Accoona is a search engine that I regularly include in my workshops and training sessions, not so much for the web search but for the news section and the SuperTarget options. Yesterday, I was horrified to discover that News is no longer there. Instead of Web, Business and News there is just a single search box. Going through my feeds this morning, I see that Phil Bradley has picked up on this as well but has explored a little further than I had. News is still there but you first have to do a search in the box on the home page. When the results page comes up, the three options reappear and you can then limit your search to web, business or news. Why they have decided to increase the number of clicks I need to make to find the information I want beats me. They won’t gain any fans by doing it and will no doubt lose those who already use it for news. One look at the home page and they will assume, as I did, that the news service is no more.
Libraries@Cambridge 2006
The Powerpoint of my presentation, given at the Libraries@cambridge 2006 conference on December 13th, together with the list of resources and further reading is available at http://www.rba.co.uk/presentations/cam2006/
The topic was RSS, Blogs and Wikis: New Essential Tools for Communication and Collaboration.
Advanced Search Strategies – Top 10 Tips
Another advanced search strategies course successfully completed at Manchester Business School with the usual eclectic mix of participants, and a new top 10 tips and tricks at the end of the day. It is interesting that RSS feeds get a mention this time around, and it does seem that more people are starting to use them for news and alerts.
- Trovando – http://www.trovando.it/. Enables you to type in your search strategy just once and run it across dozens of search tools one by one. Tools are grouped by type, for example web, blogs, audio/video.
- Remember that each search engine is different. Each has unique search features, has different coverage and sorts yoru results in a different way.
- Seek out evaluated subject listings and specialist tools for subjects or industries that are new to you. For example Intute (http://www.intute.ac.uk/), TechXtra (http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/), Alacrawiki (http://www.alacrawiki.com/).
- AlltheWeb Livesearch – http://livesearch.alltheweb.com/. Starts displaying results as you type in your search so that you can quickly see when you start to go wrong. It also displays related and alternative search strategies that can help you if you are new to the subject area.
- Wayback Machine – http://www.archive.org/. For tracking down copies of pages or documents that have disappeared from the original web site. Type in the address of the web site or the full URL of the document, if you know it. (Note: this is not guaranteed but worth a try for older documents that are unlikely to be in the search engine caches.
- RSS feeds. More efficient than email for monitoring topics and managing search alerts. IE 7 and Outlook 2007 can both read RSS. If you would prefer to try a web based reader try Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/), Newsgator (http://www.newsgator.com/) or Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader)
- Keep up to date with who is best at which type of search. For example image search, blogs and feeds. Obviously, this can quickly change so use RSS feeds to monitor announcements and blogs that assess and evaluate what the search engines are doing.
- Make the most of the Advanced Search options to narrow down your search, for example filetype or format, site search (can be used to search individual sites or types of site such as academic or government sites).
- Search Engine Showdown – http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/. Excellent site from Greg Notess with summaries of the major search engines, unique features and news on what they are up to.
- You are not going mad! Pages do disappear without trace and Google does do strange things. Try another search engine or a totally different approach. Above all, trust in your abilities.
UC&R – New Ways to Communicate workshop
I am at this moment at the University College & Research Group’s workshop on using RSS, blogs and wikis to communicate with your users, being held at Birmingham University in the UK. There are about 50 of us here and we are all having great fun playing with ePop. Poor ‘Trevor’ who is at the end of a video link is being bombarded with questions from us in the training suite. He can show us presentations, answer questions and take over our computers to help us find things (scary!). And he is on a completely different part of the campus – now we are sharing whiteboards. Brilliant session from Debbie Carter of the Univeristy of Birmingham.
The earlier part of the day was taken up with RSS, blogs and wikis. I kicked off with a general introduction to the subject and Alan Cooper from CILIP’s web team talked about how Web 2.0 is being used at CILIP. Rupert Mann from Oxford University Press looked at the technology from the publisher’s, and user’s, point of view and had some pretty scathing things to say about other publishers’s approach and attitude to RSS and blogs in particular. A memorable comment on one US university’s attempt at RSS was “No fun at Harvard any more”.
Jane Somerwell, University of Worcester, talked about blogging in her organisation and then we had the first of the practical sessions. I am pleased to report that we have significantly increased the membership of the blogosphere with at least a dozen having been set up in the last hour, and the number of RSSaholics in this room is beginning to reach alarming levels. “Stop reading your feeds and pay attention!!”
A fantastic day, great fun, and every one of us learned a lot.
Must stop… time to comment to some of the new blogs 🙂
Online 2006 free search seminars
I am now back from a very busy week at the annual Online Information exhibition and conference in London. As well as chairing a conference session and being ‘on duty’ on the UKeiG stand, I gave two free exhibition seminars on search: ‘Top tips and tricks for better web search’ and ‘What’s new in search’. These are now available as Powerpoint files.
Please note that they are just Powerpoint slides and are not annotated. So unless you were present at the seminars, the significance of some of the screen shots may not be immediately obvious – in fact they may be downright obscure. Also, she compiled these using the latest Microsoft Office 2007 suite and in the conversion to the more commonly used versions of Office some of the slides may have lost something in the translation.
LibraryThing UnSuggester | Don’t read THIS
Fed up with reading the same type of book or want to try a completely different genre? Then head straight for LibraryThing Unsuggester
I came across this in Tom Roper’s Blog. According to LibraryThing Unsuggester it “takes ‘people who like this also like that’ and turns it on its head. It analyzes the seven million books LibraryThing members have recorded as owned or read, and comes back with books least likely to share a library with the book you suggest.”
I was very impressed with the unsuggestions for the Seven Pillar’s of Wisdom: Confessions of a Shopaholic, Sushi for Beginners, and the Harry Potter paperback boxed set. You can’t get much different than that! I was rather disappointed, though, with the first two on the alternative list for The Ragged Tousered Philanthropists. That is until I discovered that number one (America: a Citizens Guide to Democracy Inaction) is tagged as humour and the number two (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood) is classed as chick lit.
Ideal for helping you choose the perfect Christmas gift for that oh-so difficult to please relative 🙂
Advanced Internet Search Strategies – Manchester Business School
If you want to get in some serious practice on the latest Internet search techniques before Christmas there are still some places available on the workshop that I am running at Manchester Business School on December 5th. The event is held in the Eddie Davies Library at Manchester Business School, Booth Street West.
Although it is being held at the business school, the workshop covers sites and techniques relevant to all subject areas and types of research. There is ample time for practical sessions so you can try out some of the tips and tricks yourself. Also, the number of participants is kept small enough for me to discuss with each person the search tools that are relevant to their specific research area.
Details of the workshop and a booking form are on the
MBS web site.
Please contact me if you have a question about the content of the workshop, but for all queries regarding bookings please contact the Business Information Service at MBS on tel: 0161 275 6502/3, Fax: 0161 275 6505 or Email: bis@mbs.ac.uk
New ways to communicate: a practical approach
I shall be presenting a keynote at an event organised by UC&R in Birmingham on December 6th. Details are as follows:
New Ways to Communicate: A Practical Approach. Using RSS, Blogs and Wikis to Communicate with your Users.
Venue: Learning Centre, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston Campus
Date: Wednesday 6th December 2006, 10am – 4pm
As the Internet has developed, so has the potential for reaching information service users. This event will consider how information professionals can best use modern tools such as RSS feeds, weblogs and wikis tools to communicate with users and colleagues, and to develop and promote their services.
Speakers include:
Keynote: Karen Blakeman, RBA Information Services and UKeiG
Alan Cooper, CILIP Web Team
Cost: £35 for CILIP members, £50 for non-members (inclusive of VAT)
A limited number of free places are available for students currently studying for a degree in library and information science. Lunch is included in the fee.
Further event details may be obtained from:
Clare Langman, UC&R Group West Midlands Chair and Co-Events Secretary,
Information Specialist (Engineering and Life Sciences),
Library and Information Services, Aston University,
Birmingham B4 7ET
Tel: 0121 204 4513
Email: c.langman@aston.ac.uk
Let’s Get Wiki’d
The slides from my presentation “Assessing the Quality of Collaboratively Collected Information” are now available on my web site. This was part of the Let’s Get Wiki’d event organised by CILIP’s East of England Information Services Group. It was an excellent day covering the whole range ‘2G’ internet services such as Library 2.0 and Web 2.0 Dave (Pattern from the University of Huddersfield), Mashups (Richard Wallis, Talis), Social Bookmarking and Connotea (Joanna Scott, Nature), and wikis and the semantic web (Nick Kings, BT). I understand that links to the other presentations will be available on the ISG web site.
I now have a short break from presentations and workshops, but the next series kicks off quite soon at the end of November at Online Information 2006. I shall be giving two free seminars on Tips and Tricks and What’s New in Search. Details of these and the full programme of free seminars and masterclasses are available on the Online Information web site.
Windows Live – linkfromdomain command
This a new command from Windows Live search (formerly MSN Search) that gives you a list of links to other pages from your specified domain, for example linkfromdomain:rba.co.uk. This can be useful if you have a trusted source of information and want to see what other sites they recommend or link to. It can also be used as a means of assessing the bias of a site so that you can see the diversity, or lack of it, in the pages that the site ‘references’.