Delicious does resource links

I've been meaning to experiment with this for a long time, but just never got around to it. So I finally did, and it took me about ten minutes to come up with this:



Note that most of that time was spent trying to find the linkrolls info within Delicious' help files. Is it only me that gets totally lost when I try to look something up in there? Maybe I need to bookmark the ones that I'm always looking for...

mapping research trends

Springer released a new (free!) tool to map research publishing trends. It uses Google maps (like everyone else) to geographically display search results, but also breaks them down according to several other facets. I like the faceted search and display capabilities, including subject, author, institution, journal and country. It seems like a pretty powerful breakdown.

I am especially intrigued by the ability to restrict results to open access articles only. This means that I can look at the trend of open access publishing in a certain field over time and according to geography. Of course, it only indexes Springer journals, so this isn't a comprehensive look at open access publishing, but it is interesting nonetheless. We've been discussing open access pros and cons (I'm a pro-person myself) in class lately and this caught my attention.

So I did a quick search on "breast cancer" from Jan 1, 2009, to today, Feb. 18, 2009, restricted to the US (so I can actually zoom in on the map a little). I got 80 articles with 390 authors geographically pinpointed on the map. The little people on the map below are color-coded, red meaning more people are represented, yellow indicating fewer. When you zoom in, the people explode (!) into more people, showing more specific geographic locations.

Powered by AuthorMapper.com

And this is the same search restricted to open access articles only. Only 2 articles (hey, it's only February), including 11 authors from six institutions. And they link directly to the articles in the search results, of course. Pretty nice functionality.

Powered by AuthorMapper.com
Hmm...fun tool. Also nice for highlighting all of your research institution's collaborations. Which gives me another idea...

Audio experimentation

Title: UTK/SLA Brownbag 11/05/08
Description: A roundtable discussion with Martha Earl, Reference Coordinator at Preston Medical Library, which serves the UT Medical Center and the UT Graduate School of Medicine, Mark Dickey, Engineering Research Librarian at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Research Library, who provides information to researchers at the national lab, and Leslie Duncan, Manager of Information Services at the National Limb Loss Information Center, which provides information for and about amputees. Topics discussed include the changing role of librarians, next generation catalogs, and whether Dialog searching should still be part of the curriculum. They also shared their experiences as information professionals and offered some advice for students.
Listen:



For audio archiving and sharing, check out Ourmedia.org! My page is here.

Oh, yeah, we went to Romania cause my husband is awesome

We have had the best year ever. Really, we have. Globetrotting and at home, everything has been pretty darn marvelous.

Friday tomfoolery

Sarah Wright's Dewey Decimal Section:

078 Newspapers in Scandinavia

Sarah Wright = 91818389780 = 918+183+897+80 = 2078


Class:
000 Computer Science, Information & General Works


Contains:
Encyclopedias, magazines, journals and books with quotations.



What it says about you:
You are very informative and up to date. You're working on living in the here and now, not the past. You go through a lot of changes. When you make a decision you can be very sure of yourself, maybe even stubborn, but your friends appreciate your honesty and resolve.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Zombie escape made simple

How I do love commoncraft. They make all of the crazy-complex stuff in life seem so much simpler, fun even. And for Halloween, they even help us stay safe from zombies.

Zombies don't eat candy, don't dance, and can't swim. They don't sound like much fun at all.

This is a purely technical, experimental, and mostly boring post

Nbii.gov partners 2007-2008

alliance amc art basin biodiversity conservation cswgcin department ducks energy engineering epa explorer forest galveston gbif information institute interdisciplinary invasive james land mapping marine monitoring montana national natural noaa nsf nwr parks pbif pondicherry program project protection resources resources- river science service species state texas university university- university-national usfs usgs

created at TagCrowd.com

As it says, I used TagCrowd.com, a quick and easy way to turn text into a tag cloud. I especially like doing it to my information science papers to see how big the words data, information and academic get, usually correlated to how boring my paper is. The best part is seeing the words you don't expect pop out at you. Like service, or even better, texas.

Many good tools exist to do this for you, starting with all kinds of input: your blog, website, excel spreadsheet (IBM Many Eyes = lots of text analysis tools), or just cut and paste text from anywhere. A list of cloud generators can be found here.

The cloud you see above is part of my practicum project this semester, studying the National Biological Information Infrastructure (Nbii.gov). I'll spare you the details. This is just a test--don't go thinking that this is valid, complete data, 'cause it aint.