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Update on Google Video
Just a quick update.
Tuesday I wrote about Google's new television transcript search. I said it seemed to only search news programs. But checking back in on it, I see it searches things like sitcoms, too. A quick search for Phoebe and Rachel finds a ton of hits from Friends. A search for Jay Leno finds hits from The Tonight Show. I'm not really sure what you do with the stuff once you find it, since there's often no video and the transcripts are incomplete. Maybe it's helpful if you want grainy screenshots of Nicole Kidman looking uncomfortable.
posted by Steve in the Library on Monday, January 31, 2005
Atom Feeds and RSS
Some people might be interested to know this blog now has an Atom feed.
The link is on the left side of this page, under the Search the Site link. It's also here. What can you do with an Atom feed? Blogger has a nice explanation here. Feeds allow you to have content sent to your computer. To read the content, you usually use a newsreader. Newsreaders tell you when content is updated on a site. So instead of visiting your favorite sites every day, your favorite sites visit you. Some people find having all of their daily online reading in one place very convenient. If you're one of them, we hope this new feed makes your life a little easier. And if you'd like to visit the world of syndicated feeds, consider starting an account with Bloglines. It's free and doesn't require any downloads.
posted by Steve in the Library on Friday, January 28, 2005
Yellow Pages with Pictures
This is very cool.
Amazon's Internet search site, A9.com, has added a new feature: A Yellow Page search with actual pictures of the businesses. Long Island City doesn't seem very well represented yet. A search for coffee finds lots of places but few pictures. I love this because people can usually recognize a business by the way it looks without necessarily knowing its name. Now you can find that restaurant you can walk to but not pick out of a phone book list. And if you're going someplace you've never visited before, now you at least know what you're looking for. I can't wait for Amazon to start getting more pictures into their database (yes — this is a database, just like EBSCOhost. Instead of articles, this database has pictures). How did Amazon do this? The full story is here. Basically, they just drove around cities with digital cameras, a global positioning system, and software that linked the pictures to addresses. It's pretty amazing.
posted by Steve in the Library on Thursday, January 27, 2005
MapQuest for Commuters
Whenever I take the train or bus anywhere, I always feel like there's a better route I could be taking. It's something I had learned to live with. But now I don't have to, thanks to Trips123.com.
Trips123.com is a map site that gives you directions for public transportation. They claim to also know what's going on with schedule changes and track construction. But even if it's not 100% accurate (they seem to still have the C train running), it's a good starting place. Especially if you're not familiar with the buses in an area. I'll never doubt my commuting skills again.
posted by Steve in the Library on Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Finding News Transcripts
Google continues to move everywhere. Now you can search recent television transcripts with it.
If you'd like to play with it yourself, you can check it out at video.google.com. So far it seems to work OK. It's not searching a ton of television shows. It seems to only search news programs. And it doesn't find you the actual video; it only finds the transcript. Of course, like any transcript search, it's sometimes tough to find things because transcripts are riddled with misspellings. Do a search for the word traing, which doesn't exist, and you find over 600 mentions of the word. I guess training just takes too long to write. Google Video isn't a horrible tool, but it sure isn't as powerful as LexisNexis' transcript search. LexisNexis covers more sources and seems to clean up the spelling. LexisNexis probably goes back further than the Google search, too. You can find transcripts in LexisNexis by doing a Guided Search and searching News Transcripts under the first news category pulldown.
posted by Steve in the Library on Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Be Skeptical
The New York Post's always reliable gossip page has an item about Jason Leopold.
Who is Jason Leopold? A quick LexisNexis search reveals that in October 2002 he wrote an article for Salon.com that allegedly invented a damaging email. Salon later pulled the article from their Web site. According to the Post, Leopold is now writing a book about his life. I assume it will also mention that incident. So why do I bring up the fact that yet another self-indulgent biography is about to hit the bookshelves? Just as a reminder to always be skeptical about anything you read. Reporters are only human. While most strive to be fair and truthful, many, for all kinds of reasons, lie and manipulate facts. So whenever you're reading just about anything, keep that little tidbit in the back of your head. Skepticism is a good thing.
posted by Steve in the Library on Friday, January 21, 2005
Make a Copy
Yesterday, I wrote about using Google's mail service (Gmail) to organize your research. The article I linked to mentioned Gmail because of its vast space and its organizational capabilities.
Now Microsoft is getting in on the act, selling subscriptions to Microsoft Outlook (the software) to go with Hotmail. The goal seems to be to make Hotmail a bit more like Gmail, without actually changing Hotmail. The only reason I'm bringing it up, though, is to mention something I should have mentioned yesterday: you should always back up important information. That includes emails. The Hotmail/Outlook subscription would let you download your Hotmail messages to the desktop of a computer but you can also download Gmail messages into a free e-mail client like Thunderbird. Here is how. Once you have your messages on a desktop, you can back them up to a disk or CD or flash drive, so all of your vital research notes are safe in a few places. Web-based e-mail like Hotmail and Gmail are very convenient, but since you're not paying for them, there's no real accountability. If their servers crash and you lose everything, they'll just apologize, but you'll probably never see your email messages again. Preserving documents is a key part of librarianship, but it should be a part of your everyday routine, too. Backup everything you can. Don't trust any format. If you have it electronically on your computer, save it someplace else, too. And if all else fails, put it on good old fashioned paper. Computers make things easier, but only if you take the right precautions.
posted by Steve in the Library on Thursday, January 20, 2005
Let E-Mail Organize Your Mind
The thing about online research is that there's no paper trail. You find something great and assume you'll be able to find it again, or you find something great, e-mail it to yourself (most of LaGuardia's databases allow you to do that quite easily) and then promptly forget about it.
A big part of research now is just remembering where you put everything. Some people print copies of everything, so they have the physical item to remind them of an idea. That's not a bad idea. Especially since most professors want hard copies of everything in your source folder. But if you're trying to save trees, the Digital Ocean newsletter has an interesting idea on using a free Google e-mail account to organize your brain. This is a link to the article. The idea mostly involves using a Gmail account, which can hold a ton of information, to organize your projects into folders. For instance, your English 101 paper might have an English 101 folder with copies of all of your materials and ideas (these databases would probably have a lot of great articles, by the way). The big trick is remembering to check in on your ideas to make sure you're not forgetting anything too important. It's an interesting idea, though. And it makes great use of Gmail's powerful search feature. It also keeps your regular e-mail account a little bit more free of clutter.
posted by Steve in the Library on Wednesday, January 19, 2005
ETS Gets Into the Information Literacy Game
Uh oh. It looks like another standardized test is coming down the pike.
The New York Times reports the Educational Testing Service is working on a standardized test for information literacy. The test seems to be a response to the theory that students have access to lots of information, but aren't sure how to evaluate it. A test is a great idea, or at least a great start to the challenge of measuring information literacy. I'm curious what ETS will come up with. The test has to measure broad concepts, like using ANDs and ORs in a search, but it also has to make sure students can find specific items using those broader concepts. I'm not sure how a national test could accurately measure all of that. Especially if no one at ETS is seeing how the students use the information they find. It seems that until you see what a student does with her research, you can't really tell if the searching, finding, and evaluating were strong.
posted by Steve in the Library on Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Visual Google?
This is pretty amazing.
Computer researchers in California are working on image recogniztion software optimized for cell phones. That means that, if they're successful, you'll be able to snap a picture of something with your cell phone, submit it to a database, and then find out what it is. It sounds impossible, right? According to Hartmut Neven, who's working on the project, the secret is to start small. He's thinking about movies since there are a finite number of billboards around at any given time. He predicts his team can create a database that will allow you to snap a picture of a movie billboard and send information about the movie back to your phone. So how does this affect us here at LaGuardia and here in the library? It's hard to say. This story is just a reminder that people are always working on amazing things that are going to impact how we do other things.
posted by Steve in the Library on Friday, January 14, 2005
Chess Databases
If you've come to the Library for Bibliographic Instruction, or a BI, as we like to call them here, then you've heard us talk about databases. Usually, when we say database in the Library, we're talking about something like the CUNY+ catalog or one of our many electronic databases that can give you full-text access to everything from newspaper articles to journal articles to entire books.
But there are lots of other kinds of databases, too. Today's Times talks about chess databases. Where CUNY+ gives organized access to our book collection, these chess databases give organized access to chess moves and previously played chess matches. There's some debate within the chess community over if these databases make people into better chess players. I imagine, like any information source, these databases help when people synthesize them with their own ideas. Imagine writing a paper that only quoted articles, but didn't have any of your own thoughts. It would be horrible. But a paper that cited other works while getting your own points across? That's an A paper. Now someone tell the chess people.
posted by Steve in the Library on Thursday, January 13, 2005
Yawn. Another Search Engine
BusinessWeek has another story about another search engine. This one is called Clusty.
Are we almost out of silly, pointless names for search engines yet? Clusty's thing is that it organizes your results into categories. Like I did a search for "Jennifer Aniston" and Clusty broke it down like this: Jennifer Aniston pictures (26) Brad Pitt (22) Screensavers (12) Green, Rachel (11) Awards, Filmography (9) Collection (8) Nude (9) Friends" star (8) Girl (6) Aniston Online (5) The numbers represent the number of pages it found within the category. But my question is, why wouldn't you just add the category to the search yourself? If I want information on Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt, that's what I'll search on. Why do I need a search engine to do that for me? I think that's why people always turn back to Google. It's simple and it doesn't presume to know what we're looking for. It assumes a search for Jennifer Aniston is looking for pages about Jennifer Aniston. The one interesting thing is that Clusty lets you search "gossip" for pages, too. It looks like it's mostly searching entertainment news sites and gossip mainstays like the Star and the Enquirer. It's an interesting idea, though, breaking news down a little bit more specifically. It's something you usually only see in subscription databases, like LexisNexis.
posted by Steve in the Library on Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Times Online Going Pay-To-Read?
Uh oh. It looks like the New York Times is looking into if they should charge for online access to their articles.
They probably should. I hardly ever buy the Times anymore. Their Web site is so easy to use, I almost prefer it to the paper itself, which is about twice as tall as I am. But don't worry. LaGuardia faculty, students, and staff will still have online access to the Times without paying as they go. How? LexisNexis, the newspaper database. By doing a Guided News Search of Today's News and specifying the New York Times in the Search this publication title(s) field, I was able to bring up today's paper. Since I'm only interested in the sports section, I did a full text search on Sports Desk, which is what the Times calls their sports pages, and was able to bring up the whole section. And unlike the Times Web site, there aren't any annoying banner ads to deal with in LexisNexis. So don't worry about the Times going to a fee-based model. The Library's LexisNexis subscription has you covered.
posted by Steve in the Library on Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Canada Wants To Create a Digital National Library
Google's decision to digitize all of those books and make them freely available on the Internet seems to have had an interesting influence on other libraries.
Everyone wants in (login info.). The Toronto Star has a column calling for Canada to create an online national library. The national library would include books, government documents, and legal decisions published in Canada. In fact, it would include very one of those things ever published in Canada (within copyright). And it would all be available for free. Ideas like this are always great, but scanning the materials in is just the tip of the iceberg. When you're making documents available online, you have to make them accessible. That means making them searchable. It means spending money to have someone organize the materials by subject, just like they are in the CUNY+ catalog. It's great to talk about making materials available, but it's not enough to just throw everything you have online. There has to be a way for people to find what they need — and easily — or else you're just wasting bandwidth. Information is only helpful if you can find it when you need it.
posted by Steve in the Library on Monday, January 10, 2005
Newsmakers Bypassing Newspapers
I'm not into cars but I noticed something interesting this morning.
The Vice Chairman of GM has a blog. You can see it at http://fastlane.gmblogs.com. What's interesting is how he starts the blog:
It's interesting to see someone who's been the subject of tons of interviews striving to get his voice heard. Blogs allow executives to express their ideas directly to the public, without the need for a news organization. It's a good thing, because it reduces the risk of misquotes and selective quotes. But it can also be bad in that you don't have dissenting voices balancing what's being said. Another executive who loves talking via blog is Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks. His blog is Blog Maverick and he uses it to talk directly to basketball fans. If this trend continues, news databases, like LexisNexis are going to have to figure out a way to capture the conversations outside of the newspaper and magazine stories. It'll be a tough job.
posted by Steve in the Library on Friday, January 07, 2005
Site changes
A few site changes:
1. The online databases page is now annotated. The annotations appear in a pop-up window (which pop-up blockers shouldn't stop, since the user is requesting the new window). This way, the page looks clean, but patrons have access to more information if they want it. See it here. 2. The online database page also features a new breakdown of the full-text resources. The alphabetical page is now broken down by letter. See it here. 3. We updated a bunch of the site pages so that they all have a consistent look and feel. This meant matching fonts and page layouts. We also put in a top navigation that shows users where in our site they are. It's an ongoing process but the site is already starting to look more unified. This page is a good example. 4. Some people mentioned that the orientation of our map was confusing so we flipped the map. The map is here. Send comments, questions, and suggestions to sovadia@lagcc.cuny.edu.
posted by Steve in the Library on Thursday, January 06, 2005
Calendar Research
Today's Circuits section of the New York Times has an interesting piece on calendars.
It's interesting because the article, appearing in the technology section of the paper, comes down in favor of paper calendars. With the semester starting and those big assignments already presenting themselves, you calendar really becomes your best friend. A calendar does more than allow you to keep track of when assignments are due. A calendar allows you to set the pace of your assignment, completing certain aspects in a time frame you're comfortable with. Calendars are great for research assignments because they keep you honest. They remind you of when you thought you'd have something done. So check out the Times article if you're looking for a nice paper-based calendar. And if you're looking for an electronic calendar, consider a free Yahoo! calendar. Or better yet, get a paper one and an electronic one and see which one you're more comfortable with.
posted by Steve in the Library on Thursday, January 06, 2005
Best Reference
Search Engine Watch, the very cool site that tracks changes in the world of search engines, lists what they consider to be the best online reference sites.
Not to be outdone, the American Library Association also has a list, which you can see here. Both lists have some overlap, and there are some good calls and some bad calls, like any "best of" list. It's just hard to know what to do with these links. I try to file them away, but I never remember to look at the list when I'm looking for something online. That's why I really appreciate the Librarians' Index to the Internet. They track and organize quality sites like the ones on the list so I don't have to. Still, it's always nice to see what sites people like. And now I know that if I want plant information, I should check out the USDA's Plant Database. Now I just need to buy some plants.
posted by Steve in the Library on Wednesday, January 05, 2005
New York City Map Portal
New York City has a really nice map portal. It's here: http://gis.nyc.gov/doitt/mp/Portal.do.
You type in an address and the site generates a little map of the area. But you can add in details you'd like to see on the map, like post offices, police stations, schools, and libraries. Plus, the map also links to other City sites, so you can find out more detailed things like school information, the sanitation schedule, and zoning information. It's really convenient and the interface is very simple. Plug in your own address and you're bound to learn something about your neighborhood.
posted by Steve in the Library on Tuesday, January 04, 2005
The Year in Blogs
Welcome back!
Some news while everyone was away, hopefully resting... PC Magazine named the creators of blogging software as their People of the Year. What's interesting is that the programmers they named (the people from Blogger.com and Movable Type) created free software. They could have sold their products (and both companies have or once did at some point) but they decided to give away their software, both to get people hooked on blogging and to create a way to better contribute to the conversations around the Internet. It's very cool that they're being acknowledged for not being corporate sharks.
posted by Steve in the Library on Monday, January 03, 2005
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