Listen Notes: the podcast search we’ve been waiting for

Listen Notes is new and appears to be the podcast search-engine we’ve all been waiting for. At long last. Plus, it’s a very pleasing service. Fast, comprehensive, and simple to use, if in need of a few hours of graphical and UI polishing. This is what it looks like for me (I immediately perma-blocked its row of distracting examples of ‘most searched for’).

There’s a date-order filter. It’s not yet perfect in its search handling, though. For instance, search for:

“West Midlands”

… and then for

“West Midlands” -BBC

No results at all for the latter search, despite the first set of results containing a number of non-BBC podcasts related to the West Midlands. Curious. Nor does it knock out unwanted results using NOT, which some sites such as 3D Warehouse use. Given the overbearing online verbosity of the BBC, it seems a pity they can’t be excluded from results in favour of a wider variety of grassroots podcasts. As far as I can tell it’s impossible to modify results by excluding some keywords. If that’s down to a server workload problem, it seems a pity that a half-dozen exceptions can’t be offered, such as -BBC -NPR etc.

There’s also a very comprehensive and seemingly unbiased Directory with categories which, with a little drilling, gets you to sub-categories like History podcasts. Navigating the Directory is rather haphazard at present, but the another option is to Google thus…

site:www.listennotes.com/directory/ wildlife

… which in this case will quickly indicate that you’ll need to browse the directory pages to the Local | Outdoor | and Government categories, and that you’ll be wasting your time looking for any mention of the word “wildlife” in Natural Sciences podcasts.

There’s no keyword-based date-order search results to be had by RSS, which would work as a form of alerts service, but it’s good to see that each podcast’s own RSS feed is prominent on each show’s profile card.

Interestingly, there’s an offer: “Buy podcast database for $1000 flat fee”. It looks as though it’s actually worth the price, though given the lifespan of podcasts you’d then have to do some serious ongoing work to maintain and repair it.

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Idyll

Idyll is a new “friendly markup language — and an associated toolchain — that can be used to create dynamic, text-driven web pages.” Interactive diagrams in academic papers, that sort of thing…

Jay Kay Klein archive

The Jay Kay Klein archive has just released nearly 6,000 vintage photographs of U.S. science fiction fandom. Mostly it appears to be convention room-parties, panels/auctions in progress, and author signings with the head turned down – but there are more than a few gems in there. For instance, here’s Ray Bradbury with young artists from Oakland at BayCon in 1968, holding a lizard-man head made by Philip Tippett. Phil — as he was later known — went on to work on the first Star Wars films and lead the animation team at Industrial Light and Magic.

Genomic Observatories Meta-database

Genomic Observatories Meta-database, a new repository for…

“metadata on biological samples, used for biodiversity inventories, population studies, and environmental metagenomics.”

Wider context: “There has never been a better time for a taxonomic renaissance”. And “A Few Bad Scientists Are Threatening to Topple Taxonomy”.

Telling tails

FurScience… “a multidisciplinary team of scientists studying the furry fandom”.

‘Underutilized, consider discarding’

Cambridge University asks: How to “provide training solutions for scholarly communication” in the UK? Not usually, it would seem from reading this article, by inviting along the member of the library school staff who teaches such things…

“It is fairly universally acknowledged that it is a challenge to engage with library schools [in universities] on the issue of scholarly communication, despite repositories being a staple part of research library infrastructure for well over a decade. There are a few exceptions but generally open access or other aspects of scholarly communication are completely absent from the curricula.” (my emphasis)

Amazing: one would have thought that Open Access — along with all the other ‘public and free-to-access’ online sources from Google Books to data sources — would have been covered in a compulsory double-module for an entire semester of the second year of a degree in librarianship. But apparently not, though no doubt there are a few unremarked exceptions quietly doing good work.

Note that this new article has an associated Google Docs list of the (currently very minimal) UK provision for Scholarly Communication training provision, including a useful linked list of online caches of free training materials.

The introduction to this Google Doc further suggests that such training is not always present even at the Masters degree level, or is not there of sufficient duration and quality…

“… the traditional educational route for library workers through a Masters degree does not always equip them with an adequate level of knowledge [on open access, copyright and research data]”

The implication of the Cambridge University article is that other professional groups may have to be asked to provide such training to researchers, since librarians as-a-class seem to be so unwilling to engage with these pressing topics. It seems yet another indicator that librarians as-a-class are at risk of being labelled: ‘Underutilized, consider discarding’.

PastPin

PastPin by Geopast, challenging the public to geo-locate and time-tag photos of unknown location/time, uploaded by 115 selected institutional contributors to the Flickr Commons.

A nice cleanly designed service for public domain pictures, but page-loading assumes that you have superfast broadband, and that your broadband isn’t already being saturated with other downloads and music streaming. It also seems to be calling images from the often-slow Flickr, which slows it down even further. Lovely idea, but too grindingly slow for the majority of Internet users.

Directory of Korea Open Access Journals

New to me, the Directory of Korea Open Access Journals from the National Research Foundation of Korea. The NRF’s website is currently down and their Wikipedia page is confusing, but at 2017 they appear to be a bona-fide if somewhat semi-detached arm of the Korean culture ministry.

The future of learning and the independent scholar

High quality long-form journalism on “The future of learning and the independent scholar”, from Karl Schmude in The Spectator Australia…

“In this essay I will focus on three things – firstly, to sketch the contribution of the independent scholar to the world of learning in the past, and more broadly to the world of culture; secondly, to reflect on changes in university and academic life that have affected the capacity, and even the existence, of the independent scholar; and thirdly, to highlight the potential for independent scholarship in present-day culture, given that the university has now come to dominate the world of learning, and even of vocational training.”

The British edition of The Spectator sporadically nips behind a paywall, but this is from the Australian edition and is free for me.

Schmude is writing from a Catholic perspective, so the essay entertains a few hobby-horses which canter around aimlessly for a few lines, but when he’s sticking to the topic it’s a stimulating read. Worth it for the phase “immune to the insinuations of conformism” alone…

… he was largely immune to the insinuations of conformism.

Algerian Scientific Journal Platform

Algeria now has an official Algerian Scientific Journal Platform (ASJP) aggregator for online journals (inc. humanities), all of which appear to be open. It’s from CERIST (Centre de Recherche sur l’Information Scientifique et Technique), which a little digging shows is a bona fide arm of the Algerian Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research.