The next issue of Internet Resources Newsletter will be published at the end of January. In the meantime, Marion, Catherine and myself wish all readers a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year.

Internet Resources Newsletter by email and RSS

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To add this RSS feed to Bloglines, Feedster, etc, either copy and paste the above URL into your feed reader, or use the 'Add to any feed reader' button towards the top left on IRN web pages.

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Here is this month's selection of news items of interest

[Contents] - [ IRN Home Page ] - [HWU Library Home Page] 

A-Z NEW & NOTABLE WEB SITES

10 x 10

http://www.tenbyten.org/

100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time.

Academic Info: What's New

http://www.academicinfo.net/new.html

This service has started up again.

academici

http://www.academici.com/

A knowledge network of academic experts.

ACAP: Automated Content Access Protocol

http://www.the-acap.org/

ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) is being developed as an industry standard by the publishing industry, working with search engines and other technical and commercial partners.

ACAP will enable the providers of all types of content published on the World Wide Web to communicate permissions information (relating to access and use of that content) in a form that can be automatically recognized and interpreted, so that business partners can systematically comply with the publishers' policies. In the first instance, ACAP will provide a framework that will allow any publisher, large or small, to express access and use policies in a language that search engines' robot "spiders" can be taught to understand. It is anticipated that, in future, the scope of ACAP will be extended to other business relationships and other media types.

Accounting, Business Studies and Economics Dictionary

http://www.tuition.com.hk/dictionary/

A Dictionary for students.

Advanced Industrial Science and Technology: AIST

http://www.aist.go.jp/index_en.html

Full text of this journal is freely available.

AjaxTrans

http://ajax.parish.ath.cx/translator/

Translates to any of five languages, as you type!

Anthro.Net

http://anthro.net/

“Anthro.Net is a unique research engine, which is distinct from search engines and edited directories. Search engines use mindless robots to scour the web to count keywords on pages. Edited directories, such as Looksmart, use human editors to categorize the subject matter. There are several excellent ones for anthropology; including Points of Reference. The problem with these is that they are ultimately a product of their webmaster's interests, abilities and energy to maintain their pages.

Anthro.Net queries a database of over 40,000 pages from reviewed web sites with anthropological content built by users' interests.”

Anthropology Collection Database

http://www.calacademy.org/research/anthropology/collection/

From the California Academy of Sciences, a free searchable database.

AQA

http://www.aqa.issuebits.com/index.htm

“We're called AQA, which stands for Any Question Answered. Yes, any. Try us. Simply put AQA's number in your phone (63336 for UK mobile phones or 57275 for Irish mobile phones), text a question to this number, wait a couple of minutes or so and we'll get back to you with your answer. A good answer. An answer from intelligent human beings with a bank of knowledge and insight at their disposal. It's like having your mobile phone permanently on phone-a-friend.”

Art and Architecture

http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/index.html

“The Art and Architecture web site is designed to be explored. There are more than 40,000 images here, and a network of over half a million links. There are amazing and wonderful things to find, and any number of ways of finding them.”

Awareness Watch™ Newsletter V4N12 December 2006

http://zillman.blogspot.com/2006/11/awareness-watch-newsletter-v4n12.html

The December 2006 V4N12 Awareness Watch™ Newsletter is a freely available 45 page .pdf document (877 KB) from this URL. The Awareness Watch Featured Report this month features Healthcare Resources.

Biomicrofluidics

http://bmf.aip.org/

Biomicrofluidics is an online open-access journal published by the American Institute of Physics to rapidly disseminate novel microfluidic techniques with diagnostic, medical, biological, pharmaceutical, environmental, and chemical applications.

biz/ed

http://www.bized.co.uk/

Following withdrawal of Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funding, and in order to maintain an important educational service, the website was acquired from the University of Bristol by Thomson Learning in August, and is now available at this new address

BSV (Building Services Vacancies) Recruitment Consultants.

http://www.bsvconsultants.co.uk/

“BSV is dedicated to recruitment within Building Services. Created by Professional Building Services Engineers who understand the vacancies they are posting.

The recruitment team has over two decades of Engineering Consultancy and Contracting experience, which includes CIBSE membership, as well as being accomplished in Recruitment.”

Chem.de

http://www.chem.de/

“Chem.de is a project of the Chemistry Information Centre (FIZ) Berlin, the German Chemical Society (GDCh) and the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) Hannover. We offer broad information about chemistry.”

City of Literature

http://www.cityofliterature.com/

“Welcome to Edinburgh, the world's very first City of Literature, a permanent title awarded to the city by UNESCO. We seek to build on our rich literary heritage by promoting the vibrant contemporary book culture that Edinburgh has to offer - a culture that can be found throughout Scotland.”

Confabb

http://www.confabb.com/

Confabb (confabb.com) combines an aggregate database of major conferences, conventions, and trade shows sorted by industry with social networking tools designed to empower conference attendees to improve their overall experience.

Built into the site is a reputation management system to be used by conference attendees, speakers, organizers and administrators allowing people to plan for and attend conferences, and critique and review those they have attended and want to share with colleagues. No other resource contains such a comprehensive listing of events or as robust a tool set for maximizing the conference experience via the live Web.

CR4

http://cr4.globalspec.com/

Industry-based forums for discussing engineering issues.

Educators Corner

http://edcorner.stanford.edu/

A free collection of entrepreneurship education resources.

Electronic Journals Library

http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/index.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=7&lang=en

“The Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek EZB (Electronic Journals Library) is a service to facilitate the use of scholarly journals on the internet. It offers a fast, structured and unified interface to access full text articles online.”

At the moment, it contains 28321 titles, among them 3408 online-only journals, covering all subjects. 12518 journals can be read free-of-charge.

Elgg

http://elgg.org/

Elgg is an open source software platform designed to allow people to easily connect and share resources. Established in March 2004 by Ben Werdmuller and David Tosh, Elgg allows you to create a social network and host it on your own infrastructure, modifying the features to fit your specific needs.

Users establish personal digital identities and connect with other people, collaborate with them and discover new resources through their connections. Plugins allow users on different social networks to collaborate, and provide specific functionality for tasks like project management, mobile browsing and collaboration through user-controlled wikis.

Engineering Education

http://www.engsc.ac.uk/journal/

Engineering Education is a peer-reviewed, international journal and is freely available via the website of the Engineering Subject Centre and distributed in paper format to all UK university libraries and Engineering departments. Engineering Education is published in the summer and winter each year.

English Short Title Catalogue

http://estc.bl.uk/F/?func=file&file_name=login-bl-list

The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) lists over 460,000 items published between 1473 and 1800, mainly in Britain and North America, mainly, but not exclusively, in English from the collections of the British Library and over 2,000 other libraries.

European Archive

http://www.europarchive.org/

The European Archive is a digital library of cultural artifacts in digital form.

EuroSimE 2007

http://www.eurosime.org/

To be held in London, England. 15-18 April 2007.

Focusing on Thermal, Mechanical and Multi-Physics Simulation and Experiments in Microelectronics and Microsystems this conference brings together experts from around the world.

Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval

http://www.nowpublishers.com/ir/

A new subscription-based journal.

Hawksmere

http://www.hawksmereltd.co.uk/hawksmere/

Hawksmere has over many years established a solid reputation for the quality and timeliness of its seminars and conferences in subjects as diverse as business law, commercial contracting, project management, facilities management, marketing, PR and senior management development.

Health Search Plus

http://www.healthsearchplus.com

With Health Search Plus you can simultaneously search within Google, Yahoo, DMOZ, Images, Videos, Podcasts, News, Message Boards, Blogs, Books, Groups, Medical Encyclopedias and Dictionaries, Pubmed, Cochrane Reviews, NIH, FDA, CDC and more.

iMechanica

http://www.imechanica.org/

iMechanica aims to use the Internet to enhance communications among mechanicians, and to pave a way to evolve all knowledge of mechanics online. iMechanica is hosted on a server at Harvard University, and runs like a common, such as Boston Common and Central Park. It belongs to whoever uses it.

IMechE Proceedings Archive 1847-1996

http://archive.pepublishing.com/home/main.mpx

The IMechE Proceedings Archive 1847-1996 gives you direct access to over 200,000 pages of unique material, including technical papers, obituaries, meeting reports, technical drawings, and editorial comment, all covering some of the most influential and innovative years of engineering development.

In:Form

http://www.napier.ac.uk/inform/

Napier Library's Online Information Skills resource.

Information: Interactions and Impact (i3) conference

http://www.i3conference.org.uk/

The Department of Information Management, Aberdeen Business School, The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK, 25-28 June 2007.

Institution of Mechanical Engineers – The Presidents' Choice

http://presidentschoice.imeche.org.uk/

The Presidents’ Choice Web site was launched on 16 October 2006. It is a collection of prestige lectures and practical papers which are completely free to access.

International Journal of the Commons

http://www.ejournals.nl/index.php/ijc/index

International Journal of the Commons is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed open-access journal dedicated to further our understanding of institutions for use and management of resources that are (or could be) enjoyed collectively.

International Journal of Vehicular Technology

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijvt/

International Journal of Vehicular Technology is available free of charge as an Open Access journal on the Internet.

iTunes - University Podcast Collection

http://www.oculture.com/weblog/2006/10/free_university_1.html

University Podcasts Collection on iTunes.

Jan Szczepanski's lists of OA-journals

http://www.his.se/templates/vanligwebbsida1.aspx?id=20709

Mentioned in last month’s IRN, Jan tells me that the list is growing, with about 100 new titles a month so the figures mentioned last month are a bit out of date. Recent figures (2nd Nov) are 4916 current and 948 historic.

JISC Inform 15

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/pub_inform15.aspx

The autumn issue of JISC Inform is available. This issue highlights science and innovation.

Joint Research Centre (EU)

http://www.jrc.ec.europa.eu/

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) is the European Commission’s own research centre.

"The mission of the JRC is to provide customer-driven scientific and technical support for the conception, development, implementation and monitoring of EU policies. As a service of the European Commission, the JRC functions as a reference centre of science and technology for the Union. Close to the policy-making process, it serves the common interest of the Member States, while being independent of special interests, whether private or national."

Journal of Information, Information Technology, and Organizations

http://jiito.org/

Available free of charge as an Open Access journal.

Latindex

http://www.latindex.unam.mx/

Latindex Es producto de la cooperación de una red de instituciones que funcionan de manera coordinada para reunir y diseminar información bibliográfica sobre las publicaciones científicas seriadas producidas en la región.

Leveraging the Power of White Papers: How to Create White Papers That Persuade

http://www.freepint.com/issues/231106.htm#tips

An article in a recent issue of FreePint, by Michael A. Stelzner.

LibWorm

http://www.libworm.com/

A search engines for over 1,000 library blogs. You can also produce RSS feeds from searches. Note also the category feeds.

MatDL

http://matdl.org/fez/index.php

The NSDL MatDL Pathway aims to provide stewardship for content and services needed across the MS community and in particular for its targeted audience of materials undergraduate and graduate students, educators, and researchers.

Available here are: Tools, like the Repository and Soft Matter Wiki, to describe, manage, exchange, archive, and disseminate data among national and international government-funded materials teams and centers.

MatForge for open access development of modeling and simulation tools.

Teaching Archive for collaborative development of core undergraduate MS teaching materials.

Services and content for virtual labs in large undergraduate introductory science courses.

meebo

http://wwwm.meebo.com/index-en.html

Instant messaging access.

MicroStencil

http://www.microstencil.com/

MicroStencil offers breakthrough electroformed stencil technology and interconnecting solutions for the microelectronics packaging industry.

mirum.net

http://competitive-intelligence.mirum.net/

You can find tips, tricks and resources related to competitive intelligence here.

Modern Building Services

http://www.modbs.co.uk/

Modern Building Services offers an editorial perspective covering not only traditional areas of building services but also seeking to unify the role of everyone in the industry across the entire building process, from inception to lifetime maintenance and refurbishment.

MPS Technologies Ltd

http://www.mpstechnologies.com/

MPS Technologies Ltd (MPS) offers state-of-the-art publishing related products and services to publishers and librarians. Products include Bookstore, a digital content delivery platform.

New Scientist Podcasts

http://www.newscientist.com/podcast.ns

A weekly podcast is available here.

Online Access to Research in the Environment: OARE

http://www.oaresciences.org/en/

Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE), an international public-private consortium coordinated by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Yale University, and leading science and technology publishers, enables developing countries to gain free access to one of the world's largest collections of environmental science literature.

Over one thousand scientific journal titles owned and published by over 200 prestigious publishing houses, scholarly societies, and scientific associations are now available in 70 low income countries. Another 36 countries will be added by 2008.

OpenAjax Alliance

http://openajax.org/

The OpenAjax Alliance is an organization of leading vendors, open source projects, and companies using Ajax that are dedicated to the successful adoption of open and interoperable Ajax-based Web technologies. The prime objective is to accelerate customer success with Ajax by promoting a customer's ability to mix and match solutions from Ajax technology providers and by helping to drive the future of the Ajax ecosystem.

Optics InfoBase

http://www.opticsinfobase.org/

InfoBase is the Optical Society of America’s (OSA) online database of both current and past volumes of all its journals.

OttoBib

http://www.ottobib.com/

You can create a citation from a book’s ISBN.

Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research

http://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca//index.php/perj

The first issue of this journal is now available.

PostgraduateStudentships.co.uk

http://www.postgraduatestudentships.co.uk/

“All types of funding, all levels, all for postgraduates all in one place“

The idea behind the site is that it brings together all the different sources of postgraduate funding for potential (and actual) postgraduates together in one place, so intending students will be able to see funding from general sources such as charities and research councils, alongside those from universities.

Public Sector Select List

http://www.selectlist.co.uk/

The Public Sector Select List website is an online procurement system that features the Supplier Information Database and provides access to public sector contracts and tenders in the UK. Users can search and set alerts to deliver tender notice information direct to email.

Publishing Research Consortium

http://www.publishingresearch.org.uk/

The Publishing Research Consortium is a group representing publishers and societies supporting global research into scholarly communication, with the aim to provide unbiased data and objective analysis.

A recent report is: Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-existence or Competition? An international Survey of Librarians’ Preferences.

Research Leaders

http://www.le.ac.uk/researchleader/

An online resource to support the leadership development of Principal Investigators. Newly appointed PIs are expected to lead and manage a research team, secure new research grants, liaise with stakeholders, publish, respond to with institutional issues and agendas, and maintain and develop their own research expertise. Frequently they simultaneously carry out a range of teaching and administrative duties too.

This resource aims to help new Principal Investigators navigate the bewildering array of leadership and management responsibilities that come with this role.

Resource Personnel Oil & Gas Jobs

http://www.resourcepersonnel.com/

Specialists in supplying professionals for field development teams to the upstream oil and gas industry worldwide.

RUSQ - Reference & User Services Quarterly

http://www.rusq.org/

RUSQ—Reference & User Services Quarterly (ISSN: 1094-9054) is the official journal of the Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association.

Safety Software Directory

http://www.ehssoftserve.com/Sdirectory/index.htm

A searchable, on-line directory of software, web applications, and electronic resources for occupational health and safety. Each listing contains a brief description of each product and direct links to the developer's web site for additional company and product information.

Unlimited access to the Safety Software Directory for one full year is $199 for individuals.

Scholarpedia

http://www.scholarpedia.org/

The free peer reviewed encyclopedia written by scholars from all around the world.

Scottish Poetry Library

http://www.spl.org.uk/

“The Scottish Poetry Library is the place for poetry in Scotland, for the regular reader, the serious student or the casual browser.”

slideshare

http://slideshare.net/

A place to share and discover slideshows.

Staff College Automated Military Periodicals Index: SCAMPI

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/scampi/

The Joint Forces Staff College Library is a specialized military library, focusing on research in joint and multinational operations, military history and naval science, operational warfare, and operations other than war. Library staff members regularly scan the weekly news magazines, monthly and bimonthly journals such as Military Review, Armed Forces Journal, and quarterly publications, including NATO's Nations and Partners for Peace, RUSI Journal, and the Naval War College Review. Miscellaneous reports from RAND and the General Accounting Office are also indexed for SCAMPI. The resulting database serves as a guide to articles on military and naval art and science, operational warfare, joint planning, national and international politics, and other areas researched by JFSC faculty, staff, and students.

Strategic Alliance of Federal Science and Technology Libraries

http://safstl-asbstf.scitech.gc.ca/

From Canada - Federal Science eLibrary

The proposed Federal Science eLibrary aims to deliver seamless and equitable access to full-text electronic journals in science, technology and medicine (STM) to the desktops of all federal government researchers, policy analysts and decision makers.

Structural Engineering International: SEI

http://www.iabse.ethz.ch/journalsei/asareader/index.php

Structural Engineering International (SEI), the quarterly Journal of the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering (IABSE), is the leading international journal of structural engineering dealing with all types of structures and materials.

The journal is available through IABSE Membership or Annual Subscription, but from this page you can view: Summaries of technical articles from the year 2003, SEI Table of Contents 2006, and the full length of the article: Structural Applications of Aluminium in Civil Engineering F. Mazzolini.

Students Online

http://students-online.co.uk/

A student community website, a bit like Myspace for students.

Study Skills Guide for Students

http://www.educationatlas.com/study-skills.html

Developing effective study skills, improving reading comprehension, discovering your own personal study style, learning to manage your time more efficiently and learning the best way to prepare for exams are just a few of the topics covered in "The Study Skills Guide for Students".

Syndetic Solutions

http://www.syndetics.com/

Syndetic Solutions provides specialized, quality bibliographic data to enhance library online catalogs.

Technovelgy

http://www.technovelgy.com/

The creative ideas and inventions of science fiction writers.

The Stormont Papers

http://stormontpapers.ahds.ac.uk/index.html

This website offers access to the Parliamentary Papers of the devolved government of Northern Ireland from June 7 1921 to the dissolution of Parliament in March 28 1972.

theArchitectureRoom.com

http://www.thearchitectureroom.com/

News, jobs, books, etc.

Timeline

http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/

This is well worth having a look at. Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information.

Tricks and tips for better web search – and - What's new in search tools

http://www.ukeig.org.uk/training/index.html

Karen Blakeman's Online 2006 presentations are now available for download.

UC Berkeley on Google Video

http://video.google.com/ucberkeley.html

The University of California, Berkeley is the pre-eminent public research and teaching institution in the nation. From classic literature to emerging technologies, the curricula of our 130 academic departments span the wide world of thought and knowledge. Supported by the people of California, the university has embraced public service as an essential part of its mission since 1868. The content on this page—drawn from campus seminars, courses and events—is just one part of UC Berkeley's commitment to the broadest possible dissemination of knowledge for the benefit of our state, the nation and the world.

UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research.

http://www.ukfederation.org.uk/

The federation provides a single solution to access online resources and services for education and research.

Web Curator Tool

http://webcurator.sourceforge.net/

The Web Curator Tool (WCT) is a tool for managing the selective web harvesting process. It is designed for use in libraries and other collecting organisations, and supports collection by non-technical users while still allowing complete control of the web harvesting process

Zimbio

http://www.zimbio.com/

“Our network of public portals are designed to help people quickly get down the learning curve on any topic of interest by seeing what other people are reading, saying, and recommending about the topic. Public portals are interactive, dynamic websites that offer a range of features including group blogging, member photos, links to favorite websites, RSS headlines, tracking of search results, and discussion forums.”

[Contents] - [ IRN Home Page ] - [HWU Library Home Page] 

NICE WEB SITE

In the course of finding sites of interest for this Newsletter, we sometimes come across Web sites which we feel deserve slightly more than a passing mention. Each month we will pick out one or more such sites, and give them a short review. The sites will normally be UK based, may be small or large, and be of interest or potential interest to academics. After lengthy discussions we have decided, with incredible creativity :-), to call these: Nice Web Sites. Details of previous Nice Web Sites are available in the Nice Web Site Archive.

There are two Nice Web Sites this month. Both are subject-based, and both take advantage of some Web 2.0 concepts.

iMechanica
http://www.imechanica.org/
iMechanica aims to use the Internet to enhance communications among mechanicians, and to pave a way to evolve all knowledge of mechanics online. iMechanica is hosted on a server at the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, of Harvard University. A growing team of volunteers serve as architects, moderators, and developers. iMechanica is an outgrowth of Applied Mechanics News and its sister blogs. iMechanica is free: writers are free to post, and readers are free to read.

CR4
http://cr4.globalspec.com/
News, comment, forums, blogs, RSS feeds and more, in engineering, from GlobalSpec.

RM

[Contents] - [ IRN Home Page ] - [HWU Library Home Page] 

BLOGORAMA

News about Blogs, RSS, etc:

You already know what blogs are, but for more information about RSS see the Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol) or Webopedia http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RSS.html

The Internet Resources Newsletter has an RSS feed (essentially the Table of Contents for each issue): http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/irn/irn.rss

Library Blog Search Engine
http://libraryzen.com/
A custom search engine that sifts through 530 individual blogs.

RSS Specifications
http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm
A list of sites allowing you to submit RSS feeds

The Academic Blog Portal
http://www.academicblogs.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Government Central
http://www.government-central.com/
RSS feeds for government agencies

Property Week feeds
http://www.property-week.co.uk/rssindex.asp?navcode=1795

Feeds 2.0
http://www.feeds2.com/
Feeds 2.0 is a Web 2.0 personalized RSS aggregator. It incorporates a learning engine so that it does much more than show posts as they come in. Instead, it prioritizes incoming information according to the user's interests.

RSS feeds from UN bodies
http://unhq-appspub-01.un.org/lib/dhlrefweblog.nsf/dx/21112006020405PMSLKQD4.htm
A post from UN Pulse

Electronic Journals with RSS Feeds 
http://www.library.unr.edu/ejournals/alphaRSS.aspx
A long list, from the University of Nevada, Reno Libraries

This month's selected interesting blogs and RSS feeds

UK Web Focus
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/
Reflections on the Web, from Brian Kelly at Ukoln.

SPE Updates - RSS feeds
http://updates.spe.org/index.php/news-feeds/
From the Society of Petroleum Engineers

Open Rights Group
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/

Medical feeds
http://www.medical-feeds.com/

Confused of Calcutta
http://www.confusedofcalcutta.com/

all my eye
http://allmyeye.blogspot.com/
"Wherein the Ingenta product management, engineering, and information architecture teams ramble, rant, and generally sound off on topics of the day"

Emerald LibraryLink Blog
http://librarians.emeraldinsight.com/blog/

PhysOrg.com
http://www.physorg.com/physorg.rss

Calls for papers from Inderscience
http://www.inderscience.com/rss/calls.php
This Call-for-Papers channel covers the latest calls for papers produced by Inderscience's distinguished academic, scientific and professional journals

PopSciBlog
http://popsci.typepad.com/

Brightsurf Science News
http://www.brightsurf.com/rss_feed.xml

Atypon Systems
http://www.atypon.com/news/
Atypon provided software, hosting, and systems development to the information industry.

Information Overload
http://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/john.williams
by John Williams, Newcastle University

Blatant Berry Blog
http://blatant.libraryjournal.com/blog/
New views of the library landscape

Nano Technology Blog
http://cr4.globalspec.com/blog/13/Nano-Technology-Blog

Defenestrated
http://defenestrated.typepad.com/defenestrated/
A delicate blend of government technology, grants management, cool gadgets, Britain, and the arts, with a dusting of random weirdness

Useful Chemistry
http://usefulchem.blogspot.com/

if:book
http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/
This blog is the public mind space of the Institute for the Future of the Book, a New York-based collective devoted to chronicling and positively impacting humanity's shift from printed page to networked screen.

iMechanica - web of mechanics and mechanicians
http://imechanica.org/rss.xml

Engineering Library Instruction
http://www.library.drexel.edu/blogs/engineeringlibraryinstruction/
This is a new Instruction blog to help students develop their information seeking skills for their research projects.

lo-fi librarian
http://www.lo-fi-librarian.co.uk/
A legal librarian’s musings, from the UK

CED Industry News
http://www.cedmagazine.com/CEDIndustryNews.xml?nid=2797

Everything 2.0
http://bobstumpel.blogspot.com/

TradePub.com PubFeeds
http://rss.tradepub.com/?br=techxtra

[Contents] - [ IRN Home Page ] - [HWU Library Home Page] 

PRESS RELEASES

**** The ‘Long Tail’ of technology information ****

It’s a prerequisite for any successful search service in technology and technology-related subjects to have a ‘Long Tail’ – by that I mean a large inventory of relevant data. This is because the majority of search queries made by technologists, or by others seeking information in technology-related subjects, tend to be very specific. It’s in the nature of the subjects, and the information retrieval needs of those involved in these subjects, for granularity to be important.

TechXtra http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/ aggregates content from a large number of different databases containing technology-related content. A search of TechXtra will search across more than 4 million records of various kinds – articles, technical reports, digital theses and dissertations, books, eprints, news items, job announcements, video, learning & teaching resources, key websites, and more – most of which relate to technology subjects. TechXtra has a ‘Long Tail’, and its getting longer.

TechXtra aggregates, so that you don’t have to. From the one TechXtra search box, you can currently search 29 databases. If you need them, there are easy links to the native interfaces of these 29 databases. Hits from searches are shown by database, so you can scan their content. Sometimes this is useful, and sometimes not (we’re working on more options). If you want, you can restrict searches to a particular format (technical reports, or articles, or books, and so on), or two selected databases using the Advanced Search option.

TechXtra recently added three more databases to its cross-search:

In the majority of cases, the full text of items found through TechXtra is freely available. This includes the 8,000 Australian theses mentioned above, nearly half a million articles in computer and information science from CiteSeer, items found via ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World), thousands of eprints from arXiv in mathematics and computer science, 300 earthquake engineering technical reports from Caltech Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory Technical Reports, many articles from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), theses and dissertations from NDLTD, resources from around 30 institutional open archives in the United Kingdom, learning resources from the National Engineering Education Delivery System (NEEDS), and more. We’ll shortly be adding graphics which will give a visual indication of the likelihood of being able to click-through to the full text.

Sometimes, materials found via TechXtra are not available in full text, or are only available if you, or your institution, subscribes to the service, or via pay-per-view.

In addition to the cross-search, TechXtra provides a number of other useful services, some of which have recently been expanded.

Numerous new feeds have been added to the OneStep News service http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/onestepnews/ giving this wider coverage of breaking industry news. The new feeds are from: PRWeb, AZoM Materials/Engineering News, NASA Breaking News, MIT News, EETimes News, ENCMag.com News, and Automotive World News, and more.
Over 5,000 news items are currently listed.

The coverage of OneStep Jobs, http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/onestepjobs/ which gives access to the very latest new job announcements has also been increased. New sources include: Total Jobs, TipTopJobs, IrishDev.com Jobs, 4ConstructionJobs.co.uk, and Eluta.
Over 7,000 new jobs are currently listed.

For those who’d like to subscribe, free, to numerous trade magazines, white papers and surveys, TechXtra has a Magazine Subscription section http://techxtra.tradepub.com/ All titles are free to professionals who qualify.

Sample titles include:

There are also links (Xtra Extras) to newsletters of interest in technology information, a design data search service, a bookstore, and an Offshore Engineering Information service.

Some more features will shortly be added.

TechXtra is a freely available service, developed at Heriot Watt University in the UK. We receive no external funding for its development, so we rely on word of mouth to spread the word. I hope you may help, and tell your colleagues about TechXtra, or blog about the service, or place a link to it from your websites.

For more information, contact: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk

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