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.

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:

http://www.kacike.org – now an online shopping site.

Temporarily removed http://www.sensesofcinema.com – infected with a spambot

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.

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.