archaeologydataservice

Removed the http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk from JURN search, due to their being down for about a week now. I’ll add them back in when their servers return.

“Enter, accompanied by a flourish…”

J-Stage has been restored to the world’s stage, and the indexing URL has been restored to JURN. However it looks like Google Search has completely de-indexed J-Stage at the article level, because of their extended 404. Thus JURN results for their articles will only appear after the Google Search bot re-indexes them.

“Exit, pursued by a bear…”

Journals at J-Stage, Japan’s central journal aggregation website, have been off-stage for two days now…

“… emergency maintenance on our server for security measures.”

Public Domain Super Heroes

Public Domain Super Heroes, a searchable illustrated directory. Currently at 4,000 comic-book and strip characters who can be freely re-used, also some toon characters and monsters and selected vintage storybook characters. There is also a related discussion forum.

SAGE’s free access period

I hope JURN users have been enjoying their free access to all of SAGE’s journal PDFs in January, via JURN’s search results. Thanks to SAGE for making them free, and also for allowing Google Search to index them at the PDF level. We’re now a week into February and their free access continues. I’m checking the free access URL daily, but there may soon come a point where JURN’s SAGE links hit paywalls again — perhaps for as long as 24 hours — before the indexing URL is removed.

Summary execution for students

Precis writing skills among recent American graduates: apparently disappearing faster than UC Berkeley’s federal funding…

“We had close to 500 applicants. Inasmuch as the task was to help us communicate information related to the work we do, we gave each of the candidates one of the reports we published last year and asked them to produce a one-page summary. All were college graduates. Only one could produce a satisfactory summary. … Our own research tells us that a large fraction of community college professors do not assign writing to their students because their students cannot write and the professors do not consider themselves to be writing teachers. It is no wonder that employers like us find it so hard to find candidates with serviceable writing skills.”

Admittedly precis and outline writing is a skill that’s only barely acquired after a good deal of practice, and then not by all in a class. It may help if a student has developed the knack of point-summarising by regularly taking hand-written outline lecture notes. Even then ‘getting it’ might require half a semester, rather than just a couple of hours of lessons. It’s a skill that’s likely to be especially difficult for a student who isn’t an avid advanced reader, ideally a reader of factual argumentative content that requires one to constantly unpick arguments on-the-fly.

Grand Comics Database

The Grand Comics Database is the comic-book equivalent of the IMDb for movies. It has a 2016 descriptive assessment for librarians by Mike Monaco of The University of Akron.

Visit Britain’s open stash of 15,000 “copyright-free” hi-res pictures

Visit Britain provides nearly 15,000 selected copyright-free images, with a search box. The selection is obviously highly curated and high-quality, and no registration is required to download. If you have a pop-up blocker, you’ll need to whitelist media.visitbritain.com to get at the hi-res magazine-quality image download link. There are a few noticeable gaps in coverage, such as the major ceramics tourism hub which is the city of Stoke-on-Trent (one picture, on a search for “Stoke-on-Trent”).

openECO list checked and updated

Checked for link-rot and updated if needed: openECO: list of 700 ecology/nature titles indexed in JURN.

The tyranny of “relevance” sorting

The tyranny of “relevance” sorting is rather wearing. Why is “relevance” the unchangeable default for various forms of search result? Because they’re so very rarely “relevant” (Google Search aside) and more often than not I’m looking for a “by date” ordering. I’ve been to the site before, and now I just want to see what’s new. If there’s one innovation I’d like to see in 2017 it’s a robust browser add-on, one which can be taught to identify the site’s relevance/date toggle and then auto-switches to “by date”.