Open-Source Search Engine Wikia Search
Check out the new search engine wikia search! It is not only the newest search engine on the block, but also new (and I believe unique) in its values (see Wikia Search Alpha Launched January 7, 2008):
- Transparency - Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.
- Community - Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community focus.
- Quality - Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the searching experience.
- Privacy - Must be protected, do not store or transmit any identifying data.
Plus, building on the approach that has made Wikipedia so successful, it allows users to enhance the search engine by contributing to "mini articles" on search terms that will provide short definitions of terms, help disambiguate similar or identical terms, and provide photos and "see also" references.
Here is the NYT coverage: Wiki Citizens Taking on a New Area: Searching By MIGUEL HELFT Published: January 7, 2008.
Continue readingVisit AHA online!
The Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) began on January 3 in Washington DC and Rick Shenkman, the editor of the History News Network, is posting his "reporter's notebook" online with video excerpts of talks and panels.
- Reporter's Notebook: Highlights from the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association (Wash. DC) By Rick Shenkman
There are some really interesting and fun things to listen to here! For a sample, start by listening to Congresswoman Pat Schroeder on Day 2 recounting "the sorry history she experienced in the House as one of a handful of congresswomen."
Continue readingPending Transparency Legislation
Here’s a list of pending legislation relevant to government openness and transparency maintained by The Open House Project..
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2004 EPA Report Concluded Libraries had Great ROI
The Government Printing Office recently posted a small sample of EPA documents harvested from the EPA web. I'm not writing about this effort today, but so far it looks promising and I commend GPO for sharing part of the results with the community. There will be more about this later.
Today I'm writing about one of the fruits of their web harvesting. One of the reports that GPO pulled and I hope is eventually widely distributed in print is:
Business case for information services : EPA's regional libraries and information centers
by United States. Office of Environmental Information.; United States. Environmental Protection Agency. National Library Network.
EPA 260-R-04-001, Published January 2004
Because I'm uncertain what will happen to the current GPO page once the pilot is finished, I've elected to post this report to the Internet Archive at http://www.archive.org/details/BusinessCaseForInformationServicesEpasRegionalLibrariesAndCenters.
What really impressed me about this report, which might have been mentioned before, is how the authors found a strong financial benefit to EPA running regional libraries. Here is their Executive Summary (bolding mine):
The Environmental Protection Agency?s network of regional libraries and environmental center libraries provides substantial value to the Agency, its professional staff, stakeholders, and the public. Calculated conservatively, the benefit-to-cost ratio for EPA library services ranges between 2:1 and 5.7:1. Libraries and librarians are nonetheless a significant investment, costing the Agency roughly $6.2 million annually to operate and maintain. It is an opportune time to initiate an Agency-wide dialog on the extent and nature of library services at the Environmental Protection Agency.
The rest of this 24 page report basically expands on these findings. Unsurprisingly, time as well as money were saved. According to a table at page 16 of the PDF file, 2003 reference for EPA staff saved the agency over 16,000 hours and over 14,000 hours in serving external users.
So, speaking conservatively, keeping the EPA libraries open provide $2 of benefits for every dollar spent on the libraries PLUS freed up over 30,000 hours a year that EPA staff could spend on other tasks. Makes you wonder why the agency chose to close the libraries anyway.
According to Open WorldCat, there is only one paper copy of this report in the nation's libraries. Hopefully some of you will change that.
Continue readingBook scanning projects
Two recent items that look more closely at book scanning projects:
- The Race to the Shelf Continues The Open Content Alliance and Amazon.com by Beth Ashmore, Cataloging Librarian, Samford University & Jill E. Grogg, Electronic Resources Librarian, University of Alabama Libraries. Searcher, Vol. 16 No. 1 — January 2008.
"So, why would a librarian choose to go with the OCA over the other partners currently available? Two words: open access. If the goal is to support open access principles and to get scanned copies of out of copyright books indexed in as many search engines as possible, then OCA is the right choice. With minimum requirements such as attribution and maximum requirements of no re-hosting, OCA leaves the greatest number of opportunities for users to discover and re-use the text that they find, making it ideal for those interested in data mining."
- Google Book Search: Document Understanding on a Massive Scale, by Luc Vincent, Google, Inc.
Lorcan Dempsey notes of the Google paper, "The paper outlines presentation options based on copyright status and also discusses how Google supports the document understanding community through the release of software and data sets. I was interested that there was no discussion of social features."
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