Re: [CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused searching

[MJ Ray]

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

[Karen Coyle]

Quoting Jason Griffey :



I happen to think that authority is dead dead dead as a method of measuring
information worth, but that's just me. :-)



I think it depends on what you mean by "authority." The formal  
authority of librarians seems to have few followers. Academics follow  
authority in terms of citations -- who (in their defined circle) has  
cited whom. Lots of people view the NY Times best seller list as a  
viable authority for a "good read.". Most of us have one or more  
friends whose film recommendations tell us pretty clearly whether or  
not to see the film.


The problem isn't authority, per se, but who is making the statement  
and what you know about them. Like standards. with authorities there  
are so many to choose from. The difficulty is selecting the authority  
that will give you the results you desire.


I suspect that many people use the term 'authority' to mean something  
like 'proven' or 'correct' or 'of scientific basis.' Yet each of these  
makes sense only in a particular context for a particular set of  
questions. I fear that the set of questions that libraries respond to  
with authority are ones that are of interest only to a small minority  
of world inhabitants.


--
Karen Coyle
kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

Re: [CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused searching

[Andrew P]

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 know this might 
not pertain to the current
topic of this thread, but after reading the initial inquiry I thought I'd
mention this as it's the new alternative to del.icio.us.



 

Cheers,

Andrew  MLIS

> Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:16:18 -0400
> From: k...@cornell.edu
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused 
> searching
> To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> 
> On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 7:56 AM, Tim Cornwell  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
  
_
Attention all humans. We are your photos. Free us.
http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9666046

Re: [CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused searching

[Keith Jenkins]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 7:56 AM, Tim Cornwell  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

Re: [CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused searching

[Tim Cornwell]

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 
>  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

[Keith Jenkins]

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  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

[Donahue, Amy (NIH/NLM) [C]]

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=3237&page=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.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

Re: [CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused searching

[Joe Hourcle]

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

[MJ Ray]

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

[Jason Griffey]

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  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=3237&page=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.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

[Kent Gerber]

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=3237&page=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.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

[CODE4LIB] Bookmarking web links - authoritativeness or focused searching

[Cindy Harper]

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=3237&page=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.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