You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February 2009.
A short film about Open Access academic journals and books – in Dutch, but with English subtitles.
There’s also another video, along similar lines, now online: Tim O’Reilly makes the argument for Open Publishing @ TOC 2009 from Open Publishing Lab @ RIT on Vimeo.
JURN initially launched with just 850 URLs. 24 days after launch, I’ve been able to find and add an additional 1000 URLs — pushing the current total to well over 1850. The most up-to-date list of titles indexed is available here (PDF, 500kb).
I now have a stack of dissertations to mark, so JURN activity will be light for the next month or so.
The March 09 Internet Resources Newsletter blogs and links to JURN. JURN is even highlighted as one of two outstanding new websites…
“There seems to be a number of good websites listed in this month’s Internet Resources Newsletter, making any choice for the ‘Nice Web Site’ difficult, however, I’ve chosen two search engines…”
Maritime Compass blogs about JURN…
“Focusing on the arts and humanities, many articles on preservation and history are included. It’s a great search engine, returning highly relevant results. I searched very broad terms, such as ’sea’ and retrieved fascinating articles, both popular and scholarly. Specific searches, such as vessel names, also retrieved wonderful hits.”
Jurn.org is now hitting No.7 on a straight Google search for:—
ejournals arts humanities
And No.12 for a straight Google search for:—
ejournals humanities
And No.17 for a straight Google search for:—
ejournals arts
JURN has been blogged by the French organisation TGE-Adonis, part of the French National Centre for Scientific Research.
JURN mentioned as a “pick”, on the latest 50-minute “Digital Campus” podcast.
JURN blogged by PLAI in the Philippines.
Jurn.org is now showing up in the main Google index.
JURN linked and mentioned by the French academic blog Pintini.
JURN is now at http://www.jurn.org/ — and simply typing jurn.org in your web browser will also get you there.
As of four hours ago, JURN is now showing up on the main Google search results.
Someone enquired if I was aware that Google Custom Search “Sites” control panel needs to have a distinctive fragment of an URL entered if it’s to seek accurately for a match. This is to do with checking if an URL is already in the site index. Google Custom Search will happily add a duplicate if you let it, especially if you just check against a full URL. Yes, I’m fully aware of this feature, and that it’s case-sensitive — and so only search for a distinctive fragment of an URL, before adding it to the site index.
I am also cutting back the URL slightly if needed, to give Google a slightly wider “spread” in what it picks up from that URL. Alternatively, I’m seeking out just the url that holds the articles (often very different from the main journal URL).
JURN has been blogged and linked by the German Archivalia.
I’m trying to fix a problem with JURN returning 
into the search box after a search, when it should show 
.
being the “raw” HTML codes for those Chinese characters.
Tweaking the supplied code snippet from UTF-8 to iso-8859-1 seems to cure it. But then that results in nothing being returned to the search box at all, even for English queries. Which is obviously a non-starter, since I’m not going to cripple JURN in English.
It seems the bug results from a combination of Google’s remote “show_afs_search.js” javascript file (which I can’t change), and my showing the results on the same page as the search box (i.e.: the “iframe hosting option”). The language encoding for the search terms is getting stripped out, somewhere in the loop back to the search-box.
Other people’s Custom Search Engines seem to handle the problem, but only by displaying the results on a new second page. I may have to look into having a second interface for non-English users, showing the results on a second page, when JURN makes the move to its own domain. Or you can just use the “raw” Google page for JURN.
Unless someone can offer a solution? But I’ve searched the support forums with no result. It seems it may well be a genuine bug with the “iframe hosting option”. The same bug also causes JURN to refuse non-English accents (i.e.: diacritics) on search terms. So “pate” will work and will find “pate” and “pâté”, — but “pâté” on its own won’t be accepted as a valid search term.
I just purchased/registered a suitable domain name for JURN, as I don’t want (potentially rather heavy) traffic bogging down my personal blog space. Hopefully it’ll be live by Friday or maybe Monday. I’ll put an auto re-direct on the old page.
JURN gets a quick mention on Open Access News.
I wanted something memorable, with just a few letters.
JOUR sounded too French.
JURN is a common German / Scandanavian boys’ name, no-one else was using it for anything remotely like a search-engine or even a trademark, and I had some new artwork to hand featuring a boy to be the “mascot”.
I pictured “Jurn” as some student stuck in the wilds of somewhere like Finland, without paid access to commercial ejournals and trying to plough through Google Scholar in English and getting tangled up in results that constantly demanded payment. JURN is the search engine for that student.
So… that’s why the new search-engine was named JURN.
The alpha version of the new academic search-engine JURN is now live, indexing 951 web URLs covering ejournals, mostly free and full-text, in the arts and humanities.
The front-page weighs in at just 9kb, so hopefully traffic won’t be too heavy.
