Web Search–Meta Search Tools
Vivisimo Makes Changes To Web Search Cluster
Vivisimo’s web search cluster used to include 6 engines but in the past day or so the folks in Pittsburgh have removed three of the six. Gone from Vivisimo are Yahoo Search, AOL Search, and Netscape Search. All three of these engines feature results from the Google database. Currently, Vivisimo queries AlltheWeb, MSN, and Looksmart, and OpenFind. Vivisimo still remains a very useful tool for those who like the meta search/document clustering concept. Btw, Ixquick is no longer sending queries to AOL and Netscape.
See Also: If you visit Vivisimo make sure to note it’s dynamically generated result clusters and it’s wonderful “page preview” feature. “Preview”, allows you to open a live version of the web page that it’s embedded into the results list. Look for a link to “preview” on the right of the result title. Vivisimo also offers users to demo its document clustering technology with many specialized databases and directories including Pubmed, the Librarians’ Index to the Internet, and FirstGov.

Public Libraries–Budget Cuts
Source: The NY Times
Budget Cuts Force the NY Public Library System to Reduce Hours
Another public library system, another set of budget cuts. ): From the article, “In October, 67 of the central system’s 85 branch libraries [including all four research libraries] will gradually shift to a five-day week, as a hiring freeze cuts into available staff. In some cases, local libraries will stick to their reduced summer schedules. The Brooklyn Library, with its 60 branches, is considering similar cutbacks, a spokesperson said, while the Queens system has made other cuts in services…”It is appalling and a sign of twisted priorities.” said Mike Wallace, author and director of the Gotham Center for New York City History. “The library is one of our greatest public resources which enhances activity for all sorts of people. This is a knowledge-based society, they tell us, and to be denied one of the great tools is a blow to the city, the society and the culture.”

Libraries–Ohio
Virtual Reference
A Busy Week for Ohio Libraries
At the beginning of the week SECINC was introduced. What is it? From a GovTech.Com article, “The SCEIC [Statewide Core Electronic Information Collection] is a collaborative effort involving INFOhio, the state’s virtual library and information network for primary and secondary school libraries; the Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK), the network for higher education libraries; and the Ohio Public Library and Information Network (OPLIN) under the leadership of the State Library of Ohio. Later in the week, OhioLINK, introduced a new �Chat With a Librarian� service. From the OhioLINK site, “Chat with a Librarian� is a chat service that connects you, the user, to a reference librarian. Your questions can be answered when you have them - during searching. For example, you are searching an OhioLINK provided database like ERIC, and you wonder, �How do I find the best information about multiculturalism?”

E-Books
Source: CNN
E-Textbooks Clicking with Colleges
From the article, “Allen Renear, associate professor at the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, says during the dot-com frenzy, some exaggerated predictions about what e-books would deliver and when managed to muddy the waters about electronic reading technology. “The fact is that electronic reading is a revolution that is happening,” said Renear, who is also chair of a group developing standards for handheld electronic books (the Open eBook Forum’s Publication Structure Working Group). Renear believes textbooks are where e-books will come into their own, with audio and video, interactive diagrams and searching capabilities.”

Doctors–United States–Databases
Public Citizens Adds Content to “Questionable Doctors” Database
Search to see if doctors from Florida (just added), Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas and Vermont have been disciplined for various offences including incompetence, negligence, sexual misconduct by state and federal authorities. Learn more from this Government Technology article. Questionable Doctors is free to search for names. A 3-month subscription costs $10.00. You can access and print 10 individual disciplinary reports.
See Also: List, Ranking of State Medical Boards’ Serious Disciplinary Actions in 2001

News Briefs
Web Search–Google
Source: Fortune Small Business
“All the Right Moves”
More on Google, Sergey, Larry, and life at the Googleplex.
Quick Note: The article also mentions AlltheWeb and Wisenut. As we’ve said many times before and are saying again, it’s great to see AtW getting more attention. However, the article is incorrect in stating that, “AlltheWeb uses human editors to review and refine searches, as does another upstart, Wisenut.com, which is owned by LookSmart.” Both of these engines, like Google, are fully automated prodcuts. Wisenut has been and continues to be a big disappointment. Yes, the engine is still available online but the database is out of date and no additional features or improvements have been made in a very long time. In a recent look around Wisenut I found pages from major sites that haven’t been recrawled/updated in over one year.

Professional Reading Shelf (2 Items)
Virtual Reference
Full-Text Report,
A Digital Reference Service for a Digital Library: Chat Technology in a Remote Reference Service
A report about chat-based virtual reference services at Ryerson University in Canada
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The September/October Issue of Information Highways is Now Online
Titles of selected article from the Canadian periodical:
*”UpClose: Dr. Nick Bontis”
“Meet the man who’s changing the way we think about a nation’s intellectual capital”
*”Fee-based content gains momentum”
*”How to negotiate with vendors”
*”Monitoring Web pages” by Gwen Harris

Patents–United States
Full-Text of NIPRA Lawsuit Available Online
On Tuesday (8/27), we posted news that the National Intellectual Property Researchers Association (NIPRA) filed a lawsuit asking for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to stop “phasing out” paper patent and trademark records. The full-text of NIPRA’s filing with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is now available online.

Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (2 Items)
September 11th–Educational Resources–Webliography
Source: Dickinson College
Compilation, Teaching 9-11.Org
A comprehensive set of materials including syallabi and lesson plans.
See Also: Learn More About the Compilation (via TCOHE)
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Scientists and Engineers–United States–Statistics
Source: National Science Foundation
Full-Text Report, Characteristics of Doctoral Scientists and Engineers in the United States: 1999

Web Resources of the Week
Resource of the Week #1
Keyword Search Transcripts of All C-SPAN “Booknotes” Programs, Listen to Programs Online
C-SPAN, a cable/satellite channel here in the U.S. that airs public affairs and live coverage of the U.S. Congress. Every Sunday, C-SPAN airs Booknotes, a program that features hour-long one-on-one interviews with authors of non-fiction books. The program has been on the air since 1989. The program archives, available on the web at no charge, is a treasure chest of interesting material, most of it completely searchable. Using the search box at the top of the Booknotes homepage or via the wonderful and robust Advanced Interface, you�ll be able to keyword search transcripts of all interviews and then read the transcript or listen to the program online. For example, here’s a search for the phrase “Library of Congress” “Library of Congress” limited to the “Reporters and Writers” category. Really interesting and useful material for history buffs, teachers, reporters, and just about everyone else. Btw, the Archives can also be browsed by date.
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Resource #2
Who�s Running for Congress? Who�s Running for Governor?
The Leadership Directories (a.k.a. The Yellow Books) are well-known sources for biographical and directory information about government officials in the U.S. If you who don�t have access to the latest directories or don�t have access at your desk, I have some good news to share. Leadership Directories Inc. is providing the full profile for ALL Congressional Candidates and Gubernatorial Candidates (incumbents and challengers, 11/2002 election) available on the web at no charge.

Virtual Reference–Wondir
Wondir Nears Alpha Stage
We�ve learned from Wondir Foundation co-founder�s Matt Koll and Laura Horn that the Wondir database and question answering service is within a week or two of an Alpha release. What�s Wondir all about? From the site, �The Wondir information service will help people find practical, focused answers to questions, with an emphasis on connecting people who have questions with other people who can provide needed help. These experts, tutors, mentors, enthusiasts, and peers could be volunteering on their own or as part of an organized online help program, such as an AskA service, government or social service, corporation, civic group, professional association, university, school or library. In addition to live resources, Wondir will make extensive use of FAQs, stored Q&As and other searchable web resources. Relevant human resources will be integrated into the results and featured in a targeted way.� Wondir is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) organization.
From day one, the Wondir Foundation has been soliciting the opinions and advice from throughout the information professional community. In fact, librarian, digital reference guru and AskERIC director David Lankes (Syracuse University), info retrieval expert Bruce Croft (University of Massachusetts), and a guy named Gary Price (:, are part of Wondir�s advisory board. Matt and Laura welcome your opinions and comments. They are also continuing to actively recruit volunteers (individuals and organizations) to assist in answering questions and guiding users. Review the web site, learn more about the project, and consider getting involved. More about Wondir as it happens.
See Also: If Your’re Interested in Doing Some Volunteer Work for Wondir,
please contact friends_of_wondir@wondir.org
See Also: Learn More About Wondir via this SearchDay Article

and since we’re on the subject of Virtual Reference…

Virtual Reference
Source: The New York Times
“Ready With Answers Around the Clock”
A NY Times article on 24×7 virtual reference services. The article mentions the Cleveland Public Library’s KnowItNow24×7 service, Q and A NJ, from the New Jersey Library Network and AskNow from the Metropolitan Cooperative Library System in California. 24/7 Reference and LSSI are also mentioned in the article. Kevin Starr, California’s state librarian is quoted in the article. Two small issues with the article. Number one is the sentence, “Increasingly, librarians, fearing irrelevancy in the age of Google, are chasing their patrons in cyberspace, and around the clock.” Yes, it’s another in the never-ending string of articles that makes it seem the entire profession is on the decline because of the WWW and one search engine in particular, Google. As noted on this weblog over and over again, Google is a wonderful and important tool, not THE solution. We must market not only the services, databases, books, etc. that we provide but also the many skills we offer the public.
Issue two is the sentence, “What’s more, public libraries can use their subscriptions, already paid for by the public through taxes, to gain entry to news and information databases whose owners have recently shifted to charging Web access fees.” These proprietary databases have always charged fees. For quite a few years libraries have provided access to these products via CD-ROM and online. What’s relatively new is that many public libraries are now making these databases remotely accessible to the public.

Web Search–Google
“Meet Mr. Anti-Google”
From the article, A crusading webmaster says the popular search engine’s page-ranking algorithm is “undemocratic.” I’ll share a few comments later on. For now it’s important to note that just about all general web search engines use some form of link analysis/page rank in their algorithm. One search engine that takes it a bit further is Teoma. For those of you web search aficionados out there, Teoma is a real world application of some of the concepts and ideas from the often discussed but never publicly released IBM search engine, Clever. You can learn more about Clever and link analysis in a 1999 Scientific American article. This 2001 Science article is also worthy of your attention.

One more point. From the article, “When you type “NameBase” into Google, Brandt’s site comes up first, but Brandt is not satisfied with that. “My problem has been to get Google to go deep enough into my site,” he says. In other words, Brandt wants Google to index the 100,000 names he has in his database, so that a Google search for “Donald Rumsfeld” will bring up NameBase’s page for the secretary of defense.” In our book Chris Sherman and I describe this situation as “depth of crawl”. Because one, five, or five hundred pages from a site are indexed doesn’t mean that the each and every page from the entire site has been crawled and is searchable. Also, because Google has indexed a certain number of pages from a site don’t assume that AlltheWeb has indexed more, less, or even the same ones. This is another in the continuing list of reasons why it’s important to use more than one engine and in some cases utilize site search and specialized search tools. Btw, a search of Google using the syntax site:namebase.org inurl:*.* shows that Google has indexed about 70 pages from Namebase.

Information Access
Source: Stateline.Org
“War on Terror Restricts Information Flow”
From the article, “A dozen states - Alaska, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia - have adopted new rules to limit access to public records in the name of national security this year. Not all reporters have noticed a change, but many say they face more restrictions and an attitudinal shift from state and federal officials.” Comments from several people in the journalism profession are included.

Web Browsers–Netscape
Netscape 7.0 is Now Available
Netscape, currently with only a 3.4% share of the browser market (according to WebSideStory) has released version 7.0 today. CNET has a review available. Busy times in the browser world with a new version of Mozilla available, the Netscape release, and a totally rebuilt version of Opera due very soon.
See Also: Direct to Netscape Download Area
See Also: “Andreessen Bids Goodbye to Browser Wars” (via PC World)
“The man who created the first Web browser talks about watching Microsoft win online.”