Ropey repositories

It’s always been annoying that academic repositories jumble together paywall / no-access / open access material, and don’t allow users to search only for open access + full-text materials. With a very few honourable exceptions, it’s a ridiculous situation — and the so-called library professionals involved in the development of such ‘standards’ should be hanging their heads in shame. Bibliographic Wilderness agrees…

“Really, I’m deeply disappointed that this kind of thing — good metadata that will allow software to know if an item really is OA, and to get a link directly to the content as well as the landing page — doesn’t seem to be a concern of the repository communities. This has been a problem for YEARS, and if any of the various organizations involved in this stuff are even making any efforts to address it, I haven’t heard about it.”

JURN now indexing over 3,700 titles

JURN has ticked over another 100 new titles. Now indexing, at the article level, 3,707 free ejournals in the arts & humanities.

Checked “Short Guide…”

Checked and repaired all URLs on the “A short guide to free academic search-engines and tools, for UK students in the arts and humanities” page.

Seven titles added

Seven new titles added to JURN today:—

Ellipsis (journal of the American Portuguese Studies Association)

Catholic Education : a journal of enquiry and practice

Association of Contemporary Church Historians Quarterly (2009- . Contemporary German and European church history)

Journal of Faith and Science Exchange

Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association

Washington Historical Quarterly, The

Becoming Poetics (“emerging poetics of the 21st century”)

Four titles added

Four ejournals added to the JURN full-text index today:—

Asian Agri-History (History of agriculture in Asia. Some articles overlap with the history of religion)

History & Theory (Indexing 30 free sample PDF articles only)

Santa Fe Institute Bulletin (“The Santa Fe Institute is a private, independent, multidisciplinary research and education center founded in 1984.”)

Etudes Chinoises (‘Chinese Studies’ – some articles in English, but mostly in French)

Four new ejournals

Added four new ejournals to the JURN index today:—

Jewish Review of Books

The New Republic (Book Reviews only)

eJournal USA

Call and Response: the Scholarly Journal of the National Black Graduate Student Association (USA)

Full text vs. abstracts

Jimmy Lin’s “Is searching full text more effective than searching abstracts?“. Conclusion…

“Users searching full text are more likely to find relevant articles than searching only abstracts.”

Spam removal

Domains removed from JURN today:

www.kacike.org – now an online shopping site.

Temporarily removed www.sensesofcinema.com – infected with a spambot

18 new ejournal titles added to JURN

Added to the JURN index today:—

International Circular of Graphic Education and Research

Audiovisual Thinking : the journal of academic videos.

Acidemic : journal of film and media

CritiCine: elevating discourse on SouthEast Asian Cinema

Experimental Conversations (Cork Film Centre, Ireland)

Film magazine (Danish Film Instutute)

Hyperrhiz : New Media Cultures

Journal of the Moving Image

Movie : a journal of Film Criticism (Warwick University)

Moving Image Source (Museum of the Moving Image, New York)

Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art

Shift : Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture

Studia Rudolphina (Art and Culture in the Age of Rudolf II)

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy

Hortus Semioticus (Semiotics)

Open Theology : a theological quarterly

Melilah : Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies

Rationality, Markets and Morals

   Hat-tip for the above: Jan Szczepanski’s “new ejournals this month” lists. I hadn’t been aware of these lists before, and have added them to the list of regular sources for tracking new open ejournals.

How to import/export a list of banned URLs from the Google Noise Reduction script, for Firefox + GreaseMonkey.

You may have spent some time building up a list of banned URLs for the Firefox addon Surfclarity, which strips unwanted domains from Google Search Results. Surfclarity no longer works with the latest Google changes, but the Greasemonkey script Google Noise Reduction does. In this tutorial we’ll swop the Surfclarity blacklist into the Google Noise Reduction blacklist.

1. In Firefox’s address bar, type: about:config.

2. Scroll down to extensions.surfclarity.patterns

Double click on the line of banned URLs you’ll find there, and copy them to Notepad.

3. Scroll further down to greasemonkey.scriptvals.http://exego.net//Google Noise Reduction.blacklist and take a look at the format. Note that it’s a little different than Surfclarity…

({‘britannia.com’:true, ‘oxfordjournals.org’:true, ‘tandf.co.uk’:true, ‘ingentaconnect.com’:true, ‘sagepub.com’:true, ‘myspace.com’:true, ‘experts-exchange.com’:true})

So we’re going to have to do some basic search-and-replace on our Surfclarity blacklist. Back up the Google Noise Reduction.blacklist if you want, as we’re going to overwrite it in a few moments.

4. Go back to Notepad and look at the list of Surfclarity URLs you just copied out.

Search for : and replace with : ‘ — note the space after the “:”.

Then search for : and replace it with ‘:true,

Now add ({‘ to the very start of this list, and ‘:true}) to the very end of this list.

Congratulations, you now have your SurfClarity list in Google Noise Reduction format.

5. Copy your new list to the clipboard, go back to greasemonkey.scriptvals.http://exego.net//Google Noise Reduction.blacklist, clear what’s in there at the moment, and then paste the new list in. You’re done.

Obviously, you can now also copy a backup of the Google Noise Reduction.blacklist

Alternative Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars

#alt-ac: Alternative Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars is set to be published online, in open-access format. It’ll be edited by Bethany Nowviskie, Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library and Associate Director of the Scholarly Communication Institute. The book will feature…

“contributions by and for people with deep training and experience in the humanities, who are working or are seeking employment — off the tenure track — within universities and colleges, or in allied knowledge and cultural heritage institutions such as museums, libraries, academic presses, historical societies, and governmental humanities organizations.”

So not that alternative, then. I suspect that a great many arts and humanities people in the UK — both in teaching and publishing — will have to look much further afield than ‘the usual suspects’ if they hope to gain employment over the next few years.

How to tame the Wild Google: 10 steps to Google Search simplicity (Nov 2010)

This ten-step tutorial gives you a Google Search for grown-ups, with all the training wheels taken off. Speed has not been compromised. The tutorial assumes that you’re using Firefox as your primary Web browser, that you use Google Classic when you’re signed-in to Google, and that you’re searching the Web from a widescreen desktop Windows PC.

This is not an optional “pick and mix” list, unless stated. Everything is needed, and sometimes one element relies on another element. All browser addons and scripts listed below are free, and come without any adware/spyware. They have been tested by myself. All are working happily together, and all are working with the latest roll-out of Google Search (as of 14th November 2010).

Step 1: If you don’t already have Firefox, please download and install it. If you have Firefox, make sure it is upgraded to the latest version.

Step 2: Download and install the Firefox Addon AdBlock Plus. This will automatically remove the bulk of advertising from Google search results pages.

Step 3: Download and install the Firefox Addon GreaseMonkey. This is the absolutely vital addon, the one that will run the GreaseMonkey scripts listed below.

Step 4: Close and relaunch Firefox, to ensure that the new addons are recognised and running.

Step 5: Now download and install all of the following GreaseMonkey scripts. All these have been tested, and they work together without conflicts. We’ll need to configure some of them, but we’ll do that once you’ve downloaded and installed them all. Installation is as simple as clicking two buttons.

For Google Search:

* Disable Google Fade-in.

* Disable Autocomplete.

* Google Preview Killer. No pop-up visual previews.

* Google 100. Lets you have more than 10 search results per page.

* New Google Ad-block. Blocks a few subtle types of Google Search ads not blocked by AdBlock Plus.

* Linkify Google Search Results. Makes the green Web address below each result useful.

* Scrub Google Redirect Links. Don’t allow Google to wrap search result links in gibberish code.

* Google Searches Exactly What You Type. No dumb second-guessing of what you want. You may need to turn this off if you find it causes looping on Google Books.

* GoogleMonkeyR. Allows all sorts of tweaks.

* No SearchWiki. Removes the little icons that appear next to each search result when you’re signed in (that’s right, the ones you never use).

* Customize Google Nav Bar. Lets you change and/or configure the topmost strip of text menu-links that lead to other Google Services…

* Hide/Toggle Google Sidebar. A very and neat elegant solution.

* Google Always Show Search Options. The search-by-date and other drop-down options on the sidebar are always fully opened up. This is needed because the Disable Autocomplete script breaks the sidebar’s menu-opening functions.

For Google Image Search:

* This is optional, but recommended. Google Image Basic + Direct Images. The first forces Google Images search to revert to how it looked and worked before it was Bing-ified. The second script adds direct links from thumbnails to the original images. They both work, and work well together.

Step 6: Now ensure that all those GreaseMonkey scripts you just installed are set to work on whatever the URL of your Google Search Home Page address is. Right-click on the smiling monkey icon in the bottom-right of your Firefox web browser. Select “Manage User Scripts…”.

Now scroll through the list of scripts, and check that each script is set to work on the correct Google web address. The scripts are pre-configured for this and should work fine without adjustment, but it may be that you use an obscure variant of the address for the Google home page. If in doubt, use something global like: http://*google.* (* = a wildcard, or instructions to ‘accept anything here’).

Step 7: Now we need to configure three of those GreaseMonkey scripts we just installed. The others should work fine without adjustment.

a. Google 100: Visit Google Search | In Firefox, go to Tools -> Greasemonkey -> User Script Commands | Choose “Set Google results per page” | Enter the number 18. Save and exit.

b. GoogleMonkeyR: In Firefox, go to Tools -> Greasemonkey -> User Script Commands | GoogleMonkeyR Preferences…

Then apply these preferences and Save…

c. Customize Google Nav Bar: This one is a little tricky to customise for non-coders. If you want to configure the links in the topmost menu of Google’s services…

… then right-click on the smiling monkey icon in the bottom-right of your Firefox web browser. Select “Manage User Scripts…”. Highlight the Customize Google Nav Bar script in the list. Click on Edit. Now make any changes by cutting or rearranging blocks of code thus, then Save…

Step 8: Explore your new Google Search experience. No Ads, No Autocomplete, No Reflowing of results as you type; No Pop-up Previews, No Fade-in, No code-wrapped URLs, No “did you really mean?”, No unwanted buttons or menu items, and with a neatly hidden (but available) sidebar. And with a couple of few nice discreet extras, and an elegant presentation that takes full advantage of your widescreen desktop monitor.

I’m assuming, of course, that you’ve already turned off Google Instant in your Google dashboard settings…

Step 9: I also like control over what results appear in Google Search results. I sometimes want to ban whole domains from ever appearing (e.g.: never see an informaworld.com page in search results ever again) in the results. This is optional, but recommended. The best solution for this has always been the excellent Firefox addon SurfClarity. However, this has stopped functioning due to the recent radical changes at Google Search, as have most of the similar GreaseMonkey Scripts. Until SurfClarity is repaired, the only domain blocker for Google Search that I can recommend and that I know is working with the new changes, is the GreaseMonkey script Noise Reduction for Google and Bing. It’s fairly elegant on the page, but does leave blank gaps where the erased search results were. The only real problem is that you can’t import/export the list of blocked domains. It also works for the Bing search engine.

Step 10. Sigh, relax, and enjoy a distraction-free searching experience.

The first domain blocker for Bing search results

The first domain blocker for Bing, Noise Reduction (needs Firefox + GreaseMonkey). It can remove whole domains from Bing’s search results. Domains are blocked on an “as encountered” basis.

Google Books links in Amazon results

A brilliant little Firefox + GreaseMonkey script, adds a discreet Google Books preview link in pages for Amazon books. It works a treat!

Amazon with Google Books

How to get the old Google Images back

Remove the new Google Image Search’s increasingly annoying ‘Bing-bling’, by using Firefox + GreaseMonkey + a potent combination of Google Image Basic and Direct Images in Google Image Search!. Image search then reverts to how it used to be. Clicking on a thumbnail in the search-results takes you straight to the largest version. When searching for images “larger than…” you may need to tell Firefox (one-time only) what application to open the image with, rather than popping up a “where would you like to download this to…” I told it to open large images with Firefox itself, and large images then open in a new Firefox tab. Nice.

And, while you’re at it… Flickr: link all sizes.

New Atlantis

Added to JURN today:—

New Atlantis, The (many articles on technology and ethics)

Teaching American Literature : A Journal of Theory and Practice

Slightly widened the way in which JURN indexes the arts coverage at Intelligent Life.

Repaired indexing link for Anistoriton journal

BBC History book reviews added

Added around 140 book reviews from BBC History Magazine, via the URL www.bbchistorymagazine.com/book-review/

Google’s death throes?

PC Mag‘s pundit John C. Dvorak calls it today…

“You can see the beginnings of Google’s ruin already … the recent and more aggressive changes have been terrible … It doesn’t take a genius to see that Google is beginning to make huge judgement errors.”

Much as I love Google, I’ll admit to a similar uneasiness in recent months. Wild and often silly experimentation with the core search results appears to be a product of chasing “the dumb market”. It’s also possibly a reaction to the apparent lack of innovation in search itself — exemplified by what seems to be the obvious failure (^*)of Google Caffeine to suppress spammy search results and SEO spivvery. I’d wonder if yesterday’s global 10% pay rises at Google, aimed at stemming the outflow of people from the company, might be linked to this sense of failure?

Perhaps better to split the basic search almost in two, via the configuration options. Give people who don’t want to switch to a Firefox/GreaseMonkey/scripts solution a single tick box in the Google Options dashboard that says, in as many words…

“I not a drooling idiot, please take all the silly training wheels off.”

Google also needs to invest far more heavily in free high-quality online training in how to search effectively. And to push it into schools at the junior level under the rubric of ‘search literacy’.

More commentary on the Dvorak article at Beyond Search. He thinks the article harsh, but concludes…

“What’s unfolding now is little more than visible signs that a systemic problem is disrupting functions. … The digital Black Death has taken root.”

---

* “Some 22.4% of Google searches done since June [2010] produced malicious URLs, typically leading to fake antivirus sites or malware-laden downloads as part of the top 100 search results, according to the Websense 2010 Threat Report published Tuesday”

Four journals added to JURN today

Four ejournals added to the JURN index today:—

Early Modern Culture

Muzikologija. (Added to the Journal directory only — the database-served PDFs cannot be indexed in a targeted way by a CSE.)

Journal of Journal Studies (Mostly in Dutch, some English articles)

BC Studies : the British Columbian Quarterly (1968-2010)

The anti-search attitude

On Saturday I picked up a special one-off Google “how to” £9.99 magazine in W.H. Smiths (the biggest UK magazine chain store). It claimed to be a comprehensive guide to Google, yet devoted just a half of one of its hundreds of pages to some basic search modifiers such as “quote marks for phrase”. And most of that half-page was screenshots. This inexplicable dismissal of search as a teachable skill is something that’s been worrying me for some time. Despite the absolute necessity of learning to search, to find and re-find — it’s not a skill that’s taught at primary, secondary or further education, except in the most perfunctory manner. Students enter my new technologies undergraduate class and the British education system has simply not equipped 95% of them with the most basic knowledge of how to skilfully search using Google.

Stephen E. Arnold of Beyond Search has a long post today in which he sees this same inexplicable mood appearing in businesses, where bad search skills have a direct financial impact. He calls the new mood “anti-search”…

“People at this meeting don’t want search. These attributes are anti search, and I think that is the big trend for 2011. Everyday users of online systems don’t know how to formulate a query, figure out most business intelligence reports, and have little time to invest in piecing together an “answer.” The goal is the intellectual equivalent of buying a do-nut when hungry. Quick, easy, and probably not good in the long run but okay for the now moment.

What is anti search?

I think it is a culmination of many experiences. People who did lousy research in college don’t become great researchers when they get a job, gain 30 pounds, and have to juggle life’s rubber balls.

Anti search, therefore, is the need for systems that are easy to use, require little intellectual effort to learn, and deliver “good enough” information. Maybe information “on training wheels” is a better way to think about anti search.

Anti search 2011 is taking root in an environment with several characteristics…”

This is a ridiculous attitude, since properly training staff in search would pay for itself. For instance, in a recent Network World (2010) article on findability, it was said that research has found that professionals…

“spend 20% of their time looking for information and they find what they are looking for less than half of the time. That’s equivalent to spending 10 weeks a year searching for information and remaining ignorant half of that time.”

And a summary of the Summer 2010 ROI Research survey of 500 search-engine users found that…

“19% abandon the online search, taking it offline if they can’t find the information”

The UK business situation was reported in research from official UK government researchers YouGov, The Costs of Traditional Filing. Small and medium businesses in the UK…

“[staff in an average firm] spend approx. 3 months a year looking for [paper] documents [...] 87% of respondents spend up to 2 hours every day looking for documents”

The national waste of time was estimated to cost £42 million each day. And that’s just paper documents. Add to that the time that untrained staff waste looking for things online (“spend 20% of their time looking for information and they find what they are looking for less than half of the time”), and it seems there’s some serious wastage going on in businesses. And I’d suspect that matters are the same in much of the UK’s public sector.