If any of you from my Research In the Digital Age Class this summer are still interested, On the Media had a whole hour on Google this week. Don’t b evil!
The New York Times has a story on annotation and Association copies this morning. I love the following quote:
“People will always find a way to annotate electronically,” said G. Thomas Tanselle, a former vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University. “But there is the question of how it is going to be preserved. And that is a problem now facing collections libraries.”
Indeed!
If you have visited any databases in the ProQuest family (which now includes Chadwyck-Healy and CSA) since the last week of December, you may have noticed some major changes to the look and capabilities. ProQuest has updated the structure of their databases to allow more searching among packages, filtering of results, and other customizable enhancements. Notable databases which are affected include:
American Periodicals Series (PQ)
ARTBibliographies Modern (CSA)
British Humanities Index (CSA)
British Periodicals (PQ)
International Index to the Performing Arts (PQ)
International Index to Music Periodicals (PQ)
MLA International Bibliography (CSA). Periodicals Archive Online (PQ), and RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (CSA) will follow to the new platform later in the year. You can visit ProQuest central (http://libezproxy.syr.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/pqcentral?accountid=14214 ) to view the complete list of resources available on the new platform. In my opinion, there are several improvements to the usability and responsiveness of the platform, and I welcome your feedback. We are submitting comments to the vendors, so please contact me if you have any suggestions. Also let me know if you’d like a personal overview of the changes. More information can be found here: http://library.syr.edu/blog/news/archives/001741.php
The latest NYT article on digital humanities was published over the weekend. (Here’s the first.) I like how the graphic for the frequency of “Christian” looks like a skyline filled with churches.
The full project is available online at victorianbooks.org, where the researchers have kindly made their data available open access.
Via the Vintage Ad Browser (which is like a free version of Ad*flip)
Videos of the MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium are now available online.
You may have noticed a recent change in the interface to the MLA International Bibliography. Our previous vendor, FirstSearch, has discontinued their offering of the database, and we now purchase access through CSA. Links in the catalog and on our other webpages have been updated, but please let me know if you are unable to get to MLA from a link on the library’s website.
I’ve found the CSA Illumina platform easier to use and a bit faster than the old FirstSearch interface, and I hope you will find the same. The tools for filtering search results are expanded as well. I expect further improvements early next year when CSA and ProQuest merge their products—I’ll let you know when that happens.
One other immediate difference deals with accessing the information in the MLA Directory of Periodicals. The easiest way to get to a journal’s directory record through CSA is to go to Advanced Search, type the journal title into the search box, and select either Source, SO= or Journal Name, JN=, and click search.
Not surprisingly, the results will include citations for articles published in that journal. Clicking on the title of an article reveals full bibliographic information and a [Journal Information] link next to the source. Journal titles in this system, for some reason, are not clickable. Click [Journal Information] to access the MLA Directory record for that periodical.
Let me know if you have any questions about the new interface. You can view it for yourself here.
Plenty of these phonebooths in Syracuse; perhaps a good idea in conjunction with one of the online book-swapping services?
via unconsumption – Via halfletterpress: The Highland Park Book….
(Sorry, not that ELO!)
The Electronic Literature Directory is a resource for readers and writers of born-digital literature. Created by the Electronic Literature Organization, it provides an extensive database listing electronic works, their authors, and their publishers. The descriptive entries are drafted by a community of e-lit authors who also tag each work and identify the techniques used in its creation. Discussions of entries are ongoing and offer a networked, peer-to-peer model for literary review.
Vist the Electronic Literature Directory.
Amazon has made available their most Most Highlighted Passages of All Time, from Kindle books. Not to spoil anything, but it’s hilarious that a passage from Gladwell’s Outliers is in the top ranked spot.
They’ve also got the most frequently highlighted books posted.
This is a great way to see what has stuck chords with readers, and perhaps (as Shipman, Marshall, Price, & Golivchinskly investigated) to identify the best bits in a book. Craig Mod had some interesting ideas and visualizations about “overlay” in ebooks recently. But these announcements from Amazon also bring up some of the creepier points (for librarians anyway) of tracking usage statistics in ebooks.
Along with highlighting, Kindles allow for notes to be attached to books– one wonders if those will be mined for content. I’ll have to check the EULA to see who owns those notes.
If it’s Amazon: what a business model! Fledgling authors could buy this information from Amazon to learn how to write a book that people are interested in.
The good news is that the notes feature (and the highlighting feature, for that matter) are so unusable on the Kindle, I’m assuming only a small percentage of users even engage in these practices. I could be wrong. Maybe what this data really tells us is that people who read Dan Brown and Malcolm Gladwell are also more willing to put up with poor interface design.
Recent Books at Bird