• Directory
  • FAQ: about JURN
  • Group tests
  • Guide to academic search
  • JURN’s donationware
  • openEco: nature titles indexed

News from JURN

~ search tool for open access content

News from JURN

Monthly Archives: February 2020

New Bosworth-Toller, with new search

29 Saturday Feb 2020

Posted by David Haden in Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

The venerable and free Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary has a new public beta, and… “search and especially advanced search have been completely overhauled”.

The Smithsonian in CC0

26 Wednesday Feb 2020

Posted by David Haden in Spotted in the news

≈ 1 Comment

The Smithsonian now has a unified open-access picture library online, primed with an initial 2.8 million hi-res images. The licencing appears to be uniformly CC0. Another 200,000 images will reportedly be added through 2020, with more in future years.

It’s easier to use than the main ‘advanced interface’ — where, on a search for cats for instance, you’ll have a very hard time figuring out how to remove scans of the pages of old botany recorder-books (with text-only records of cat’s tail plants) — when you just want pictures of furry cats.

The new CC0 portal is very slow at present, probably due to the weight of visitors arising from the publicity and the bots from the likes of Alamy which are doubtless already strip-mining it. But a search for cats in the Collection, with CC0 eventually loaded and the first page suggested it to be a fine collection, although it rapidly turned into cat skulls and botany (‘cat’s-tail grass’ etc) on the second and third pages.

A test download gave a large 7Mb .JPG file…

It appears not to be on Google Search or Google Images in any substantial form, as yet. “CC0” is on each record page in plain-text, so can theoretically be used as a keyword by Google. But it appears, from the following search…

site:www.si.edu/object/ “Cats” “CC0”

… that Google has not yet indexed the new 2.8m record pages. Indeed, one wonders if they ever will, as even a broad…

site:www.si.edu/object/ “CC0”

…reveals a mere 70 results in Google Search. If they hardly index the existing pages, then what hope for the new 2.8m?

Image Composite Editor 2.0

20 Thursday Feb 2020

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks

≈ 2 Comments

Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor 2.0 is free photo stitching software for desktop PCs. (Also backed up at Archive.org). Although it bills itself as yet another panorama-stitching software, if can also stitch hand-held ’tiled’ sequences of images, provided there is overlap. Such as multiple images of a large old poster. The software is the product of Microsoft’s Photosynth years, and both very fast and accurate.

As a test I started with three images from eBay, non-scanned and made with a hand-held camera…

After import the files were automatically arranged by file-name numbering: 1, 2, 3. Then by using the Structured | Layout section it was easy enough to get the three images into a column…

Automatic can be used, but the best results come from jiggling the Structured | Overlap sliders until you have an approximately good fit. It seems the fit doesn’t have to be perfect.

From there you go to the next step, Stitch, and if it’s not done right you go back and adjust the Overlap sliders again. It only took me two tries to get a perfect stitch.

Cropping and export is then very straightforward. As you can see there’s a slight skew at the top and bottom, but further finessing of the Overlap sliders might fix that.

A very nice bit of free software, and so much easier and faster than other possible options. One could, theoretically, use this with screenshots of a public-domain picture trapped inside a tiled viewer, quickly re-combining these into a large whole image.

The Stadtische Gallery

19 Wednesday Feb 2020

Posted by David Haden in Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

Stadtische Gallery in Munich, Germany, has kindly placed scans of all their public domain works online. A test search for kat (cat) also picked up katalog and katherine. A search for katze (cats) was no better, but did pick up two tigers. A search for katen (tom-cat) found nothing. This suggests either that the Germans were not historically cat-lovers, or that the range of pictures is limited compared to other open online galleries. A search for hund (dog) suggests the latter.

A Google site search of site:https://www.lenbachhaus.de/en/discover/collection-online/ fared little better with kat, but did discover the fine 1916 woodcut “Der Leopard” (Der Tiger).

A specific search on the site for tiger then found another three not discovered by kat. Possibly the Germans don’t always consider a tiger/leopard to be a ‘big cat’, as the British do? Thus, a mix of Google and a number of on-site searches seems best for a deep-dive.

There is a Creative Commons filter, tucked away under: Refine results | How to use | CC. The standard here seems to be CC-BY-SA. A Kandinsky scan was found to be 2000 x 1602px at 300dpi.

Not all material that one would expect to be available under CC actually is, for instance the 1916 tiger woodcut and the 1918 woodcut “Plakat fur die Gabriele Munter”.

New Zealand museums – 45,000 low-res CC images

11 Tuesday Feb 2020

Posted by David Haden in Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

New Zealand now has 45,000 low-res images from the nation’s museums under Creative Commons. They’re on Artstor as a public collection.

A search “within collection” for keyword cat had 48 good results. One can then right-click on a result and load it in a new tab. From there it’s easy to get a download, and there’s only the lightest of barriers.

My test downloads, however, were all low-res (1024px, 96dpi), while the viewer images appear to be much higher res but are locked inside a tile-viewer. The downloads are just about of a size to be amenable to A.I.-driven resolution scaling, though.

Original of Marion Queenie Kirker’s 1930s portrait of an old sailor, 1024px:

A.I. up-rez to 2400px and a quick colourise:

Not ideal, but there are no jaggies and it’s acceptable for a wide-bordered page in a PDF magazine. One would have to retrieve the larger tiled image and re-assemble, if one wanted better. Which can be done with freeware: waft the mouse cursor around a bit to get it all loaded, then save as a PDF, extract images from the PDF with PDF Image Extractor 1.0, re-assemble in a grid using the Pages module in PhotoScape.

Results relevance is keyword-based, rather than having kittee-trained A.I. identify that there’s a cat in the picture. But the relevance ranking is fairly good, at least on this test.

UK Library and Information History Group – newsletter editor required

07 Friday Feb 2020

Posted by David Haden in Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

A volunteer Newsletter Editor is required by the UK’s CILIP, for their Library and Information History Group. The Group’s Newsletter appears three times a year. Deadline: 29th February 2020.

Newsletter archives 2004-2019.

Paris Musees – 150,000 CC0 images

03 Monday Feb 2020

Posted by David Haden in Spotted in the news

≈ 1 Comment

The museums of Paris now kindly offer a royalty-free image filter on their online collection. My test search for chat (cats, felines) gave 376 results, from what are said to be 150,000 newly uploaded CC0 images. These are the filters you want to find CC0 + ‘has an image online’…

I find it’s possible to set the site to use English, but that version is not fully translated. “Image libre de droit seulement” is still present in the supposedly English interface. “Datation” is obvious and allows you to set a date-range.

A right-click / “open in new tab” on the “Voir/See” button then takes you to the item’s record page with a download link. Download links are public (i.e. without a sign-up or other obfuscation), start quickly, and my test image came inside the .ZIP format.

In my first test I had a 4k 300dpi .JPG, at 6.5Mb. Nice. A few more tests shows the same thing, and the scans are clean and crisp. I downloaded about ten .ZIPs, some simultaneously, and did not encounter wait times or a ‘daily limit’ pop-up.

The keyword relevance is a bit off, though, being overly broad. For instance, chat also finds chatiments (punishments), which may cause chuckles among schoolkids encountering spankings and canings while doing innocuous homework on ‘kittees from history’…

Thankfully the results produced nothing more shocking than that, which was a surprise give the goriness of the French revolutions and the pungency of their satirical arts.

Subscribe: RSS News Feed.
I'm on Patreon!

JURN:

  • JURN : directory of ejournals
  • JURN : main search-engine
  • JURN : openEco directory
  • JURN : repository search

Related sites:

  • 4 Humanities
  • Academic Freedom Alliance
  • Accuracy in Academia
  • Alliance Defending Freedom
  • ALPSP
  • alt.academy
  • AMIR
  • Anterotesis
  • Arcadia project
  • Art Historicum (German)
  • AWOL
  • Beall's List (updated at 2018)
  • Beall’s List (old)
  • Beyond Search
  • Bibliographic wilderness
  • Booktwo
  • Campus Reform
  • Charleston Advisor
  • Coalition for Networked Information
  • Communia (public domain watchdog)
  • Cost of Knowledge
  • Council of Editors of Learned Journals
  • Dan Cohen
  • Digital Koans
  • Digital Shift
  • Dissernet (Russian anti-plagiarism)
  • DOAJ
  • Don't Block TOR
  • eFoundations
  • EIFL
  • Electronic Frontier Foundation
  • ELO
  • Embargo Watch
  • ePublishing Trust for Development
  • Facebook: Arab Open Access
  • Facebook: Italian Open Access
  • Facebook: Open Access India
  • Film Studies for Free
  • FIRE
  • Flaky Academic Conferences
  • Found History
  • Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
  • Free Speech Union (UK)
  • Google Algorithm
  • Heterodox Academy
  • Iconclass
  • IFLA Serials blog
  • ImpactStory
  • infoDocket
  • InTech Blog
  • Jinfo (formerly Free Pint)
  • Kindle blog
  • L'edition Electronique (French)
  • La Criee : periodiques (French)
  • Leader Statement Database on Free Speech
  • National Association of Scholars
  • National Coalition of Independent Scholars
  • Neil Beagrie
  • OA Lookup : Policies
  • OA Working Group
  • OASPA
  • Online Searcher
  • Open Access Bibliography
  • Open Access Week
  • Open and Shut?
  • Open Electronic Publishing
  • Open Folklore
  • Open Knowledge Maps
  • Open Library of Humanities
  • Periodiques en ligne (French)
  • Peter Murray Rust
  • PKP / OJS
  • Project Gutenberg
  • Publishing Archaeology
  • RBA Blog
  • Reclaim the Net
  • Research Information
  • Research Remix
  • Right to Research
  • River Valley TV
  • ROARS (Italian)
  • Scholarly Electronic Publishing
  • Scholarship Matters
  • Searchblox
  • Searcher
  • Serials Cataloger
  • Serials Review
  • Society of Young Publishers
  • Speech First
  • TaxoDiary (taxonomies news)
  • Taxpayer Access
  • Tentaclii
  • The Scholarly Kitchen
  • Thoughts from Carl Grant
  • Web Scale Discovery
  • Zotero blog

Some of the libraries linking to JURN

  • Boston College Libraries
  • Brooklyn Public Library, NY
  • Duke University
  • Kobe University, Japan
  • Rhode Island College
  • San Jose State University
  • UConn Stamford
  • University of California
  • University of Cambridge (Casimir Lewy Library)
  • University of Cambridge (main)
  • University of Canberra
  • University of Toronto
  • Washington University
  • West Virginia University

Spare BitCoins? Please send donations to JURN via: 17e2KGuyzjzEEE7BsoYTwMo3MtUod6DrjP

Archives

  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • June 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • News from JURN
    • Join 901 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • News from JURN
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...