Awards, SLA Europe

SLA Europe Information Professional 2007: Call for Nominations

Posted on behalf of Penny Leach, SLA Board

The Board of SLA Europe would like to remind you that the closing date for nominations for the SLA Europe Information Professional 2007 Award (SLA Europe IP 2007) is 28th February 2007.

The goal of the annual Information Professional Award is to recognise outstanding achievement in the information profession amongst those living and working in Europe, so this is a chance to gain recognition for a professional colleague or yourself.

The winner receives an expenses-paid trip to the SLA Conference in
Denver, June 2007. The nominator of the winner will receive a magnum of champagne.

Further information about the Award, including past winners, can be
found on the SLA Europe web site. The from is available in Word and PDF. All you need to do at this stage is complete the form and email it to Penny Leach (penny.leach@gs.com), including a short statement as to why the nominee should be considered (and attaching any relevant information). You do not need to be a member of SLA to nominate or be nominated.

The Award is sponsored by sponsored by Factiva.

Blogs, Presentations, RSS, Wikis

RSS, Blogs and Wikis – Woking Library

I am doing a repeat of my Basingstoke RSS, Blogs and Wikis presentation at Woking Library on Tuesday, 20th February. It is being organised by the Surrey Library & Information Group and kicks off at 6 pm. All those who work or have worked in Library and Information services in Surrey and the surrounding areas are welcome.

If you are interested in attending please contact Hilary Ely, Surrey County Council Libraries & Culture, East Area Office, Omnibus, Lesbourne Road, Reigate, Surrey RH2 7JA by Wednesday 14th February 2007, e-mail: h.ely@surreycc.gov.uk Tel: 01737 737687 Fax: 01737 737649.

As an aside, I am delighted to see that the Hampshire and Isle of Wight sub-branch of CILIP’s South East Branch, and who invited me to give the talk at Basingstoke library, now have a blog at http://hiow.blogspot.com/

Top 10 Search Tips

Top 10 Search Tips from Swansea

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This week I ran a workshop in Swansea on Internet search and new technologies. The first half of the day was taken up with new and recent developments and participants had the rest of the day to try out search techniques, tools, RSS, blogs and wikis for themselves. The group was made up of HE and health-care information professionals and they were all experienced, advanced searchers. It was hard work keeping up with them! At the end of the workshop they came up their own list of Top 10 Tips on Searching:

1. Live.com – http://www.live.com/. Formerly MSN search and totally revamped by Microsoft, this proved to be very popular and will probably be the main alternative to Google for the workshop participants. They particularly liked the scrolling image results page and Academic Live, which is given a separate mention later. There were some negative comments about Maps, but that area is still under development and worth revisiting now and again to see how it is progressing.

2. Graball – http://www.graball.com/. A tool for comparing the results of two search engines side by side.

3. Allwhois – http://allwhois.com/. Use this to find out who owns the domain name of a web site – an essential part of assessing the quality of information.

4. What does the plus (+) sign before a term do? The major search engines automatically search for all of your terms but they ignore common ‘stop’ words such as the, of, and. For example, if you are researching a quotation that contains stop words put it all inside double quote marks and precede each of the stop words with a plus sign. They will then be included in the search. In Google, use the plus sign before a word to stop Google stemming it and looking for variations.

5. Google’s numeric range search for anything involving a range of numbers – weights, distances, temperatures, prices. Separate the numbers at the start and end of the range with two full stops (no spaces), and include a unit of measurement (optional).

For example:

toblerone 1..5 kg

will look for sites selling massive Toberlone bars. (We assumed that one carves up the 4.5 kg bar with a chain saw!)

6. The link: and linkdomain: commands in Live.com to find pages that link to a known page or site. Use them to find pages that are similar to your known page, or to see who is linking to your site.

For example:

link:www.site.co.uk/library/ will only find pages that link to the specified page on a site.

linkdomain:site.co.uk will find pages that link to any page on the site

7. Remember to use filetype: and/or site: commands to focus your search. Filetype can be be used to limit your search to PDFs, PPT, Excel, Word documents etc. Statistics, for example, are often left in Excel spreadsheets. The site: command can be used to limit your search to a type of site, for example site:gov.uk for just UK government web sites, or to search just one site, for example site:statistics.gov.uk. Perfect for large sites that have poor navigation or useless internal search engines.

8. Alacra Industry Spotlights – http://www.alacrawiki.com/ and click on the Alacra Spotlights link. A collection of overviews on different industries highlighting key publications and resources for each sector. Ideal if you are new to a sector. Although this is a wiki, the Spotlights area is locked so that only Alacra can edit the pages.

9. Academic Live – http://academic.live.com/. “More reliable and trustworthy than Google”, and format options for bibliographic management packages such as RefWorks and EndNote. This event was held at Swansea University and there were links in each record in the results list that helped the searcher track down the full paper in the University’s own collection.

10. CrossEngine – http://www.crossengine.com/. Dozens of different search tools are grouped under tabs by type, for example web, video, audio, images, news, blogs, reference. Type in your search terms just once and then click on each search engine in turn to run the search. Similar to Trovando.it but more up to date and it has additional features such a file type search options for Google and Yahoo. Great for reminding you of alternative tools and different types of resources that you should be including in your strategy.

Search Engines

Update on CrossEngine

A few hours after I had posted my comments on CrossEngine, Greg Notess of Search Engine Showdown emailed me asking if we in the UK were seeing a different version from people in the US. My screen shot was different from what he was seeing on his screen. A quick check confirmed that CrossEngine has already made changes to the interface. The Formats tab has gone and the filetype search has been included under the Web tab (the Standard tab renamed). The audio search, previously included under Formats, now has its own tab, which seems far more sensible to me.

A few further comments now I have had time to look at it in more detail:

  • Live.com and Exalead are missing from the file format search. Both sometimes come up with unique sources when, for example, I am carrying out a highly specialised search forPowerpoint presentation or a spreadsheet containing market data. Exalead in particular does tend to pick up more European sources.
  • Accoona is missing from the News tab.
  • On a positive note, it is good to see the Gutenberg project listed under ebooks in the reference section. This was around long before Google et al and way before we all had lovely graphical interfaces to the Internet. I can recall having to FTP texts to my computer… oh Happy Days – NOT!

By the time you read this, CrossEngine may have changed something else but I’m all for that. At least it demonstrates that they are actively developing it (and possibly monitoring what the blogosphere is saying about it?). The problem for me is what am I going to see when I demonstrate it to a workshop on advanced search strategies in Swansea next week 🙂

Search Engines

CrossEngine

CrossEngine is a search tool similar to Trovando. You type in your search terms just once and then click on each search engine in turn to run the search. The search tools are grouped under tabs by type, for example standard, video, images, news, blogs. Two groupings that CrossEngine has but Trovando does not are Formats, which enables you to search for file types such as PowerPoint or Excel, and Social covering services such as Delicious, Furl and Squidoo. Audio search is included under Formats, which I find a bit odd. It makes more sense to me for that to have its own tab or be included with video as it is in Trovando. Overall, a neat tool if you want to quickly run your search in several different tools one by one.

Blogs, RSS

LLRX.com: The Blog – Another Tool in Your Arsenal

This is a very useful article by Janet Peros, legal reference librarian and co-chair of the Law Library Association of Greater New York’s education committee. It outlines the use of blogs and RSS feeds in several US legal firms, and how they have been used to replace newsletters for keeping partners and clients up to date. In some instances the mini case-studies mention the software and services used to publish the blogs and generate feeds. The motivation and reasoning behind the decisions to switch from conventional alerting services that are discussed in this article are relevant to any type of organisation in any country. The article is a good source of ammunition for those of us in the process of persuading colleagues and managers that blogs and RSS are a good idea!

Market Research, Statistics

Market Research on the Web – Special Offer

IRN Research are offering a special introductory annual subscription to their Market Research on the Web (MROW) database. The special offer is £100 and applies to single user corporate subscribers, academic and public library users. A free trial is available covering the food and drink sector.

MROW is a searchable database of sources of market data, industry reports, company lists, statistics, industry news, legislation, and links to over 4,500 evaluated UK and European Web sites. The sites are categorised by organisation type for example trade association, professional bodies, market research publishers, market research agencies, magazines/journals, Government sites, gateways/portals.

I have subscribed to this service since it was first launched and was a regular user when it was still free of charge. The main advantage of the service for me is that it saves me so much time when I am looking for industry statistics or directories of members/companies on trade and professional association web sites. I pride myself that my search skills can track down relevant sites without the help of MROW, but I then have to visit and navigate each site in turn. All too often I find that the site does not give stats on their sector or does not have a directory. MROW tells me straight away if there are stats or market data, if there is a directory of members/companies, availability of news and press releases, and if there is information on relevant legislation and technical data. MROW finds in a couple of minutes what would normally take me about half an hour to track down the Google et al way.

MROW also provides a Guide to Market Data and Statistics – a searchable database of statistical and market research terminologies, classifications, and concepts. This is a great resource for checking on market research jargon.

Legislation

UK Statute Law Database

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The UK Statute Law Database (SLD), which is the official revised edition of the primary legislation of the United Kingdom, has been made available free of charge online. The official press release is on the Department of Constitutional Affairs web site (http://tinyurl.com/2o8vuh). Most legislation that is currently in force has been published on the web site with some exceptions. For 2006 they specifically mention The Armed Forces Act 2006 and The Water and Sewerage Services (Northern Ireland) Order 2006 (N.I. 21). I cannot think of two more diverse pieces of information to omit! I am told by colleagues that there are other gaps but the site admits to this and there are details of what is still be added.

On the home page you can search for text in the title, by year, number and legislation type. There is also an A-Z index and a chronological index. The Advanced Search has additional options that include date ranges, geographical extent and text search. The earliest legislation I could find is the Statute of Marlborough 1267 “made at Marlborough in the Presence of our Lord King Henry, and Richard King of the Romans, and the Lord Edward eldest Son of the said King Henry, and the Lord Ottobon, at that Time Legate in England”. It includes “Remedy against Accountants. Farmers shall do no Waste. Remedy thereon.” I shall leave you to find out for yourselves what that is all about.

As well as reading the full text of the legislation you can view amended legislation as it has changed over time and sections that have yet to come into force. A green “A” icon links to the “attributes” of the legislation, such as start date and extent, and enables you to move between versions. The blue “P” icon indicates provisions, and versions of amended provisions, that have not yet been brought into force. I found this particularly useful for checking when parts of the Companies Act 2006 come into force. If you are viewing older legislation that has been amended, a box warns you of the fact.

Is this database going to make access to UK legislation easier? If you know your way around the structure of Statute Law then yes. Those who do not and who have never had to to do battle with Acts, Statutory Instruments and the like will not be any the wiser. If you just want to read or download a copy of a particular Act then the Office of Public Sector Information at http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts.htm will probably be quicker, and it now has RSS feeds for alerting you to new Acts and Statutory Instruments. Bills currently before the UK Parliament are available on the UK Parliament web site at http://www.parliament.uk/ (email alerts only). Command Papers and departmental House of Commons Papers are at http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/ (RSS feed available).

News and comments on search tools and electronic resources for research