Mendeley Ltd., a company based in London, England, e-mailed bloggers and other media about its new in-beta service and desktop client software called Mendeley Research Networks. According to the About Us page, “… Mendeley will make your life easier. It’s a combination of desktop software and social network which helps you manage, share and discover [...]
Update for 02008 07 23: Thanks to my omniscient observers, I’ve learned that Google’s Wikipedia-killer service Knol has gone live with a beta version. It actually reminds me more of About.com than it does Wikipedia. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like once you log in with your Google account. The “Verify Name” is [...]
Curious about BiblioCommons now that you’ve read about in Library Journal and are as frustrated as I am about the 12-person company’s Web site that consists of a single page with three outdated testimonials? You can run through this Adobe Captivate tour of the Oakville Public Library’s beta test or you can dig right in [...]
Stumbled across the new release of Mozilla Firefox, aka Firefox 3. Sad to see that the Firebug addon is not yet compatible. But I came across a different fascinating addon called Hyperword from a British company. This amazing addon lets you highlight a word or words on a Web page and then select from a [...]
My latest article for Searcher magazine on document-sharing services, “Hit Me with Your Best Doc”, is the lead cover story for June 02008. It’s not available online, however, but will appear in some of the commercial full-text databases and can also be purchased through ITI-InfoCentral.com, the digital archive of Information Today, Inc. (ITI) publications.
From the Introduction to the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae Digital Collection created by the University of Chicago Library: In 1540 Antonio Lafreri, a native of Besançon transplanted to Rome, began publishing maps and other printed images that depicted major monuments and antiquities in Rome. These images were calculated to appeal to the taste for classical antiquity [...]
Thanks to Gerry McKiernan I learned about Elgg, “a robust open source social application engine.” A Version 1.0 of Elgg is supposed to be released in the summer 02008. Elgg Classic is the current version. The software is designed for those individuals and organizations who wish to host their own social software and retain control [...]
Update for 02008 04 27: I received my beta-invite acknowledgement by e-mail on April 23, 02008 and finally got around to registering and creating my first Twine on electronic records. Since there was already one called Digital Preservation, I was prevented from using those two words. Here’s a screenshot of my Electronic Records Twine. I [...]
According to a March 6, 02008 Information Today Newsbreak piece by Erik Arnold published on, Last week, Google announced that it was launching Google Sites to supplement its growing Google Apps product suite (www.google.com/enterprise/apps). Google Sites (www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/users/sites.html) is the integration of JotSpot, a web-based wiki provider that Google purchased more than a year and a half [...]
The Indiana University Libraries and and the Indiana University Digital Library Program are conducting a pilot project with open access publishing with the Open Journal Systems software from Canada’s Public Knowledge Project. Indiana University calls their service IUScholarWorks Journals. It’s kind of cool and probably just a coincidence that I published an article on PKP in the January [...]
From the announcement on DIGLIB (02008 02 26) about the Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN) proposal: The European Commission announced that the proposal from Amsterdam University Press together with five European University Presses within the eContentplus Programme, has been selected for negotiations on funding. The opening of negotiations starts in March 2008. Completion [...]
Came across another document sharing service called Scribd. Based in California, the business was started in 2006 by Trip Adler, Jared Friedman, and Tikhon Bernstam. According to the FAQ: Scribd is a free, web-based, document sharing community and self-publishing platform that enables anyone to easily publish, distribute, share, and discover documents of all kinds. E-books, [...]
My Freebase article was published in the February 02008 issue of Searcher magazine. The article is not online, so I’m as eager as the rest of you to see it in print. It’s listed on the cover in the lower left as “The Freebase Experience.”
From the announcement on DIGITAL-PRESERVATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK (2008 01 30): As of today, the web-published content of the journal Graft: Organ and Cell Transplantation (SAGE Publications) has been exported from the CLOCKSS archive, and is now available to the world from two CLOCKSS hosting platforms at universities in Europe and the US. Released under a Creative Commons [...]
Keotag is a tag search engine, a tag generator and a social bookmarks link generator. The latter two are rather limited given that they only support a handful of social tagging and bookmarking sites. As a mouse hover over the site icons doesn’t always pop up a tool tip for each icon, it may help [...]
The alpha version of the DRIVER project’s repositories portal is up and running. DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) is a European Union-funded infrastructure to support the preservation of and access to scientific data. DRIVER also supports the principles around Open Access. User support for the DRIVER repositories portal is through the Driver [...]
The Library of Congress has set up its own collection of photos on Flickr and is encouraging the public to tag the collections of photos it’s posted there. The two collections so far are 1930s-40s in color (1,615 photos) and News in the 1910s (1,500 photos). The latter consists of photographs taken by the Bain [...]
The British Columbia Breeding Bird Atlas should excite a lot of birders who are looking for a way to share what they observe and know about the indigenous and migratory population of bird species throughout the province. This is great project. Some of the site functionality, however, hasn’t taken flight as of 02008 01 17.
Here’s a description from the front page of American Social History Online, which is pretty darned impressive: Aquifer American Social History Online – Find and use 19th and 20th century primary resources from unique historical digital collections. search diverse digital content from 40 American Social History research collections find more than 230,000 digitized objects in [...]
From the Online Exhibition page of Exploring the Early Americas virtual exhibit at the Library of Congress, which “features selections from the more than 3,000 rare maps, documents, paintings, prints, and artifacts that make up the Jay I. Kislak Collection. This ongoing exhibition has three major themes: Pre-Contact America; Explorations and Encounters; and Aftermath of [...]
Search Wikia is live. It’s the creation of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and a contributory/collaborative search engine that relies on the individual users for its growth. Here is what a search result page looks like. Click on the thumbnail to view a larger version of the image.
My article on the First International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference held July 11-13, 02007 in Vancouver, BC, Canada, was published in the January 02008 issue of Searcher magazine. The article is not online for free through the magazine, but the hyperlinks in the article are. For additional posts on the PKP conference see http://www.davidmattison.ca/wordpress/?p=2139 and [...]
SlideShare is a Flickr- and YouTube like service for sharing your most excellent and dull presentations. The service is free and private sharing, also free, was introduced in November 02007.
The Bibliotheque et Archives nationales du Quebec launched a new digital collection of maps called America, 1500-1800 in support of its book La mesure d’un continent: atlas historique de l’Amerique du Nord, 1492-1814 (Mapping a Continent: Historical Atlas of North America, 1492-1814, 02007) and the exhibition Ils ont cartographié l’Amérique. America, 1500-1800 is available only [...]
According to an announcement on DIGLIB (02007 12 12), The University of Michigan Library is pleased to announce that records from our MBooks collection are available for OAI harvesting. The MBooks collection consists of materials digitized by Google in partnership with the University of Michigan. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/o/oai/oai?verb=Identify Only records for MBooks available in the public domain [...]
From the front page of Scholarpedia: … Scholarpedia, the free peer reviewed encyclopedia written by scholars from all around the world. Scholarpedia feels and looks like Wikipedia – the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Indeed, both are powered by the same program – MediaWiki. Both allow visitors to review and modify articles simply by [...]
As announced on HISTORY-DIGITISATION@JISCMAIL.AC.UK (2007 11 26): A new online database available from the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) offers the chance to explore nearly 8,000 European oil paintings in Britain’s public art collections. NICE Paintings (The National Inventory of Continental European Paintings) was launched on 21 November 2007 and will be the first time [...]
According to the announcement on DIGLIB (02007 11 23), the first DIGMAP Workshop is being held in Lisbon, Portugal, on December 7, 02007. The announcement states that DIGMAP is proposing to develop solutions for georeferenced digital libraries, especially focused on historical maps and in the promoting of our cultural scientific heritage. The final results of [...]
TrueKnowledge is another Semantic Web search engine, this time from the UK, that’s undergoing invitation-only beta testing. The company’s also developing an API service whose initial addressable queries are to a user’s IP address.
Google once again sets the bar, this time with an API for linking different social networking sites together. Here’s the blurb from the Google Code OpenSocial API site: OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s [...]
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