The value of free

We occasionally hear hard statistics about the wider economic value of open access in academia. So it’s interesting that the new report The Connected Kingdom: how the Internet is transforming the UK economy (PDF link) has an estimate of the value of “free” to online consumers…

“We conservatively estimate the consumer surplus for free online content to be about £5 billion annually, or twice what consumers pay to access the Internet.”

I’d suspect that “conservatively” is report-speak for “we didn’t count piracy”?

Cornell uni to release 300,000 books online

Now this is a good way to celebrate Open Access Week. It’s just been announced that…

“Cornell University’s library will deposit 300,000 digital books into HathiTrust by March 2011.”

It’s possible a good deal less that that will be: i) public domain, and ii) not duplicates of works already scanned by other university libraries. But it’s certainly good news.

Carrot 2

Carrot2 is an open source software for finding thematic clusters in groups of documents…

“It can automatically organize [and label] small collections of documents, e.g. search results, into thematic categories. Apart from two specialized document clustering algorithms, Carrot2 offers ready-to-use components for fetching search results from various sources including YahooAPI, GoogleAPI, Bing API, eTools Meta Search, Lucene, SOLR, Google Desktop and more.”

“Carrot2 came about as a framework for building search-results clustering engines but its algorithms should successfully cluster up to about a thousand text documents, a few paragraphs each”

Bing hooks into Facebook

Bing has announced it will allow users to bias search results, based on what their ‘friends’ of Facebook are searching for…

“Bing will incorporate users’ social data from Facebook to improve the personal relevance of your search results starting today. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Bing leader Qi Lu, and longtime Microsoft online veteran Yusuf Mehdi announced the news at Microsoft’s Mountain View office this afternoon.”

It’ll be interesting to do a test when the service rolls out, to find out if it actually improves the results or not. I suspect not, since most people are i) bad at searching, and ii) not using Bing.

AWOL ejournals added

More new ejournals added to the JURN index today:

Nestor: Bibliography of Aegean Prehistory and Related Areas

The European Archaeologist

[ Hat-tip: AWOL blog ]

Added to the JURN index

ejournals added to the JURN index today:—

Journal of Surrealism and the Americas

Modern Art Asia

Darkmatter journal: in the ruins of imperial culture

Cities in the 21st Century

Commercium: An Electronic Journal of Franciscan Studies

RIHA Journal: Journal of the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art

Thought and Practice: A Journal of the Philosophical Association of Kenya

Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography

A comprehensive new 2010 bibliography, Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography.

“…has over 1,100 references, provides in-depth coverage of published journal articles, books, and other works about the open access movement. Many references have links to freely available copies of included works.”

E-Journal Archiving For UK HE Libraries

JISC is seeking consultation comments on E-Journal Archiving For UK HE Libraries: A Draft White Paper.

Psychohistory in a web browser

Psychohistory in a web browser? Recorded Future…

“A new predictive analysis tool that allows you to visualize the future, past or present”

Basically it seems to mine the web for information about serious future activities (plans to expand into the Indian market for instance) and makes it searchable and track-able as aggregated interactive infographics. Even if it’s imprecise, which seems likely, it could have an interesting effect in shaping the future anyway — since important decisions may be made based on the information it appears to provide. There’s a White Paper here.

Kindle blog, JURN’s spin-off blog

To save posting lots of material about ereaders and ebooks here, I’ve started a spin-off blog: Kindle blog.