Monthly Archives: May 2009

Wiley Inflexibility

Posted on 27 May 2009 by Rick Mason

A post on the SERIALST list yesterday by Linda Hulbert, Associate Director of Collection Management and Services at the O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library in St. Paul, Minnesota details one library’s response to contractual conditions being imposed by Wiley.  I found it interesting … Continue reading →

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Open Jurist

Posted on 23 May 2009 by Rick Mason

Open Jurist is a great add-on to the free case law resources I wrote about a few days ago.  Consisting of over 600,000 opinions from the federal court system, including the United States Supreme Court and the Federal Appellate Courts.  … Continue reading →

Posted in Google, Government, History, Online Services, Search, Web Design | 1 Comment

Use It or Lose It

Posted on 19 May 2009 by Rick Mason

The Center for Social Media at American University’s School of Communication has a PDF guide available for download titled Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video. To both illustrate and promote the practices, they have just released … Continue reading →

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Feedmil

Posted on 18 May 2009 by Rick Mason

Feedmil is a search engine for RSS feeds.  It does this specific task very, very well.  Search for feeds relating to any keywords you wish, and modify your results using a set of slides that emphasize/de-emphasize words that show up … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogs, Search, WebSearch | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Common Chemistry

Posted on 18 May 2009 by Rick Mason

Common Chemistry is a resource from Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) which allows one to search for chemical information using a variety of search terms, whether the terms be common names (aspirin, table salt), basic chemical names (acetylsalicylic acid, sodium chloride), … Continue reading →

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Free Case Law Resources

Posted on 17 May 2009 by Rick Mason

The Legal Technology blog on the Law.com website recently listed ten resources for free case law, detailing their respective strengths: Get Your Free Case Law on the Web (link updated 2 Dec 2009) found via ResourceShelf, crediting Law Librarian Blog

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Information Streams

Posted on 17 May 2009 by Rick Mason

Eric Shonfeld at TechCrunch writes: “Once again, the Internet is shifting before our eyes. Information is increasingly being distributed and presented in real-time streams instead of dedicated Web pages. The shift is palpable, even if it is only in its … Continue reading →

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Copyright Law, Love and Hate

Posted on 16 May 2009 by Rick Mason

Cory Doctorow has an interesting take on the differing attitude of copyright between those who wish to wish to honor a creative work and those who wish to diminish it.  An excerpt: “The upshot of this is that you’re on … Continue reading →

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Wolfram Alpha

Posted on 16 May 2009 by Rick Mason

Wolfram|Alpha is a new type of internet resource that has just gone “live”.  Many are calling it a new type of “search engine”, which it technically is, but it isn’t a search engine in the way we are used to … Continue reading →

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Google and Microformats

Posted on 14 May 2009 by Rick Mason

Google has made the jump into supporting Microformats as well as RDFa, calling their implementation “Rich Snippets”! This is great news on several different levels. Semantic markup within web pages provides a way to target searches much more effectively.  TechCrunch … Continue reading →

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Libology on the Kindle

Posted on 14 May 2009 by Rick Mason

Saw a post on TechCrunch that indicated that Amazon has opened their offerings of blog subscriptions for the Kindle reader to all blogs that sign up.  So now Libology is available to readers of the Kindle… with two caveats: It … Continue reading →

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6 Small Things

Posted on 13 May 2009 by Rick Mason

6 Small Things You Can Do When You Lack Discipline is a post on the zenhabits blog which addresses the stress we go through as we try to accomplish projects and achieve goals. I like that he stresses that discipline … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogs | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

ICOLC weighs in on OCLC

Posted on 13 May 2009 by Rick Mason

The International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) has weighed in on OCLC’s proposed policy changes.  Of note: “The proposed policy appears to freeze OCLC’s role in the library community based on historical and current relationships. We share the concern, voiced … Continue reading →

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Wikipedia and Journalism

Posted on 8 May 2009 by Rick Mason

Shane Fitzgerald, a Sociology student at University College in Dublin, Ireland (not Ohio), performed an experiment in March in which he placed several fake quotes about death in the Wikipedia entry for Maurice Jarre, who had just died, including this … Continue reading →

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More Elsevier Questions

Posted on 7 May 2009 by Rick Mason

Was the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine incident an isolated case, or is it the first of several Elsevier journals that only appear to be legit? Michael Hansen, CEO Of Elsevier’s Health Sciences Division, issued a statement today … Continue reading →

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Google Book Search Settlement Links

Posted on 6 May 2009 by Rick Mason

Peter Murray has an incredibly good selection of links about the Google Book Search Settlement on the Disruptive Library Technology Jester blog.  Really.  Spend some time perusing them.

Posted in Books, Copyright, Fair Use, Google, Government, Libraries, Library 2.0, Online Services, Publishing | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Google Book Search Settlement Links

Merck, Elsevier, and Ethics

Posted on 6 May 2009 by Rick Mason

Ever hear of the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine?  Sounds official, as well as medically specific.  Did you know it was published by Elsevier?  That is is Peer Reviewed?  And that it published an article on the effectiveness … Continue reading →

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Freecycle

Posted on 6 May 2009 by Rick Mason

Freecycle is a site which organizes regional groups of people and organizations around the idea of reusing items rather than throwing them away.  This idea is similar to the various discards listservs, as well as CraigsList’s free section. When you … Continue reading →

Posted in Online Services | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Useful Lists to Browse

Posted on 4 May 2009 by Rick Mason

This post will contain just a couple of links, but there is a wealth of information on the other end of each: 101 Great Free Sites and Downloads You’ve Probably Never Heard Of has been put together by PC World.  … Continue reading →

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