Library clips :: February

February 23, 2005

Visually emerging vocabularies…

It’s much easier to understand the empirical impact of folksonomies when looking at it from a visual point of view. I find this blog post by Vanderwal.net spot on in my grasp of this topic…I like this proviso relating to the prevention of skewed results:

"It is important to note that folksonomies work best when the tags used to describe objects are in the common vocabularly and not what the person perceives others will call it…"

Based on he’s sample we can see graphically the most used common tags for an item…"that could be used (to)extract a contolled vocabularly…" …I was alluding to this point in an earlier post.

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LIS subject area search in databases

Filed under: library

Been doing a bit of research lately on some of the larger full-text databases that include LIS info.

On three of the one’s I regularly use I found it hard to search just in the LIS subject area…but did eventually have some success (I don’t have a subscription to any of these so I’m not sure of any added features).

Ingenta allowed searching in a particular journal or across its entire collection…it allows browsing within "Library Science", but doesn’t search within just this area.

Emerald doesn’t allow you to search within a subject area but in its "Advanced search" it does allow you to check journals that you want to search, which I think is a great feature.

Elsevier has so many entry points to its collection that I get confused (Elsevier, Scirus, ScienceDirect). I found the best way was to go via the Elsevier homepage, choose the "Social Sciences" subject area and choose "Library & Information Science" (It’s great to see that LIS is within Social Sciences, and not Computers, Business, IT, or Reference). On the right is a Scirus search box where you can search in a single journal or within the LIS subject area. If you want to do another search you have to do it from the original site and not Scirus (as Scirus won’t limit to LIS subject area).

Now that I’ve graduated from my LIS studies I lack the access to full-text of these databases, but I’m ever thankful they allow free peeks at their abstracts.

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