Knowledge Leadership Associates » digital collection

Change and digital decay

Peter G. Underwood — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 14:42:07 +0000

David Rosenthal provides a thought-provoking set of comments in his blog on “Are we facing a ‘Digital Dark Age’?” (DSHR’s blog, 8 February 2011). In it, he considers the problems of preservation of digital material and concludes that, “Looking ahead, the real problem we’re facing is a fundamental change in the publishing paradigm that has been with us since Gutenberg. Documents are no longer static objects that can be copied in such a way that any reader will find any of the copies equivalent. Each reader sees a unique object that created on the fly, and changes continually as the reader looks at it. The problems that may lead to a future digital dark age are much more fundamental than details of formats or storage media, they lie in a transformation of the very nature of documents.”

Change and digital decay is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Google Books: how does it work?

Peter G. Underwood — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 08:00:17 +0000

Alexis Madrigal, writing in the The Atlantic (1 November 2010), outlines how the searching algorithm used for Google Books has recently been improved. The article indicates that the algorithm is somewhat different from that used for Google’s web search and is being “tweaked” as the design team gains more experience in the kind of searching that is used to locate titles of books. Google’s web search makes extensive use of the Page Rank process, whereby full account is taken of the number of pages linking to a site when assessing its likely relevance. This, however, does not happen with the digitized copies of books that Google has stored, so some experimentation was necessary in order to develop a set of some one hundred predictive indicators of “title” relevance, such as how often the title is searched for on the web, recent book sales, the number of libraries that hold the title, and how often an older book has been reprinted. The result was released as “Rich Results” and commenced on 1 November 2010. Why not try it now?

Google Books: how does it work? is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Displaying and linking search results

Peter G. Underwood — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:49:19 +0000

Pearltrees (http://www.pearltrees.com) offers an attractive way of mapping sites and creating links between sites that you use. A “pearl” is a web site that you have discovered and found to be useful; a “pearltree” is a collection of such sites. Having created a “pearltree”, it can be shared with others, thus providing a quick and convenient way of conveying the results of a search. It is simple to use: the main benefits become available by registering and opening a free account. Phil Bradley, an Internet consultant who writes a monthly column for Library and information update (the official journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals <http://www.cilip.org.uk/update>), has created a web tutorial illustrating the use of Pearltrees — < http://bit.ly/cL6Wjh >. In it, he shows how to set up an account, build and share a “pearltree”. This approach to sharing of web resources is typical of a social networking approach to information use and one that has great potential benefits for all types of library and information service.

Displaying and linking search results is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Forthcoming Courses 2011

gretchensmith — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:24:53 +0000

Forthcoming Courses 2011 is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates