The Biblio File

Read/Write Web is reporting on a search engine I hadn’t heard of before: WorldWideScience.

WorldWideScience is a science portal developed and maintained by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), an element of the Office of Science within the U.S. Department of Energy. The WorldWideScience Alliance, a partnership consisting of participating member countries provides the governance structure for the WorldWideScience.org portal.
When it debuted back in June 2007, it linked to 12 databases from 10 countries. Today, the portal links to 32 national, scientific databases and portals from 44 different countries.

I only ran a couple of searches, but it looks like this could be a good compliment to Google Scholar for those desperation science searches.

Kate at infodoodads reported on an applet that lets you highlight a portion of a web page, and then save or send those highlights. There is an online version, a bookmark version, and a Firefox Extension version. I downloaded the Firefox extension, and here is the link to Kate’s post, with my highlights:

http://awurl.com/rrnrpl75406

One source I consult when I’m looking for new websites on a topic I’m unfamiliar with is DMOZ.org, the Open Directory Project. They bill themselves as “the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a passionate, global community of volunteer editors.”  It’s like the old school version of delicious, created in a pre-tag world wehre people actually had to annotate stuff the found on the web if they wanted to share things with others.

I have found some pretty good blogs there, just by typing “weblogs” into the search box. It comes back with categories, and you can drill down from tehre. Of particular interest to those in Libraryland may be the Library Science category. I like this as a source because the entries have a one or two line annotation that can sometimes provide more information than a collection of tags.

From Lifehacker, a link to this tip sheet for recovering lost Word docs. Since lost Word docs are one of the bigger reasons our students request tech help, might be good to have bookmarked.

The LibrarianInBlack points to a report (download word doc  on bottom right hand corner of page) from the metasearch engine Dogpile, which states that “88.3% of total results”  are “unique to one engine.”  This means that, if we’re only using Google, we are missing quite a bit.

Amanda at Blogwithoutalibrary.net talks about the new Endeca powered catalogue at McMasters University. I haven’t played around with it much  yet, but she has a nice write-up of things she likes and doesn’t like so far.

The LibrarianInBlack has a really nice write up about OCLC’s WorldCat Local Installation project at the University of Washington Libraries.  You should definitely try it for yourself.

Fleck.com is a site that allows users to make notes (sticky style) on web pages and then send those annoations to someone else.  This could be useful for pushing pages to people on virtual reference or IM, or for any sort of collaborative work involving internet resources. Check out the example I did below.
http://extension.fleck.com/?sh=43859f5139a47be3b5267ca415b79facaf246438

The LibrarianInBlack posted a suggestion that reference librarians consider using the NPR audio archives as a reference source, particularly when students need coverage of current events. I know I’ve used NPR as a resource occasionally in the past, but I often forget about it. She also points out other cool features of NPR, such as their RSS feeds and podcasts (which i use religiously). There is a lot of good content there that might benefit our students.

Cite Bite is a tool that lets you link not just to a page, but to a specific part of a page. It even highlights the quoted part in yellow, so the person you are sending the link to can see the part of the article that you want them to see. Check out the link I made to this article on the new apple iPhone.
http://citebite.com/y8k1q4u6stvn

This could be especially useful for e-reference situations when co-browsing is not available, and could be a good tool to use in conjuntion with our IM service.