Since the early years of the Web, librarians - as well as teachers and instructors - have been posting criteria for evaluating content found on the Web. These have been designed as guidelines to help students figure out what to...
An article in Inside Higher Ed just caught my eye, "Pooling Scholars' Digital Resources ". The article described something that is hopeful for social scholarship, ominous for libraries. The brief article describes the advent of Zotero Commons, a collaboration of...
My presentation at the Charleston Conference, "The Promise of Authority in Social Scholarship," has come and gone. I want to explore the last point I made during my talk. I didn't have time to elaborate on it much at the...
If you're reading this blog, it's because blogs are a routine part of your professional growth. You view blogs as a valuable bedrock of the professional conversation. You may consider them to be at least as important as peer-reviewed publications,...
At long last, I've had a chance to read Paul Coyne's March 9 blog entry, Scholarship in an age of participation. In his entry, Coyne outlines the rationale for an as-yet unnamed new scholarly journal that will embody the principles...
I'm a List Master. Sounds pretty cool, doesn't it. A while back, I was invited by Charles Knight, a former CEO of a search engine optimization firm, to join with a handful of other search engine experts to compile a...
As an academic librarian, I've been trying to get a handle on the emerging parameters of social scholarship. This is the practice of scholarship in which the use of social tools is an integral part of the research and publishing...
I've spent the last ten years obsessing over search engines on the Web. I've taught endless numbers of classes about them, and have maintained a decade-old site (now on its own domain) that includes fairly extensive coverage of search engines...
I was in London last week, giving a talk on "Library 2.0 and Scholarly Portals" at the Ingenta Publisher Forum. This is an annual London event in which Ingenta invites its publisher customers to hear about company doings and industry...
This is an exercise in the literal. Librarians have long warned that you can't find everything that is on the Web on search engines. The part of the Web that is not searchable through these engines is known as the...
In late November, I'll be in London speaking at the Ingenta Publisher Forum. At this event, Ingenta's publisher customers meet with company representatives to hear about new developments and future plans for IngentaConnect, and to hear from invited industry insiders....
Among the interesting offerings on the customizable Web are services that allow you to create your own search engine. These services allow you to create a search engine focused on your topic of interest. They are a welcome answer to...
The online publisher Ingenta listens to its customers. Its IngentaConnect site was developed in a series of stages that involved customer consultation. This past year, it formed a ten-person IngentaConnect Library Advisory Group to advise the company on the development...