Has anyone hacked the Office 2003 Research Pane to search library tools? I suspect so. I am in no way a programmer (esp. in VB or whatever) ... but this seems very necessary. I mean really, Encarta? For "research"?

Gee. I wonder if I even have the programs to do it with?  ¶ 9:33 AM| (3) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Missed this.. RefWorks has a feed reader... Now that's interesting. Now, when I see something good in my research database feeds, I have to click through, go to the site, and export/import. This is supposed to do it straight from the feed... and it might get researchers to use refworks more (or not, depends...).

I just gave it a quick try, looks almost like it would be easier to still read in another format and just use RefWorks once you've decided you want to keep something.  ¶ 4:43 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Lipstick on a particularly stinky pig. Incremental, superficial changes... but they really need drastic work. As I've said before, if it weren't for their unique content, I'd never go there. In fact, I'd frequently rather do without.  ¶ 11:10 AM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  EBSCO: Release Information (EbscoHost finally on the Bandwagon) Woo-hoo. (BTW can everyone access the page linked above? There was a little locky thing on the link but I'm not our database admin?)

New release includes:

• Visual Search (by Grokker)
  
• EBSCOhost Clustering
• Database Selection From Basic or Advanced Search Screen
• Grouping of Databases by Subject
• Printing, Emailing and Saving in Standard Industry Formats
• RSS Feeds
• Date Range Limiter
• Option to Display, Save or Email EBSCOhost Records in MARC Format
• My EBSCOhost Personalization Folder Statistics and Reporting Function
• Context-specific Help
• EBSCOhost Result List Default Sorting Option
• Display of the Suggest Subject Terms Feature Controlled at the Database Level
• Tutorials included in EBSCOhost Online Help
• Direct Linked SmartLinks

Wow, must digest this...
updated for formatting and to highlight RSS FEEDS!!
update: the locky thing means just for EBSCO customers -- presumably, if you care about this you'll be someone with IP authentication into the databases so you should be able to follow the link. BTW, "industry formats" are like MLA, ALA, Chicago - not like RIS, BibTeX, etc. -- they already do RIS. Also, looks like next week for the update.  ¶ 12:13 PM| (2) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Research Wanted: Weblog Tools Market Share So, I'm working on my CIL2006 handout for the printed proceedings, and realize that the last time anyone made blog software market share analysis freely available was Feb '05 (and there were several methodological concerns). Has anyone revisited this? Done something scientific? Is there even something informal but more up to date?  ¶ 10:07 AM| (1) comments |cites (technorati) |

  NASA - New Horizons Bye little guy... best wishes on a safe and successful trip!


  ¶ 2:22 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  US News & WR via Yahoo: The Best Jobs to Have in 2006

The Best Jobs to Have in 2006 - All Business - Yahoo! Finance: "
Excellent Careers for 2006
U.S. News & World Report
Experts predict 2006 will be a good year for job candidates who possess desirable skills. Demand for these skilled workers could mean fatter paychecks. This is a guide to 16 careers that could do well -- and why. "

Well who would have thunk it. Librarian's on the list.
Pointed out by JCH on UMCLIS-L  ¶ 3:15 PM| (1) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Another PKM article, in an IEEE mag Clemente, B. E. and V. J. Pollara. "Mapping the Course, Marking the Trail." IT Professional 7, no. 6 (2005): 10-15. DOI: 10.1109/MITP.2005.149

Wow, another article on PKM—also citing “As we may think.”  They’re on to something here… but maybe the execution isn’t there yet or isn’t well-enough described to see….?  I’ve variously talked about wayfinding (see also Lueg and Bidwell) and non-linear or berry picking information seeking.  The authors talk about knowledge discovery trails which seem to kind of be like a stuff I’ve seen/life bits where it tracks where you go online and sort of visualizes your web browsing history.  Unlike the others, it doesn’t yet cover word documents or e-mail or anything besides the firefox browser.  Also, there’s Spinks’ more recent work on multi-task searching and real world experience of continuous attention/distraction/serendipitous finds.  IOW, it’s not clear how the trail deals with simultaneous streams – maybe a new window for each stream?  I guess they don’t really tell us enough to know.

Oh and they also talk about information extraction, but I’m not so sure about that either.  ¶ 2:53 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Wanderings of a Student Librarian: Carnival of the Infosciences #19 Wanderings of a Student Librarian: Carnival of the Infosciences #19  ¶ 2:35 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Some interesting things from "Searching to eliminate personal information management" This is one of a set of interesting articles in the new CACM issue on PIM. Unfortunately, there's nothing really new in these articles if you've been following the contributors' work in other information science venues (like ASIST, IR, MSR tech reports, etc). These articles also aren't research articles, but more magazine-like articles so the actual research is referred to -not reported. Anyway, there were some points worth remembering

Cutrell, E., Dumais, S. T., & Teevan, J. (2006). Searching to eliminate personal information management. Communications of the ACM, 49(1), 58-64. DOI: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1107458.1107492

Searching for PIM vs. web searching

• more about people (25% of searches in Stuff I've Seen by person's name or e-mail alias)
  
• more about time (not so fast -- time/date remembered/searched differs with context, could be when something happened, when an invitation was received, when a page was viewed, in episodic terms (at the same time as x happened, before y happened), etc)
  
• quick search with post-search sorting, refinement by facet preferred
  

BTW: Jack Vinson got his notes out first ('cause he worked my Christmas :) )

tag: PIM  ¶ 1:18 PM| (1) comments |cites (technorati) |