difference between that license and ‘Free to modify, share and use commercially”. A great deal, and a substantial dent in your finances if someone decides to sue you for copyright infringement, but to most people it is not obvious. It wasn’t obvious to me the first time I saw the options! ‘Free to share and use’ is only allowed for non-commercial purposes. Is it so difficult to add ‘non-commercial’ to the description?

Always click through to the original source of the image. If it is a Flickr photo the copyright license will be clear. My photo of Queen Anne’s school is indeed Creative Commons free to share and use, but non-commercially and with attribution (you are required to credit me as the photographer). You may also find that the license that Bing or Google indicates is associated with an image may not be correct. On many occasions I have identified, via Google, an appropriately licensed image for a presentation or paper only to discover that it was ‘all rights reserved’ and that the Creative Commons license referred to another image on the page. If in doubt, ask. And if you cannot identify who is responsible, or they do not respond to your emails then do not use it.

If you are wondering where Google’s image license options are, they are on the advanced search screen. You first have to run your search in Google images and then click on the cog wheel in the upper right hand area of the results page.

Select ‘Advanced search’ and on the next screen go down to almost the bottom of the page and ‘Usage rights’. Click on the downward pointing arrow next to ‘not filtered by license’ and select the license you require. By the way, ‘not filtered by license’ does not mean public domain – it covers every image that Google has indexed regardless of whether it is all rights reserved or completely free to use.

And finally, if the perfect image for your project is all rights reserved do not despair. Contact the owner of the photo. If it is a worthy project or a local community cause they may give you a free license.

Flickr, images, Techie Stuff

Are your Flickr photos backed up?

July 24, 2013 Karen Blakeman

Are your Flickr photos backed up? If Flickr accidentally deleted part or all of your account would you be able to quickly restore your collection? My own complete photo collection that has been gathered together from mobile devices and various cameras is stored on my laptop and an external hard drive, but my Flickr photos are a small subset and are organised differently. I would not relish having to rebuild my Flickr sets from scratch.

Flickr has just announced that it will be down for planned maintenance tomorrow (Thursday 24th) from 4 PM PDT to 10 PM PDT. As far as I am aware there have been no major data losses so far as a result of maintenance and upgrades by Flickr, but it once accidentally deleted a user’s entire account (Flickr user gets back account after its accidental deletion http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/02/03/flickr-user-gets-back-account-after-its-accidental-deletion/). Flickr did, however, eventually manage to restore the account.

You cannot assume that maintenance and upgrades will be without incident, though. A couple of years ago some bloggers using Google Blogger lost posts as a result of problems that arose during maintenance. (Blogger still down; 30 hours of posts lost http://www.neowin.net/news/blogger-still-down-30-hours-of-posts-lost). My husband was one of those whose posts never reappeared but thankfully he had backups. Some of his articles are quite long and detailed so he is in the habit of preparing them offline before uploading to Blogger. He also has a full backup created using Blogger’s Import/Export option (it can be found under Settings, Other). Flickr, however, does not offer an option to export your data so one has to resort to third party tools.

One of the best tools I have found to date for backing up a Flickr account is Bulkr (http://clipyourphotos.com/bulkr). This has to be downloaded to your computer and requires Adobe AIR to be installed. The free version allows you to download your photostream (small, medium or large sizes but not the original) and up to 15 sets.

If you want to download all of your sets, the original sized photos and include the metadata (title, description, tags) then you will need to upgrade to the Pro version, which currently costs USD 29.99/year. There is a Pro+ option, which is a one time payment currently offered at USD 49. Bulkr does not download comments.

An alternative is MyFlickrBackup (http://myflickrbackup.com/), which costs USD4.99 and requires .NET Framework Client Profile to run. It downloads original sized photos and all of your sets, but not the metadata. Two other programs that have been recommended to me but which I haven’t yet tried are FlickrDownload (http://www.onstation.org/flickrdownload/) and photoSync (http://webecoz.com/).

I’d be interested in hearing your experiences of any of the above, or if you know of other useful Flickr backup apps.

Karen Blakeman's Blog