Library clips

I just noticed Swiki is up and running again…

When doing research I find little gems of information in repositories or archives…the more I use them the more I need a tool that searches them all at the same time in order to save time. I like the idea of a registry where all archives are listed, where you have the notion that by consulting this registry your being exhaustive as possible. Such a place is the Institutional Archives Registry…they do an excellent job but the only problem for me is that you can’t browse by subject. Archive storage houses can come from associations, federations, universities, organisations, etc…

Here are a few repositories I’ve found where the content is specific to LIS (not including journal databases):

DoIS

d-LIST

OCLC

CLIR

Alia e-prints

E-LIS (also has a feed).

LDL

DLF

Then I came across SDL (browse archives)…an answer to my request…I wonder if there are any other archives to add to this list….

I like the idea of E-print network (for scientists and engineers), maybe we need a site like this for LIS.

Here is a relevant article on repositories.

I wish some news engines listed the sources they cover…the reason for this is that if I subscribe to the content of numerous news engines there are alot of duplicates..but at the same time I want to be exhaustive and not miss anything.

 I set up a Blogdigger group for news on Natural Medicine…scoured alot of news sites, some of the content was via search queries and some was via their directory. (the feeds from the sites are shown on the right at the Blogdigger group page)…I’m wondering how Blogdigger handles duplicates and do they show all the content from all these feeds, or just a compilation? If it is just a compilation then I would like to decrease the number of feeds in this group and just have the feeds that I know cover different sources…back to my problem being a lot of these news sites don’t list their sources.

For all I know just using Google news may give me the same results, although it’s only as good as my search query….I guess that’s why I like news from directories/categories, such as All Headlines News, which give precise results.

Wouldn’t it be great if Boardreader gave an RSS feed for search query results, who knows they might as they have a blog searching function coming soon (and RSS search query feeds are most common with blog engines).

I also wonder what sources they track…this also applies to Lycos discussion.

Google groups, Yahoo groups, have a searchable index of their respective contents (Google also including use.net)…they do have Web-feeds(RSS, ATOM) for each group, but fail to have it across all groups. I’d like to see an RSS feed generated for a search across all the groups,Yahoo already do this for their news site…

So far the only "groups" tool I’ve found that notifies latest results from a search query in it’s whole database is NetNews Tracker (only tracks use.net)…but again this is by email, not RSS.

ADDITIONAL: Pubsub generates RSS feeds for search queries across all use.net groups

There is a lot of speculation of the effectiveness of social tagging items in a shared repositry. Will it make retrieving items easier since the user is more familiar with the vocabularly? Will it be a headache for the IM or IA personnel to keep track of this intuitive chaos? One thing it will do, as mentioned in a blog post by the Community Engine blog is break corporate silos. It is mentioned that a recommendation engine built from correlating different terms used to describe the same thing can help to build a shared and user defined vocabularly amongst different departments within an organisation. Traditional views can’t see the longevity of this approach to tagging, but ít would be great to see an example in a controlled environment. I’d like to see how the tags scale and if the folksonomy needs to be sculptured or rules defined at certain stages. Some would say this goes beyond the idea of free tagging, there should be no rules. But I think we can develop folksonomies as a tool for users to define their own vocabularly they are familiar with and for the IA to review the terms and clean up the tags (synonyms, spelling mistakes, plurals, acronyms, etc..) as the system grows. Then users need to be notified of the changes in terms in the viewable index (alphabetical ??). In this way their is still an element of control as the repositry organically grows, both the user and the IA are working together.

Are there any examples of social tagging archives within a corporate firewall, and what brand of systems are being used…are they built in-house or is it a local version of services such as Furl or del.icio.us (if this is possible)