Library clips

Bloglines has augmented the way I work, I visit it multiple times a day…it has become an extension…

Since I’ve been using it for a long while and lived to see all the new features, I would like to comment some feedback on its functionality.

Channels

Even though I’m managing my feeds in folders the list is getting rather long (I don’t think sub-folders is necessarily the solution)..instead of opening multiple accounts (one for personal, one for work-related stuff, or by subject) I would like to see channels within the same account. I find this works really well with the web monitoring agent, WatchThatPage when I clip an item a prompt box asks which channel to file this in, then later you can organise it within a folder. Then when I’m reading my account I can specify a channel, avoiding scrolling past irrelevant folders. I wonder if this would mean you would have multiple OPML’s, one for each channel, and a total one.

Search

Apart from searching my subscriptions could it search selected feeds from my subscriptions, that is could all my feeds have a check box where I could select the feeds to search…good to search a single feed from a blog that doesn’t have a search box of it’s own (I know I can use Google site search for this but if I do it via Bloglines I can then subscribe to a search query RSS feed for a single blog - this feature would be great for Blogs where I only like some of the content…it could reduce the number of irrelevant posts.

Does anybody know if you can site search on Technorati, Feedster, Blogdigger or Pubsub and subscribe to the feed of the results?

Citation feed

Read my post in the Bloglines forum…apparently this is coming soon.

Admin

I find that I can’t rename a folder, and that I have to make a new folder then transfer all the feeds across…maybe I’m missing something..

Duplicates

Is there a way to filter the same posts that re-occur in many of my feeds…it seems hard as some posts are virtually the same but just re-edited a tiny bit…I suppose I mean can my reader know that a permalink has already been shown in my reader (not a link within a post but the URL of the actual post)…if I want to see it again I will search for it in my subscriptions, but I don’t want to see it in new content…this happens a lot especially when you subscribe to Furl or del.icio.us feeds.

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.

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.

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."