Monthly Archives: November 2009

Do we need a new CSE for repositories?

30 Monday Nov 2009

Posted by in Academic search, How to improve academic search, My general observations

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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.

Curating online resources

29 Sunday Nov 2009

Posted by in My general observations, Spotted in the news

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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?

The monograph in arts and humanities research

27 Friday Nov 2009

Posted by in Official and think-tank reports

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A full-text University College London report from November 2008 — “The role and future of the monograph in arts and humanities research” (PDF), 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.”