Library clips

Just to recap and add some regarding a previous post…I just noticed, (thanks to a great document on Furl - via weblogg-ed), that Furl  has a feature called Furl mates, a recommendations feature of links based on sites I have furled. There is a plug-in for del.icio.us for a similar tool called gre.gario.us, although this works on a different recommendation, it finds people who have bookmarked the same links as you. (I guess I wouldn’t call this a recommendation for web-sites rather a recommendation for people’s accounts, as you visit them to browse for what you like - interesting, tagging isn’t required for this feature to work).

Also I noticed that prior to what I’ve mentioned before I can’t seem to search by tag in Furl. Well I can browse the tags in the "popular headlines" page, but I can’t browse other tags not shown in this page. (Last time I mentioned changing the tag name after the "=" sign in the address bar, but this doesn’t seem to work as the URL is for popular sites not all sites (unlike del.icio.us which allows you to alter the term in the address bar and try your luck).

This gets me back to searching by tag without having to use a 3rd party interface such as Technorati, which I do use if I want an overall picture of the blogosphere and tagosphere (whatever you call it) and it’s conversation tracking features.

I’d like to search for a tag (results shown in an A-Z list, which is also good for browsing - I assume this may be too cumbersome, and a "no results shown" may have to do) or you may be recommended another tag. Then once I find my tag I click on it to search in a tag, and it’s business as usual.

I think at the moment del.icio.us searches in both the description and extended field in the one and only search. If del.icio.us ever does fielded searching, eg. by title (description field), by full-text or abstract (extended field), by tag, in all accounts, just your account…then it would be great having some code for a search box to put in your blog, just like Technorati’s searchlet.

The other day I posted about the lack of repositories being grouped together by subject…well I talked a little too soon. Reading my CAUL update today revealed a little suprise, well a big surprise…

…DOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) developed by University of Nottingham, UK and University of Lund, Sweden. Here is an excerpt:

"A new service is starting development to support the rapidly emerging movement towards Open Access to research information. The new service, called DOAR - the Directory of Open Access Repositories - will categorise and list the wide variety of Open Access research archives that have grown up around the world. Such repositories have mushroomed over the last 2 years in response to calls by scholars and researchers worldwide to provide open access to research information.

DOAR will provide a comprehensive and authoritative list of institutional and subject-based repositories, as well as archives set up by funding agencies - like the National Institutes for Health in the USA or the Wellcome Trust in the UK and Europe. Users of the service will be able to analyse repositories by location, type, the material they hold and other measures. This will be of use both to users wishing to find original research papers and for third-party "service providers", like search engines or alert services, which need easy to use tools for developing tailored search services to suit specific user communities."