Re: [CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused searching
Andrew P wrote: Also worth mentioning is a new site SiteCite.com that allows you to organize web links with custom URLs. It was created by a library programmer and has discovery tools so that bookmarks are easily retrievable. [...] I'm surprised that a library programmer has put the We need to make sure you are a human Google-reCaptcha insult on their sign up page. It's even on their contact form, so we can't even tell them about it. (If you don't see the messages which suggest disabled users are not humans, try disabling javascript - javascript is usually disabled by default with noscript.net because it's confusing when things you don't see perfectly start moving themselves around the page.) I strongly suggest people don't promote siteCite.com until they drop reCaptcha. The re should stand for remove. Thanks, -- MJ Ray (slef) LMS developer and webmaster at | software www.software.coop http://mjr.towers.org.uk| co IMO only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html | op
Re: [CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused searching
Keith, 41,000 sites and 21 million pages (http://www.ablegrape.com/en/about.html) is a lot of vetting. An admittedly quick check of the site didn't explain the vetting process to me, but did profess a ...background in search technology... Authoratative vetting of a large volume of resources is a hard problem. I haven't seen any good solutions, but am leaning toward crowd-sourcing with an authoratative crowd. :-) Do you have any additional information on how AbleGrape vets these? Tim Cornwell National Science Digital Library (http://nsdl.org) -Original Message- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Keith Jenkins Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2009 5:35 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused searching AbleGrape.com is a good example of a focused search engine that aims to index only authoritative sources within a particular disciple -- in this case it's wine, enology, and viticulture. It currently crawls about 40,000 vetted websites. It's a great search engine for the subject area it serves, and it probably helped that the creator was a VP at Inktomi. Keith On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 10:53 AM, Cindy Harper char...@colgate.edu wrote: So that led me to speculate about a search engine that ranked just by links from .edu's, libraries sites, and a librarian-vetted list of .orgs, scholarly publishers, etc. I think you can limit by .edu in the linked-from in Google - I haven't tried that much. if anyone here has experience at using tha technique, I'd like to hear about it. But I'm thinking now about the possibility of a search engine limited to sites cooperatively vetted by librarians, that would incorporate ranking by # links. Something more responsive than cataloging websites in our catalogs. Is anyone else thinking about these ideas? or do you know of projects that approach this goal of leveraging librarian's vetting of authoritative sources?
Re: [CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused searching
On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 7:56 AM, Tim Cornwell tc...@cornell.edu wrote: 41,000 sites and 21 million pages (http://www.ablegrape.com/en/about.html) is a lot of vetting. ... Authoratative vetting of a large volume of resources is a hard problem. I haven't seen any good solutions, but am leaning toward crowd-sourcing with an authoratative crowd. :-) Do you have any additional information on how AbleGrape vets these? I can only guess, but I would think it's probably a combination of automatic and manual vetting: crawl the links from known good sites, filter out bad sites, filter out off-topic sites, manually add newly-discovered sites not already in the index, manually remove inappropriate sites that somehow made it into the index, adjust the algorithms, try to build a user community and solicit feedback. (I once reported inappropriate results coming from a wine producer's website that had been taken over by vandals, and AbleGrape removed it from the index almost immediately.) Keith
[CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused searching
I've been thinking about the role of libraries as promoter of authoritative works - helping to select and sort the plethora of information out there. And I heard another presentation about social media this morning. So I though I'd bring up for discussion here some of the ideas I've been mulling over. Last week I sent this message to the Suggestions and Ideas forum at delicious. http://support.delicious.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=3237page=1#Item_0 The basic idea is to develop a delicious network of librarians. Or a network of faculty members. Then have one login whose network included those users, and share that login so that lots of people could share that network. Delicious responded that we could have a wiki where people posted their delicious names so that others could add them to their personal networks, but that doesn't scale up very well. Or another project I've toyed with, involving focused searching: I started with Robert Teeter's index to Great Books lists. http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtalphaa.htmlhttp://www.interleaves.org/%7Erteeter/grtalphaa.html. I've almost completed pulling them into a MySQL database so that I could sort the titles by the number of Great Books lists that mention each title. Then I thought about how one could do focused searching of the web, collecting pages with a title containing (best and books) or (great and books), and screen scraping title lists (you'd have to have some heuristic method of identifying the data, of course, and I'm aware what problems might arise there). But my test searches in that idea showed that one runs into a lot of commercial ephemeral lists and spurious lists. Now, you could rely on crowd-sourcing to filter out the consensus by ranking by the number of sites/cites. But I thought you might want to differentiate between the source - .edus, librarys, etc. So that led me to speculate about a search engine that ranked just by links from .edu's, libraries sites, and a librarian-vetted list of .orgs, scholarly publishers, etc. I think you can limit by .edu in the linked-from in Google - I haven't tried that much. if anyone here has experience at using tha technique, I'd like to hear about it. But I'm thinking now about the possibility of a search engine limited to sites cooperatively vetted by librarians, that would incorporate ranking by # links. Something more responsive than cataloging websites in our catalogs. Is anyone else thinking about these ideas? or do you know of projects that approach this goal of leveraging librarian's vetting of authoritative sources? Cindy Harper, Systems Librarian Colgate University Libraries char...@colgate.edu 315-228-7363
Re: [CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused searching
www.diigo.com is a social bookmarking site like delicious and it has added features like creating groups around specific themes and the ability to annotate the Web pages you bookmark for future reference. You might want to explore this feature and see if it is appropriate for what you envision. Kent Kent Gerber, MSLIS Digital Library Manager Bethel University St. Paul, MN phone: 651.638.6937 email: kent-ger...@bethel.edu -Original Message- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Cindy Harper Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2009 9:54 AM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: [CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused searching I've been thinking about the role of libraries as promoter of authoritative works - helping to select and sort the plethora of information out there. And I heard another presentation about social media this morning. So I though I'd bring up for discussion here some of the ideas I've been mulling over. Last week I sent this message to the Suggestions and Ideas forum at delicious. http://support.delicious.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=3237page=1#Item_0 The basic idea is to develop a delicious network of librarians. Or a network of faculty members. Then have one login whose network included those users, and share that login so that lots of people could share that network. Delicious responded that we could have a wiki where people posted their delicious names so that others could add them to their personal networks, but that doesn't scale up very well. Or another project I've toyed with, involving focused searching: I started with Robert Teeter's index to Great Books lists. http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtalphaa.htmlhttp://www.interleaves.org/%7Erteeter/grtalphaa.html. I've almost completed pulling them into a MySQL database so that I could sort the titles by the number of Great Books lists that mention each title. Then I thought about how one could do focused searching of the web, collecting pages with a title containing (best and books) or (great and books), and screen scraping title lists (you'd have to have some heuristic method of identifying the data, of course, and I'm aware what problems might arise there). But my test searches in that idea showed that one runs into a lot of commercial ephemeral lists and spurious lists. Now, you could rely on crowd-sourcing to filter out the consensus by ranking by the number of sites/cites. But I thought you might want to differentiate between the source - .edus, librarys, etc. So that led me to speculate about a search engine that ranked just by links from .edu's, libraries sites, and a librarian-vetted list of .orgs, scholarly publishers, etc. I think you can limit by .edu in the linked-from in Google - I haven't tried that much. if anyone here has experience at using tha technique, I'd like to hear about it. But I'm thinking now about the possibility of a search engine limited to sites cooperatively vetted by librarians, that would incorporate ranking by # links. Something more responsive than cataloging websites in our catalogs. Is anyone else thinking about these ideas? or do you know of projects that approach this goal of leveraging librarian's vetting of authoritative sources? Cindy Harper, Systems Librarian Colgate University Libraries char...@colgate.edu 315-228-7363
Re: [CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused searching
It's not social bookmarking, but as far as But I'm thinking now about the possibility of a search engine limited to sites cooperatively vetted by librarians, that would incorporate ranking by # links. Something more responsive than cataloging websites in our catalogs., well, that's almost exactly what lii.org is. http://lii.org I happen to think that authority is dead dead dead as a method of measuring information worth, but that's just me. :-) Jason On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 10:53 AM, Cindy Harper char...@colgate.edu wrote: I've been thinking about the role of libraries as promoter of authoritative works - helping to select and sort the plethora of information out there. And I heard another presentation about social media this morning. So I though I'd bring up for discussion here some of the ideas I've been mulling over. Last week I sent this message to the Suggestions and Ideas forum at delicious. http://support.delicious.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=3237page=1#Item_0 The basic idea is to develop a delicious network of librarians. Or a network of faculty members. Then have one login whose network included those users, and share that login so that lots of people could share that network. Delicious responded that we could have a wiki where people posted their delicious names so that others could add them to their personal networks, but that doesn't scale up very well. Or another project I've toyed with, involving focused searching: I started with Robert Teeter's index to Great Books lists. http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtalphaa.htmlhttp://www.interleaves.org/%7Erteeter/grtalphaa.html http://www.interleaves.org/%7Erteeter/grtalphaa.html. I've almost completed pulling them into a MySQL database so that I could sort the titles by the number of Great Books lists that mention each title. Then I thought about how one could do focused searching of the web, collecting pages with a title containing (best and books) or (great and books), and screen scraping title lists (you'd have to have some heuristic method of identifying the data, of course, and I'm aware what problems might arise there). But my test searches in that idea showed that one runs into a lot of commercial ephemeral lists and spurious lists. Now, you could rely on crowd-sourcing to filter out the consensus by ranking by the number of sites/cites. But I thought you might want to differentiate between the source - .edus, librarys, etc. So that led me to speculate about a search engine that ranked just by links from .edu's, libraries sites, and a librarian-vetted list of .orgs, scholarly publishers, etc. I think you can limit by .edu in the linked-from in Google - I haven't tried that much. if anyone here has experience at using tha technique, I'd like to hear about it. But I'm thinking now about the possibility of a search engine limited to sites cooperatively vetted by librarians, that would incorporate ranking by # links. Something more responsive than cataloging websites in our catalogs. Is anyone else thinking about these ideas? or do you know of projects that approach this goal of leveraging librarian's vetting of authoritative sources? Cindy Harper, Systems Librarian Colgate University Libraries char...@colgate.edu 315-228-7363 -- Follow me on Twitter! http://www.twitter.com/griffey
Re: [CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused searching
Cindy Harper wrote: I've been thinking about the role of libraries as promoter of authoritative works - helping to select and sort the plethora of information out there. And I heard another presentation about social media this morning. So I though I'd bring up for discussion here some of the ideas I've been mulling over. [...] Is anyone else thinking about these ideas? or do you know of projects that approach this goal of leveraging librarian's vetting of authoritative sources? The big problem with social media sites is that they tend towards privatising our data. Any solution needs to be both FOSS and Open Data to overcome that. Some of the veterans here will probably remember the ODP (dmoz.org) and VLib.org catalogues. Can we build on them instead of inventing another wheel? Thanks, -- MJ Ray (slef) LMS developer and webmaster at | software www.software.coop http://mjr.towers.org.uk| co IMO only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html | op
Re: [CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused searching
On Tue, 29 Sep 2009, Cindy Harper wrote: I've been thinking about the role of libraries as promoter of authoritative works - helping to select and sort the plethora of information out there. And I heard another presentation about social media this morning. So I though I'd bring up for discussion here some of the ideas I've been mulling over. [trimmed] Is anyone else thinking about these ideas? or do you know of projects that approach this goal of leveraging librarian's vetting of authoritative sources? I don't know of any projects that specifically do what you've mentioned, but for the last few years, we've been mulling over how to store various lists and catalogs so that we could present interesting intersections of them. In my case, I deal with scientific catalogs, so it's stuff like when was RHESSI observing the same area as TRACE? or When was there an X-class flare within 2 hours of a CME? or even lack of intersections When were there type-II radio bursts without a CME or flare within 6 hours? For the science catalogs, we specifically don't want to just make some sort of single ranking from each list, and it's not really easy to merge the catalogs into some form of union catalog as they're cataloging different concepts. ... and I think that there's use in library searches to keep the catalogs different, particularly when you're bringing up authority (which then gets to reputation, etc.). I'm not sure how many other people out there would try to search for Hugo award winning novels that weren't on the New York Times best seller list, so it might not be as useful for general patron use ... unless you could give it your *own* catalog (AFI top 100 movies ... that I don't already own) - Joe Hourcle Solar Data Analysis Center Goddard Space Flight Center
Re: [CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused searching
I feel like a couple years ago a librarian(s?) created a Google Custom Search Engine that did exactly what you describe as focused searching, but I can't find a link any more. You can search the CSEs by scrolling down on this page (and there are a couple of links to directories, too): http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/find/types/websites.html Also, Mike Eisenberg over at the University of Washington was working on that kind of problem with some other groups...A quick search reveals that it's now called Reference Extract and it's being done in conjunction with Syracuse University (and OCLC is somehow involved). http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Librarians-Want-to-Out-Google/4365 ~Amy From: Cindy Harper [char...@colgate.edu] Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2009 10:53 AM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: [CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused searching I've been thinking about the role of libraries as promoter of authoritative works - helping to select and sort the plethora of information out there. And I heard another presentation about social media this morning. So I though I'd bring up for discussion here some of the ideas I've been mulling over. Last week I sent this message to the Suggestions and Ideas forum at delicious. http://support.delicious.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=3237page=1#Item_0 The basic idea is to develop a delicious network of librarians. Or a network of faculty members. Then have one login whose network included those users, and share that login so that lots of people could share that network. Delicious responded that we could have a wiki where people posted their delicious names so that others could add them to their personal networks, but that doesn't scale up very well. Or another project I've toyed with, involving focused searching: I started with Robert Teeter's index to Great Books lists. http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtalphaa.htmlhttp://www.interleaves.org/%7Erteeter/grtalphaa.html. I've almost completed pulling them into a MySQL database so that I could sort the titles by the number of Great Books lists that mention each title. Then I thought about how one could do focused searching of the web, collecting pages with a title containing (best and books) or (great and books), and screen scraping title lists (you'd have to have some heuristic method of identifying the data, of course, and I'm aware what problems might arise there). But my test searches in that idea showed that one runs into a lot of commercial ephemeral lists and spurious lists. Now, you could rely on crowd-sourcing to filter out the consensus by ranking by the number of sites/cites. But I thought you might want to differentiate between the source - .edus, librarys, etc. So that led me to speculate about a search engine that ranked just by links from .edu's, libraries sites, and a librarian-vetted list of .orgs, scholarly publishers, etc. I think you can limit by .edu in the linked-from in Google - I haven't tried that much. if anyone here has experience at using tha technique, I'd like to hear about it. But I'm thinking now about the possibility of a search engine limited to sites cooperatively vetted by librarians, that would incorporate ranking by # links. Something more responsive than cataloging websites in our catalogs. Is anyone else thinking about these ideas? or do you know of projects that approach this goal of leveraging librarian's vetting of authoritative sources? Cindy Harper, Systems Librarian Colgate University Libraries char...@colgate.edu 315-228-7363
Re: [CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused searching
AbleGrape.com is a good example of a focused search engine that aims to index only authoritative sources within a particular disciple -- in this case it's wine, enology, and viticulture. It currently crawls about 40,000 vetted websites. It's a great search engine for the subject area it serves, and it probably helped that the creator was a VP at Inktomi. Keith On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 10:53 AM, Cindy Harper char...@colgate.edu wrote: So that led me to speculate about a search engine that ranked just by links from .edu's, libraries sites, and a librarian-vetted list of .orgs, scholarly publishers, etc. I think you can limit by .edu in the linked-from in Google - I haven't tried that much. if anyone here has experience at using tha technique, I'd like to hear about it. But I'm thinking now about the possibility of a search engine limited to sites cooperatively vetted by librarians, that would incorporate ranking by # links. Something more responsive than cataloging websites in our catalogs. Is anyone else thinking about these ideas? or do you know of projects that approach this goal of leveraging librarian's vetting of authoritative sources?
