Journal of the Polynesian Society

Added to the JURN site-index today:—

Journal of the Polynesian Society, The

The world’s repositories, mapped

This is cool. Repository 66 is a late 2008 mashup that maps the academic repositories of the world…

It mashes the data in both ROAR & OpenDOAR. Details of how repository geo-locations are found are here.

De-duplicated the site-index

I used a ‘duplicate text finder’ to locate and remove about 25 duplicate URLs from the JURN site-index.

Three new titles added

Added to the JURN site-index today:—

Georgian Cultural Antiquities

Past : newsletter of the Prehistoric Society

   [ Hat-tip for the above two: AWOL blog ]

452^oF : journal of literary theory and comparative literature

Do we need a new CSE for repositories?

Do we need a new Google CSE for academic repositories? The old ones are looking rather long in the tooth, and their link-rot must be getting pretty bad by now.

Open DOAR search, according to the date on the foot of the search page, has not updated since Nov 2006. Similarly, ROAR‘s own Google Custom Search Engine has not been updated since Nov 2006.

I think it’s time for a new and up-to-date one. It shouldn’t be difficult to extract the URLs from a downloaded set of OpenDOAR country pages, which are still actively maintained. It’s even easier to download the .csv of all the URLs from ROAR and to extract them with Excel. As with OpenDOAR, it seems that the ROAR repository list is up-to-date, even if the CSE isn’t. One would then combine the lists and de-duplicate, clean the list, and then upload the cleaned list to a sparkly new Google Custom Search Engine. If I had the space to add another 2,000 URLs to my Google CSEs, I’d do it myself.

   Update: I made made a combined and cleaned list, then made the combined list into a basic web-page, and then pointed a Google on-the-fly CSE at it. The resulting search-engine can be used here. Obviously it’s not at all optimised, but a test search for…

tolkien filetype:pdf

… shows that it’s quite usable as a full-text discovery tool.

Curating online resources

Digital Curation Is a Key Service in Attention-Strapped Economy writes advertising guru Steve Rubel, in the 22nd November 2009 issue of AdAge…

“… whatever time remains up for grabs [ after we finish Googling and Facebooking ] will likely to flow to human-powered or automated sites that curate content in high-interest niches. Smart companies are already seeing this and staking their claim to categories. [...] It’s clear to me, a least, that digital curation — both automated and human-powered — will be the next big thing to shake the web. There’s an evergreen need for those who can separate art from junk online. However, in this era, journalists won’t be the only ones to fulfill it. Brands, as the examples above illustrate, can play here too.”

It’d certainly be nice to think than brands might commission and sponsor the long-term curation of online resources, in the face of massive public funding cuts to existing academic services that are looming in 2010 and 2011. But I’m not holding my breath for it.

I suspect that such brand-based curation will be the equivalent of “pop-up shops” on the High Street — speedily taking advantage of an empty gap for a short while, until the marketing department has ticked all the right boxes, and then vanishing. And I doubt we’ll see ad agency bosses trawling the local libraries for potential curators — they’d be hiring someone more along the lines of the head copywriter’s niece, if not just passing it along to the unpaid intern.

Although I can see a niche for independent medium-sized firms. Imagine a major garden tools firm undertaking to sponsor a lovely-looking “art and history of topiary” website for three years — with online exhibitions of public domain material from archives, contemporary photo galleries, curated links pages and blogs, Flickr streams, and perhaps even the first issue of an elegantly-presented historical research journal on the topic?

Humanism Today

Added to the JURN site-index today:—

Humanism Today : the journal of the Humanist Institute (1985-1999)

I Tatti Studies : Essays in the Renaissance

Added to the JURN site-index today:—

I Tatti Studies : Essays in the Renaissance (1985-2007)

The monograph in arts and humanities research

A full-text University College London report from November 2008 — “The role and future of the monograph in arts and humanities research” (PDF link), later published in Aslib Proceedings volume 61, issue 1 (2009).

“This is the first in-depth study of the role, value and future of the monograph from the viewpoint of the scholar … 17 arts and humanities academics were interviewed in-depth on their experiences and views.”

CiNii

Added the Japanese search tool CiNii to JURN’s “A short guide to free academic search” page.

How to search only RSS feeds in arts & humanities ejournals

If you’re interested in discovering RSS feeds from the JURN Directory of ejournal home pages, here’s the recipe:

Make an “instant custom search engine” from the JURN Directory. I already did it for you, it’s here. This is different from the main JURN engine — it’s searching the home pages, not the articles.

Now you can search this on-the-fly engine using this formula:

   inurl:rss OR inurl:feed OR inurl:rdf keyword

You’re now searching only within news feeds, although in practice it’s not actually that useful — because so few open/free ejournals have news feeds.

Feed me

The commercial journal publishers provide sound RSS feeds by default, enabling complex services such as Journal TOCs. But there’s a distinct lack of RSS feeds from open access ejournals (even those using dedicated journal software) and other free ejournals. For instance, I did a quick RSS harvest of the Archaeology and Classical Civilisations sections in the JURN Directory, and came up with a pitifully small list of valid feeds…

http://www.ajaonline.org/rss.xml

http://arche.bymedia.net/arche.rss

http://www.archaeology.org/rss.xml

http://intarch.ac.uk/content.rdf

http://www.palarch.nl/feed/

http://www.byzsym.org/index.php/bz/gateway/plugin/WebFeedGatewayPlugin/rss2

http://scholarworks.umass.edu/etruscan_studies/recent.rss

http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~lingaeg/rss/rssfeed.xml

http://nome.unak.is/nome2/feed.xml

http://www.palarch.nl/feed/

http://scholarworks.umass.edu/rasenna/recent.rss

http://pompeiiana.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/classicsjournal/recent.rss

…so it hardly seems worth using something like rFeedfinder to harvest all the auto-discoverable RSS feeds for JURN’s Directory. The lack of feeds would appear to be one of the major failings of the online provision of free scholarly articles.

feed:bing

Nice. Here’s a useful Bing search modifier that Google doesn’t have…

feed:keyword

…finds only RSS feeds.

In Google you’d have to use this sort of roundabout method…

inurl:rss keyword

inurl:feed keyword

Or chain the two main types together with all the minor possibilities such as rdf…

inurl:rss OR inurl:feed OR inurl:rdf keyword

Google can also do…

filetype:rss keyword

… which discovers a lot, but obviously not everything. So then you would need to use filetype:xml — and that would bring in all sorts of things which are not RSS feeds. Chaining inurl: seems the better option.

French policy on … ejournals for the humanities

One-hour audio recordings of two recent lectures, “The French policy on research infrastructures and ejournals for the humanities : Adonis and Revues.org“, given in English in May 2009.

Also of interest may be the 2008 full-text PDF “On the usage of e-journals in French universities” and this recent report (in French).

Scholarly Information Practices in the Online Environment

A recent (Feb 2009) comprehensive literature review, “Scholarly Information Practices in the Online Environment: Themes from the Literature and Implications for Library Service Development”.

Business/scholarly market is driving sales of ebooks

The Scholarly Kitchen brings news of some hard statistics on the current U.S. ebook market. 2009 seems set to end with ebooks making up 5% of all U.S. book publishing revenues, making ebooks worth $1.76 billion. And very nearly 76% of the U.S. ebook market consists of professional and scholarly titles.

Journal of the Imaginary and Fantastic, No.5

Issue No.5 of JURN’s own overlay “house journal”, on mirrors. Enjoy.

Journal TOCs

The new Journal TOCs search tool allows you to…

“…search the latest Table of Contents (TOCs) of 12,568 journals collected from 422 publishers. More journals are added continuously. You can start by searching for TOCs by journal title or by keywords (searching 336,025 TOC articles). You also can browse TOCs by publisher or by subject. Then, if you click on a journal title, the latest Table of Contents will be displayed.”

Seemingly recently launched without any marketing buzz (not a single blog seems to have linked to it before now), it appears to arise from the “TicTOCs” RSS aggregation service. It’s run by the same people as TicTOCs — Santy Chumbe and Lisa Rogers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. According to the departmental home page, the £200k two-year TicTOCs is now a “past project” and is dated as having completed in 2009.

Testing the new Journal TOCs with a sample of titles listed by the JURN Directory: such as Comitatus; Museum and Society; ImageTexT; Culture Machine, gives no results. This indicates that Journal TOCs is largely indexing commercial titles, presumably via standard RSS feeds. Although free titles from the French revues.org ejournal repository service are included, presumably because standard RSS feeds are to be had.

The old TicTOCs also has search, but its search function is possibly no longer being updated — the database on Journal TOCs appears to be more up-to-date, with my test search bringing results from June 09 which are not to be had from the same search on TicTOCs.

History News Network

Added to the JURN site-index today:—

George Mason University’s History News Network (Just indexing the feature articles)

More trouble at ‘t journals

Oh dear. Following recent scandals at academic journals (Elsevier, Bentham, etc), now there’s more trouble at ‘t journals…

“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

and…

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”