Assessing Quality

The Internet Detective is back


The Internet Detective is back on the case after a year’s vacation. Internet Detective was originally developed in 1998 with funding from the European Union but was withdrawn in 2005. The free online tutorial is designed to help students develop the critical thinking required for their Internet research and is now in the Intute (formerly the RDN) Virtual Training Suite at http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/detective/

Although aimed at students the tutorial is of value to anyone who uses the Internet for research. It highlights why information quality is an issue on the Internet, offers hints and tips on evaluating information, and how to recognise scams and hoaxes. The tutorial and associated exercises take about an hour to complete, although I would expect experienced researchers to be able to do it in less than that and get all the answers right! You can skip sections if you wish and you do not have to complete it in one sitting.

If nothing else, it serves as a reminder to all of us on how to differentiate between the the Good, the Bad and the Ugly on the Net.

Business Information

Russia: All Regions Trade & Investment Guide 2006

The 2006 edition of the Russia: All Regions Trade and Investment Guide is now avilable. The guide covers all 89 regions giving data on markets, current economic conditions, sources of supply, infrastructure, trade opportunities, operating conditions, investment projects, and the legal and tax environment. Data is provided directly by the local administrations and governments, and reviewed and verified through government agencies. I have found this guide to be an invaluable starting point in the past when researching the trading environment in the region.

Prices range from £395 to £595 depending on whether you order the book and/or the CD ROM and whether you want them in English or Russian, or both. There is a 25% discount if you order before Friday 7th July.

Further information and order forms can be found at http://www.dataresources.co.uk/russ89.htm

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Compare airport parking prices

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Set up and maintained by Fubra who run Ourproperty.co.uk and petrolprices.com, Aiport Parking Shop compares prices across 6 of the biggest UK parking brokers for 24 UK airports. Select the airport from which you wish to fly, enter you departure and return date, and the number of passengers. It then comes up with a list of possibilities.

As I always use public transport to get to UK airports I was astounded at the variety and range of options and prices. At the upper end of the market you can treat yourself to a meet and greet deal where you drive straight up to departures, leave your car with a valet who will park it for you, and then have it waiting outside arrivals on your return.

For each entry in the results you can see if the service is on/off airport parking or meet and greet, transfer time to the terminal, frequency of transfers, any awards that the service has won, and more detailed information in an aiport car park guide. It also tells you whether or not there is a charge for credit card processing. If you decide to prebook – and apparently you can save up to half the cost by doing so – links take you direct to the car parking service web site.

On every page there are also links to the Car Hire Centre, another Fubra run site, that compares the prices of a range of car hire brokers; coverage is worldwide. Choose the airport or city where you want to pick up the car, enter the dates and you are then presented with a list sorted by price. Cheapest first of course!

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Blogs and Social Media Forum Podcasts

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If you don’t manage to get to the Blogs and Social Media Forum in May, VNU are now offering podcasts of the individual forum sessions for £25 + VAT each, or all 8 sessions for £150 +VAT.

The speakers included Euan Semple – ex Head of Knowledge Management, BBC; Christopher Barger – Blogger in Chief, IBM and JP Rangaswami – Global CIO, Dresdner Kleinwort Wassertein. Brief details of the forum sessions and further information are available on the VNU web site

To purchase a Podcast please contact Belinda Sprules on telephone number +44 (0)20 7316 9126, or by email Belinda.sprules@vnuexhibitions.co.uk

Search Strategies

GoshMe

GoshMe brings together hundreds of specialist web sites and databases. The home page has a number of major headings such as science, environment and society, audio, health, law, reference, sports. Select the most appropriate subject or subjects and type in your search. GoshMe looks at the results from different search engines – it claims to cover approximately 1,000 – and then displays what it thinks are the best tools in which to run the search. You can then choose the tools you want to use.

AlltheWeb, Search Engines

AlltheWeb Livesearch Beta

This is a great new search tool from AlltheWeb, now owned by Yahoo. As soon as you start typing your search terms, Livesearch suggests how you might like to complete your strategy. For example, I had only got to ‘peak o’ of one of my test searches – peak oil – and it was already suggesting peak oil news, peak oil production, peak oil myth etc. At the same time it starts displaying results in the main part of the screen. The suggested strategies and results change as you type in more letters.

The suggested searches are good but the way the results change so quickly as you add or modify terms means that you can immediately spot if you are going down the wrong track. Highly recommended.

Inforum

Inforum 2006 kicks off today

Forget about Paris in the springtime, Prague is the place to be, and the annual Inforum conference is the perfect excuse to combine business with pleasure. I first attended Inforum in 2005 when I was invited to give a preconference workshop and a conference presentation. I was so impressed with the quality of the papers and enthusiasm and friendliness of all involved that I decided to attend Inforum 2006 under my own steam. The conference takes place over three days – between Tuesday, May 23rd and Thursday, May 25th – which gives ample opportunity to add a few extra days to your stay to see the sites.

Inforum kicks off on the Monday with pre-conference workshops and I opted to attend one given by Adriana Cronin Lukas from the Big Blog Company: Blogs and blogging in the daily life of an information professional. It was a fascinating morning and I could not begin to do Adriana’s session justice by summarising it, but here are a few key phrases that I noted down:

Blogs are:

  • a sort of “online underworld” and make your work more effective and fun!
  • a key for news management and reputation management
  • a more natural way of communicating
  • flexible project management with information sharing

Think of blogs as:

  • an easy way to publish – you don’t have to be tech savvy
  • your own personal printing press instead of a collection of manuscripts (web sites)
  • ease of publishing combined with a powerful content management system
  • books – there are many genres
  • instruments of social change

The conference itself starts today, Tuesday 23rd, at University of Economics in Prague. Last year’s opening address was a show stopper; see the photo gallery for day 1 for some interesting photos of the “presentation”, in particular the jpegs inforum005 to inforum011! They will have to work hard to beat that.

The main programme this morning includes Alan Foster on Scientific Communication: evolution or paradigm shift, Lothar Nunnenmacher on the Creation of an Integrated Local View on Information Diversity, and What is our Future Standing on from Boris Skandera. The afternoon session is on new technologies and tools for electronic information.

The full programme is on the Inforum web site but if you cannot attend in person you can watch the live videobroadcast and online reporting at www.ikaros.cz and www.inforum.cz/inforum2006/english. For the videobroadcast you can choose between the original commentary of the speaker and its simultaneous translation. The official languages of the conference are Czech and English. The online reporting will be published in Czech only.

Yahoo

Yahoo! Babel Fish – Translation

Yahoo have integrated the Babel Fish translation tool into their service. Originally part of AltaVista, which Yahoo owns, Babel Fish looks very much the same in its new home. Additions include:

  • Two more language pair choices: Simplified Chinese into Traditional Chinese, and Traditional Chinese into Simplified Chinese;
  • Yahoo search results now include a translation link next to foreign language pages when a Babel Fish language pair is available
  • You can add the Babel Fish button to your Yahoo Toolbar for one-click translation of web pages

It has more language pairs than Google, but Google’s offering has Arabic to English translation.

If you have never tried any of these tools before, do not expect too much from them. Remember it is a computer program not a human being preparing the translation. The results are often more humorous than accurate, and sometimes the tools give up completely, but there is usually enough to give you a rough idea of some of the content of the page.

What is a Babel fish? It is a fictional species of fish that appears in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. You stick it in your ear and you can immediately understand anything that is said to you in any language.

Desktop Search, UKeiG

UKeiG – Desktop Tools

UKeiG (UK eInformation Group) is running a one day event on desktop search entitled “Desktop Tools – managing the flight deck”.

Date: 14th June 2006

Venue: Bloomsbury Suite, Brunei Gallery, School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG

Whether we like it or not, desktop search will be landing on our PCs in the very near future. It will play a central role in Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista, and will enable users to quickly locate files and search the content of documents stored on their computers. The other major players in the search market have already entered the fray with their own versions of desktop search, the serious contenders being Google, Yahoo, Ask, Copernic, Exalead, Blinkx and ISYS.

It is essential that we understand and are aware of what is happening in this area. It is no longer just about web search with an option to install and use desktop search for those of us who are geekishly inclined. The two will become inextricably entwined and we need to know who is doing what and understand the implications for both our users and ourselves.

The programme includes speakers from Copernic, Microsoft and ISYS, and I will be presenting the users point of view with a session on “Desktop search tools compared: the good, the bad and the ugly”.

The event costs £80 + VAT (total £94.00) for UKeiG members, and £100 + VAT (total £117.50) for non-members. Further information can be found on the UKeiG web site and on their blog.

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Accoona Talking Search Bar

Accoona have released a talking toolbar for Internet Explorer. As well searching the web and news sources via the Accoona web site, the toolbar converts any highlighted text on a web page into speech. The voice (Heather) is very life like and has so far coped very well with most things I have thrown at it, including acronyms such as CILIP, Aslib and UKeiG. I aimed it at the UKeiG management committee contact list and it did very well until it read our training coordinator Shaida Dorabjee’s details. The toolbar uses artificial intelligence, as does the search engine itself, to try and put words and abbreviations into context. In this case it decided that the SD of ‘SD Information Services’ stood for South Dakota! Whoops. It also had a few problems with the pronunciation of my address – Caversham, Berkshire – but then many humans get those wrong so I am not going to complain too much about that.

The “talking” part of the toolbar, which is an optional plug-in, was developed in collaboration with The China Daily Information Company (CDIC). CDIC says that it will help Chinese users, particularly students, advance their knowledge of spoken English through the Web but it obviously will help any foreign language students who are learning English and also people with a visual impairment.

The toolbar requires Microsoft Windows NT/ME/2000/XP and Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0+ . There have been complaints that it is classed as spyware by some privacy tools. I suspect that is because of the way it is capturing text on the screen for conversion to speech. I have a similar problem with my Pawsense program, which stops my cat messing up everything on my computer every time she sits on the keyboard. With Pawsense, it is the keystroke logging function that causes the mis-identification. Pawsense is certainly not a threat and I do not believe the Accoona toolbar is either.

With respect to installation, there have been reports of not being unable to un-install it. That was not a problem for me – in fact I had the opposite experience. The installation repeatedly told me I did not have admin rights, even though I was logged in as the administrator. I eventually solved it by unticking the option to have Accoona as my default search engine.

This is an interesting tool but not one that I am likely to use that often. Although I am a great fan of Accoona News, the toolbar is only available for Internet Explorer and I use Firefox. Nevertheless, I shall be watching this one to see how it develops.

News and comments on search tools and electronic resources for research