News Corp, Dallas Morning News, Denver Post Thinking of Pulling News from Google
An interesting thread of news, which began earlier this month with News Corp / Rupert Murdoch suggesting in an interview that they will pull their news from Google, continued today with stories that MediaNews Group Inc., publisher of the Denver Post and A.H. Belo, publisher of the Dallas Morning News, each are weighing the same option. Of course, they’re not pulling their content entirely from search engines – they’re thinking of inking a deal with Bing so that only Bing will have those stories. (Full story here from Bloomberg)
Certainly something to keep an eye on, especially for finding information and educating users about where to find information.
Interesting write-up on today’s Wall Street Journal about the growth problems at Wikipedia - specifically, the sharp decline in editors and governance, among other issues. Data showed that the latest monthly decrease in editors was -20,000 and raised questions about the ability to keep up Wikipedia.
On a slightly related note, Wikimedia Foundation recently released their plans to increase the editor count and better position Wikipedia through their Project Bookshelf. Appropriately, the details are embedded in a wiki entitled Project Bookshelf. Details on this site include the target messaging and target audiences (journalists and corporate communications are the notable target audiences).
Last week, Information Today published the notes from a forum hosted by the iSchool at Drexel entitled “Google, the Web, and the Future Roles of Publishers and Librarians“. Speakers and representatives included content providers, abstracting and indexing services, and librarians.
It’s worth a read, but for the time-strapped, here are some takeaways and snippets to think about:
Major disadvantages of Google Scholar:
- No metadata to allow filtering of search results
- Search algorithms can be artifically affected by Search Engine Optimization
- Information on what is actually being searched is not available
- Content retrieved on Google may be difficult to access.
On end-user information finding:
“By changing their value proposition, corporate and academic librarians are trying to attract users, but competing with Google is difficult. Anne Préstamo, associate dean of libraries for collection and technology services at Oklahoma State University, reported that few searches are done using econtent provider portals, and searches in discipline -specific databases have decreased. Librarians can counter this trend by registering their link resolvers with Google Scholar, so a direct link to the library appears in search results. This way, users can continue discovery through the federated search connection.” (have you registered your link resolver with Google Scholar?)
And from Roy Tennant:
“Libraries are in danger. People used to think of libraries when they thought of books. Now an entire generation goes directly to Google Books. Libraries started as a way to share scarce resources, but today, users expect information to be delivered to them. To survive, libraries need to connect to the community at the network level on a web scale to draw people to their local collections.”
By now, many of us have seen the impressive time-lapse charts created by the nonprofit folks over at Gapminder.org (if you haven’t, try this link).
What you may not know is that Google acquired the Gapminder technology in 2007 and released it as for all to use, now rebranded Motion Chart – available as a ‘gadget’ on your Google Docs account or, if you want to really take advantage of it through code, through the Google Visualization API.
Of course, most of us aren’t as fluent in code, but for those who are intrepid, a good baby step to using the more complex Visualization API is to start with the simpler sibling, Google Charts.
Thankfully Wired magazine recently put up a wiki on how to use Google Charts that’s a good first step for anyone with free time & the desire to learn!
In search engine news last week, Bing announced a collaboration with Wolfram Alpha where certain data from Wolfram – nutritional data and mathematics – will be available through Bing.
More features to come this week – see the posting for more details.
In related news, Google announced that it now has added World Bank data to its search results (such as population, children per woman in Brazil, etc.). This is in addition to US Census data and BLS data which was added in April.
Clinical research company Quintiles has launched Clinical Research at http://www.clinicalresearch.com, a Web site that is intended at helping lay people find clinical research.
As a resource in itself, while no documentation/sourcing is provided, it seems to be searching ClinicalTrials.gov alone (not even mRCT!), so it’s probably not something you’re going to be adding to your armamentarium, as there’s no new information here.
However, it’s worth knowing about, not only for if / when it comes up in discussions with end users, but also because it’s another data point of a larger, and more important trend to us as corporate medical librarians & information professionals.
And that is – more and more sources of information are being opened up on the “back end”, whether directly via APIs or through URL strings that are friendly to query modifications (and tools like Pipes). What this means is that it is becoming easier and easier for people to create their own website (with their own branding, logo, etc.) that will do a “custom search” tailored to client needs (for example, Quintiles combined the ClinicalTrials.gov data with Google Maps to have a hybrid results/mapping screen).
Not only is it easy (with a little bit of tech know-how), but it’s largely free.
This can be both an opportunity and a threat, depending on how we react to this technology.
Corporate Librarians - If it’s easy for third parties to do this, can an outside consulting firm / CRO / contractor create these and drive traffic & attention away from your services? Or are you doing this yourself? (Are you well versed enough to be able to do this on your own?)
Independent Information Professionals - This certainly opens up a lot of very low-cost business opportunities to set up custom services for your clients. Are you taking advantage?
*Plug for the PHT Spring Meeting: Taking advantage of technologies such as these will be a focus for the PHT Spring Meeting, April 10-12, 2010 in Philadelphia*
Michael Porter & David Lee King recently debuted the Library 101 website at Internet Librarian. Amidst this is a nice list of “Resources to Know” which is a good list of things for those who have finished or are looking for a companion to 23 things:
Among the many needs voiced in the PHT Membership Survey was needing to know from an educational perspective – topics like best practices, benchmarking, ROI, marketing and technologies. These ideas are being incorporated in multiple ways – news & updates on the blog, Annual and Spring meeting planning, as well as in setting up learning events during the year.
Starting with the November issue of CapLits, we will also highlight at least one article addressing librarianship that you might not be aware of – articles which can help either strategically or tactically. These are intended to be not only instructive, but conversational – articles will also be posted here on the PHT blog in order to act as a forum for asking questions and sharing thoughts!
All members are encouraged to submit articles for discussion – suggestions should go to the Professional Development Chair, Praveena Raman (Praveena.raman@elan.com).
For this month, here are the articles for discussion:
- Cost-Effectiveness and Cost-Benefit Determinations in Special Libraries – White, HS. Special Libraries 70 (April 1979): 163-69. http://www.sla.org/speciallibraries/ISSN00386723V70N4.PDF#page=23
- The Funding of Corporate Libraries: Old Myths and New Problems – White HS. Special Libraries 78:3 (Summer 1987): 155-61. http://www.sla.org/speciallibraries/ISSN00386723V78N3.PDF#page=29
This came across my desk today from a vendor. It is most directly relevant to those of us in the device world, but it also begs the question more broadly – are we seen internally in our companies as the experts in search?
If so, then at the very least #0-6 below should be recognized as “our domain” – otherwise we risk ceding the expertise to others and losing that credibility. Moreover, if we’re doing these items, not only are we reinforcing value and saving institutional money, but also building opportunities to show additional value in creating knowledge.
Dear Colleague,
March 2010 is rapidly approaching. Every medical device you sell in Europe will need a new or updated Clinical Evaluation Report on file with your Notified Body by that time.
These are not minor documents to write. Together with your writer you’ll need to do the following tasks:
[0] Identify purpose (hypothesis) of evaluation,
[1] Identify keywords,
[2] Identify data filters and cut-offs,
[3] Build Boolean search strings,
[4] Have access to and search Embase, Medline, Cochrane Library, and other databases,
[5] Identify articles to acquire,
[6] Acquire the full-text articles,
[7] Read and weight each article for relevance and data integrity,
[8] Exclude redundant or unusable articles,
[9] Analyze remaining articles,
[10] Write the report.
…
Our team of experts can train you, teach you the depth and breadth that is expected in these reports, or write the reports for you.
