From the SLA Press Release:

SLA Name Will Stay: Alignment of Association to Continue

Alexandria, Virginia, December 10, 2009- The Special Libraries Association (SLA) announced the results of its association-wide vote on a new name today. Voting in record numbers, SLA members failed to approve a proposal to change the organization’s name to the Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals. 50 percent of those members eligible to vote participated in the referendum, with 2071 voting yes and 3225 voting no.

(more on the link above)

For those who missed it, NLM released the MEDLINE data changes for 2010, including new MeSH headings and changes to MEDLINE and OLDMEDLINE data.

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/nd09/nd09_medline_data_changes_2010.html

For those who didn’t catch it yesterday, the next 2 steps in the current Google-News Corp (and other publishers) saga:

The first is that the Google “First Click Free” program is now more like “First Click Free… up to 5″ – the way it used to work is that Google would crawl the content of the news item, then let you click through to the actual news item, obviating the need for a subscription unless you wanted to click anywhere else on the site.  “The new change will limit you to five pages per day before you must register, regardless of how you get to the website.”

The second change is to how Google indexes pages.  From Mashable:  “Publishers now have the option to tell Google’s spiders to only crawl and index the “preview pages.” This refers to pages that display the first few paragraphs of an article on subscription sites like WSJ.com in order to entice them to pay for a subscription. If a publisher chooses to have spiders crawl their articles in this manner, they will be labeled with ’subscription’ within Google News.”

Full story here.

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:

http://www.libraryman.com/blog/101rtk/