The Shadow over Google

What Google Search has to filter out every day… demonstrated by a sample search for Lovecraft (as in the author “H.P. Lovecraft”) for just the last 24 hours. About ten valid hits, which Google has usefully brought to the top of the results — but also thousands of malware-laced fake ebook PDFs and spam pages offering ‘essay writing’ services (of the sort that claim to help students cheat their way through university).

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Open and Closed Articles in Norway

“Grades of Openness. Open and Closed Articles in Norway” (August 2018)…

Based on the total scholarly article output of Norway, we investigated the coverage and degree of openness according to three bibliographic services: 1) Google Scholar, 2) oaDOI by Impact Story [now called Impactstory], and 3) 1findr [formerly oaFindr]. According to Google Scholar, we find that more than 70% of all Norwegian articles are openly available. However, degrees are profoundly lower according to oaDOI and 1findr, respectively 31% and 52%.

open shares vary considerably by discipline, with … the Humanities at the lower end

Open Access Week: Events

Open Access Week: Events listing for 22nd – 28th October 2018.

Steaming Amazon

Amazon’s search is becoming more and more useless. Search for “middle-earth” in Books: Reference, and half way through the second page of results, it starts slipping in multiple “middle-east” results. Presumably on the assumption that the searcher is a drooling idiot who’s mis-typed the search query.

Hathi’s toolset now runs on all its content

Hathi now offers free public tools that provide…

“access to the text of the complete 16.7-million-item HathiTrust corpus for non-consumptive research, such as data mining and computational analysis, including items protected by copyright.”

Previously the tools could only run over Hathi’s public domain content.

JURN’s re-check at 80%

80% of JURN’s entire URL list has now been checked for continuing presence of the URL path on Google Search. I check the specific URL path being indexed, and not just the basic domain (e.g.: for ITJ: The Intel Technology Journal , http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/research/ rather than http://www.intel.com). Broken URLs are being found/fixed or deleted as required.

Added to JURN

Marketing Libraries Journal (a new journal, using bit.ly for its PDF links and not currently well-indexed by Google Search)

Experimentally added hcommons.org at the deposit record level, as well as the PDF level.

Cats in stacks

A new article, “Ask a Catbrarian: Marketing Library Services Using a Cat”…

“Although Uggles was already well known within the library system and among many of the undergraduate students, Uggles’s popularity really took off once Uggles began ‘hiding’ around campus.”

Google’s new Dataset Search tool

Google has a new Dataset Search tool. It looks good.

An initial test search for Krita (the open source paint software) didn’t pick up anything, so it is just limited to datasets and is not also bringing in general file-names from FTP servers.

A wide search for Antarctica Cephalopods then gave a good set of 25 results, all of which were record pages that appeared to place their dataset under CC or to be public domain (NASA etc). There doesn’t appear to be any way to then load a further set of results, or to do a further keyword search within the record-pages of the results.