freeopeninfo.org

In the beginning of 2008 a couple of us in the library program began a graduate research assistantship with the Pictures of the Year International (POYi) program at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.  POYi has been in operation since 1944.  They hold yearly contests in photojournalism.  Our GRA project involved building a web archive of all those photos, nearly 40,000 of them to date.  The software we used is called Omeka (http://omeka.org/) and it is a fabulous piece of software.  Because it is free and open source software, which means the code has been available to us, we’ve been able to get in there and adjust it to our needs, just as the Omeka folks encourage.

The site has launched.  There is still quite a bit to do.  The last 10 years still need to be described.  That may take a while because there are issues with the data for most of those years.  And there are still a number of tweaks and adjustments to make.  One of the big things I’d like to do is work on the metadata itself.  Basically, all we’ve done is take spreadsheets of data the POYi folks provided to us, saved them as CSV files, and reformatted them into MySQL statements, which we then uploaded into the Omeka POYi database.  In other words, we’ve spent most of our time on the structure of the data and very little time on the data’s content.  I’d like to work on that content — make it more descriptive.  The more descriptive it is, the more access points are created, and thus the more successfully searchable the site is.

In coming months we hope to replace the main POYi site with a Drupal installation.  Right now it’s pretty much a static HTML site.  Bringing Drupal into the mix will make it more interactive — polls, image galleries, forums, blogs, and the like.  We think something like that would add a considerable amount of quality to POYi’s web presence.

In the meantime, if you’d like to visit our archive, the URL is http://archive.poyi.org/.  If you have any suggestions, questions, comments, etc., please let me know.

I’m debating about whether I should keep this blog going or not.  So if you are one of the zero people who has this on their RSS feed and all of the sudden you notice that it’s not loading, you’ll know why!

I love blogs and I read a lot of them, but that doesn’t mean I want or should be writing one.  For a while, however, I thought that was the case.  Maybe it is, maybe it’s just that graduate school keeps me too busy right now.  We’ll see.

A friend of mine, Matt Altman, published a book late last year called The Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.  I’m about a third of the way through it and although I majored in philosophy in college and took a class on Kant, I’ve never read such a lucid explanation of Kant’s thought before.

Matt and I were roommates in Chicago during the Fall of 1993.  We were participating in an off-campus program studying The Self in Context at the Newberry Library.  The first six weeks of the program were spent in group discussions.  The last nine weeks were spent in independent research.  I had a lot of problems at the Newberry and largely I think it was because, academically, I was too young, immature, and didn’t quite realize what real research meant.  My paper, Thomas Merton: The Self in the Context of Contemplation and Spirituality, was 54 pages of bad writing.  Not that I didn’t spend a lot of time on it (I was very passionate about Thomas Merton), but I don’t think I truly understood what it meant to write a solid research paper.  I also had problems with my classmates and the professors.  It was a very, very politically correct environment and I felt constantly attacked.  Having never truly rebelled as a teenager, I spent the entire semester on the defensive.  I’ve recently gone back and re-read some of the professors’ comments and although I think the atmosphere was negative and it was partially their fault, I think I should give them more credit.

All in all, the experience was worthwhile.  I’ve been a successful student and have rarely had issues excelling in my courses.  I didn’t fail the semester at the Newberry by any means, but I didn’t come near excelling either.  And although it took me 15 years, as a result of that experience I grew as a scholar.  It’s a common theme lately, but I think I learned more from that program by not doing really well than I might have if I had done well.  Besides, if nothing else, I met Matt and I’m really glad we’ve remained friends all these years.  I also had a work study assisting archivists working on the Pullman Company records.  That was invaluable.

I finished reading Rebecca Solnit’s wanderlust: a History of Walking.  I’ll have to add it my mental list of favorites.  It reminded me of another favorite: The embers and the stars: a philosophical inquiry into the moral sense of nature by Erazim Kohak.  Both books are philosophical, historical and narrative.  My favorite mix.  I majored in philosophy and while I enjoyed reading more academic philosophical treatises when I was in school, philosophy in narrative has always been more rewarding for me.  I think this is becaues I enjoy stories and I enjoy context.  A philosophical treatise is most always presented out of context of the philosopher’s life.  It’s an attempt to be objective and “scientific.”  Kohak says it nicely:

Philosophy, as the ancients knew, begins with wonder. That wonder, though, is not puzzlement. It is, far more, the openness of one who no longer clings to the confidence of conceptual and technological mastery. It is openness of one willing to see, to hear, receive (Kohak 46).

I have been using Google’s Blogger for my blog, but for no particular reason, I think that was a mistake.  I’d rather have this blog hosted on my own domain.

Other news: the freeopeninfo.org blog was always meant to me a more professional expression of my interests in library and information science, but I’ve been itching to write on topics outside of that scope.  Enter http://4mph.org/, my personal journal / blog / what have ye.  The URL won’t resolve for a few more days.

Having trouble finding good medical information? Or you’re a medical student looking for latest news and other information in the health and medicine fields?

Part of the problem with Web searching is that most of us enter a simple keyword or phrase. This kind of search usually casts the widest net. For example, a Google search using the keyword

sun

Will return over a billion hits:

But if I add an extra keyword, such as

sun spots

my net covers less area:

Back to the search for medical blogs. What if I need to find a quality blog published by the medical community, such as a hospital or a medical school. Then we need to add an extra delimiter. As I mentioned in my last post, the delimiter is a domain. Knowing that I might have a better chance of finding a well written and respected medical blog published by an educational institution, I can do the following search in Google:

Or in Yahoo:

And after a minute or so of perusing the results, I’ve found scores of promising links. Including this blog, which has compiled a Top 100 list of medical blogs: http://www.ondd.org/the-top-100-academic-medical-blogs/.

Should academic journals continue to exist? Interesting discussion on Slashdot (interesting also that this is even a discussion topic):

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/08/2132254

Finding good, reliable information on the Web can be difficult. Fortunately, there are many tools, tips, and tricks available that enable smarter searching. Unfortunately, sometimes the same kinds of tips and tricks vary from one search engine to another. But that’s okay. Many search engines offer advanced search functions or help pages to guide you along. Take advantage of them if you’re in the mood to find something really useful.

Let’s begin with Google and see how one slight alteration to a single keyword search may result in drastically different search results. Our single keyword will be health. What we’re going to do is called a domain search. The Web is loosely organized by domains. The most commons ones are .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov. Below are three snapshots. The first one displays a simple keyword search. The next two invoke domain searches for the .gov and .edu domains.

Simple keyword search:

Simple keyword and domain search (.edu):

Simple keyword and domain search (.gov):

Basically, a domain search is a way to limit or narrow the scope of our search. Simply adding site:edu or site:govto the end of our search request will alter where Google searches for our keyword. In other words, a keyword search by itself is one without any limitations and by definition will be the most comprehensive search. However, a domain search will limit our search to specific domains. Let’s take a look at our results:

Simple keyword search:

Simple keyword and domain search (.edu):

Simple keyword and domain search (.gov):

As you can see, the results are completely different and there is not a single overlap of linked sources. While a simple keyword search is the most comprehensive type of search, this does not mean it is the most comprehensive search. Give it a try yourself with the .org or .net domains and see what kind of results you retrieve.

There are many little things you can do to get more out of searching. If you use Google, I’d urge you to explore http://www.googleguide.com/ or play around with Google’s Advance Search. By the way, using the site tip works for searching a specific web site. Just alter your search like so: health site:health.gov and Google will return results linking only to pages within health.gov. Let’s take a look:

Other search engines have similar functions and it’s often worthwhile to explore what they have to offer. I often promote Gigablast because I think it’s an excellent search engine. Their Help page lists a very detailed and friendly guide to smarter searching. Let’s take a look at a health site:gov search on Gigablast. Notice how they display Category searches as well as links. This also helps make for a more thorough search.

Gigablast possesses some nice features: they display some very descriptive information about the site and there’s that last modified or published time stamp also. Very useful.

The other day (or, uh, week) I mentioned how keyword searching using a variety of search engines inevitably results in a Wikipedia article as one of the top links. Now, I think Wikipedia is the cat’s meow and I often go there to read more about a subject or simply to browse. Heck, it certainly is popular as it currently ranks #7 in Alexa’s Top Sites in the United States. Is this good? I think it’s great. What do I mean by that? Well, when in the history of anything has an encyclopedia been popular by millions and millions of people? Certainly some of us grew up the nerdy type and enjoyed perusing through a Britannica or an Americana (1851!), but we were a minority. Now, not so much and I think that’s an exciting thing.

But I can’t stress enough that relying on a single source for our information is a bad thing, even if it’s a source such as Wikipedia, which has a multitude of editors and contributors. Information is a complex business and the more sources we gather, the better off we will be. Why? Because gathering as many viewpoints on a subject broadens our understanding and increases our awareness. So, what else is out there? What else is fun to peruse? Here are a few:

Astronomy
Wikisky.org (think Google Earth for the Universe)

History
American Journeys

General
ibiblio.org: the public’s library and digital archive

Science
Making the Modern World

Philosophy
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Religion
The Catholic Encyclopedia

There’s a wonderful service offered by the Librarians’ Internet Index (LII). Visit the site and Subscribe to New This Week to receive weekly emails containing Librarian reviewed Web sites covering all sorts of topics. LII is also a good search engine.

For links to other great Web sites, look through my del.icio.us page. I’ve accumulated quite a few goodies … and so have others.

And don’t forget, visit your local library. While there are many wonderful Web sites out there, nothing will ever fully replace a book.

For a couple excellent articles on Wikipedia itself, read these:

The Charms of Wikipedia at The New York Book of Reviews
What to Do With Wikipedia at Information Today, Inc.