Using IBM's Visualization software in Libraries

Nice examples at OUseful Info on how to use IBM's Many Eyes for discovery purposes in libraries:

A blog on toxicology and how exciting can toxicology records be in Compendex?

My colleague David Evans who is the publisher of Elsevier's toxicology journals has started a blog on Toxicology. His first post is related the first ever WHO report that highlights "children's special susceptibility to harmful chemical exposures at different periods of their growth."
To celebrate the launch of his blog I included the latest Compendex records on toxicology on the right hand side. To follow on my previous post, I don't find anything "exciting" on these records.

How to make Compendex exciting?

To be frank I never thought until I read T. Nikkel's post on Compendex if Compendex was an exciting database or not. T. Nikkel has a point. It could be more exciting if we link and include some other digital media that can bring more context to content.
Btw you should check their weekly engineering trivia where they offer $10 Tim Hortons Coffee gift cerrificate

Hakia: The new Turkish delight in search?

There were few postings here, here last week about Hakia. I am all for a new search engine (especially started and funded by Turks ) that will provide us better answers to our questions.

Riza Berkan who is the CEO of Hakia invites public to send good questions. I don't if the following is a good one by his criteria but here we go:

What is technology intelligence?


The results that I am getting now from Hakia are not giving me the answer. The first result is related to the Privacy issues after 9/11. The same question in Google brings more relevant results including Alan Porter's article on QTIP

That's a challenging and intriguing road ahead in getting the meaning of the questions and providing the right answers...

Btw my search "Who is Elsevier's competitor" resulted in the following result:
You are very curious today Although Reed Elsevier is a competitor, it can not be included at a threat to Thomson. See this page. which created a nice smile in my face.

I hope in the future, Hakia using their semantic web technologies, would be able to provide a full list of our competitors and not just the search results similar to Google where I can't get any insights..

Cortex: bringing intelligence to information with a Brazilian style

Cortex which is based in Rio de Janeiro offers a very interesting solution

Animate Yourself Using Gizmoz

Get your own at Gizmoz.com

More on Gizmoz at Israel21C

Elsevier: A great company to work for

I just completed a survey( learned it via John Wikert from Wiley) that Noelle Skodzinski from Publishing Executive magazine is conducting to get industry input for Quality of Publishing Worklife Study. Spend 10 minutes and give your input if you are working for a publishing company.

One of her questions was:

Would you describe Elsevier as a great publishing company to work for?

Yes
No

My answer was a definite Yes.

Respectance: There is no "peace" even if you are dead

What's the connection with "U.S. Venture Capital Investment Continues to Grow, Up 8% to $7.4 Billion in Second Quarter of 2007" and launch of respectance?

New York Times Editorial's Dream

on Turkish election results...

Understanding user intent when presenting search results

A paper "Random Walks on the Click Graph" by Nick Craswell, and Martin Szummer both from Microsoft Research will be presented SIGIR 2007.

“We are trying to find,” Craswell explains, “a high-quality set of synonymous queries and results. Because our work is based on a large set of user click data, we’re getting a handle on user intent. Whereas click data can only go from a precise query to a set of documents, we find larger clusters of related queries and information.”

Click data, on which the project relies, provides the means to analyze the results for a particular query. The engine devised by Craswell and Szummer considers the history of all the people who ever typed that query and the preference of those users according to which results were often clicked. The history of which results were selected for which queries is click data.

“Click-based methods,” Craswell notes, “are a very good way of understanding the dominant intent.”

In doing so, the researchers are able to take a look at queries that are synonymous, but “synonymous queries,” as it turns out, are not quite what you might expect.

“Interestingly,” Craswell says, “the definition of what’s a synonymous query is different from synonyms you would find in a thesaurus. It’s very specific to search and depends on understanding user intent.” via Microsoft Research

Where is Turkey heading?

That's the key question in everyone's mind? The ruling party won the election today. The result was no surprise. Now let's see how "social islam" or "political islam" will turn into a real democracy.

I do "hope" that the new government will continue in the path of Mustafa Kemal:

"A nation which does not practice science has no place in the high road of civilization. But our nation, with its true qualities, deserves to become - and will become - civilized and progressive."

Scirus Topic Pages launches in Beta

"Scirus Topic Pages is a new free online resource for the scientific community. Developed by Scirus and Elsevier journal editors, Scirus Topic Pages focus on a particular scientific topic of interest to researchers and are designed to provide the most comprehensive information available on that particular topic. Each Topic Page provides researchers with a summary of the topic written by an authority in the particular subject area, with direct links to relevant scholarly papers, websites and other online resources."

Here is the list of the current topics:

Analysis of Traditional Oriental Medicines
Evidence-Based Laboratory Medicine
Evolutionary Economics
From Genomes to Proteomes
Heat shock proteins and membranes
Mechanisms of immune tolerance to allergens
Membranes for the Biopharmaceutical Industry
Molecular Oncology
Reactive Oxygen Species in Plants
Serine Proteases

TopicPages links user to web sources and also recent published paper on the topics through Scopus. One thing that I would suggest (and may be this is already being planned by my colleagues) is to open the introduction part to comments.

Will VuFind bring a new life to library OPACs?

VuFind looks refreshing with their sleek UI , faceted searching and other collaboration tools. The best of all it's Open Source. via Meredith Farkas

Will it replace the traditional OPACs? Time will tell...

Roy Tennant has more on VuFind.

"VuFind is a library resource portal designed and developed for libraries by libraries. The goal of VuFind is to enable your users to search and browse through all of your library's resources by replacing the traditional OPAC to include:

• Catalog Records
• Digital Library Items
• Institutional Repository
• Institutional Bibliography
• Other Library Collections and Resources

VuFind is completely modular so you can implement just the basic system, or all of components.
"

Google sees the future in universal search and translation

Marissa Mayer who is Google's VP for search products and user experience said that "Google had invested in automatic translation as a way to improve search results across various languages" and Google was moving " towards integrating all of its different search engines, including its Google Book Search and Google Patent Search, to produce comprehensive results for the same search".

She also says that "We're just getting started with universal search, there are a lot of issues to overcome here." via InfoWorld

One key thing would be the user interface to present these results in a way that it's going to make sense to the user and bring the "real meaning out of the content".

Bringing the Fun and Users to Customer Service: GetSatisfaction

GetSatisfaction "is a new way for customers and organizations to work together to get answers, solve problems, and create new and better products & services."
It would be very nice if this solution can be integrated into subscription based products too.

OctoPart: A new search engine for electronic parts

Octopart which was started by two physics grad students has a clean interface to find electronic parts you need. One interesting feature that they have is users can create project and save the parts in the project folder.

Comparison of Google Scholar and Web Of Science for Citation Analysis

Prof. Anne-Wil Harzing has a very interesting article titled "Reflections of Google Scholar" comparing Google Scholar and Web of Science for citation analysis.

"If an academic shows good citation metrics, it is very likely that he or she has made a significant impact on the field. However, the reverse is not necessarily true. If an academic shows weak citation metrics, this may be caused a lack of impact on the field. However, it may also be caused by working in a small field, publishing in a language other than English (LOTE), or publishing mainly (in) books."

Harzing has also developped a software called "Publish or Perish" using Google Scholar content where the program provides analysis of citations including total number of citations, average number of citations per paper, average number of citations per author, average number of papers per author, average number of citations per year.

Now that Elsevier content will be available in Google and Google Scholar, it would be interesting to see how the numbers of Prof. Hanzing analysis will change in reference to "not all scholarly journals are indexed in GS" and GS overlap with WoS and Scopus.

Creating hype a la Powerset: Charging to see a demo

Now that's a first for me. Powerset is organizing an event to show their beta and charging $10 to see the demo. Who knows may be their marketing folks will put the demo online to be purchased through ipod....

After Post: Clarification from Mark Johnson who is a product manager at Powerset explains the confusion. Apparently the event organizer is charging an entry fee for the function.

ConnectBeam gets funding

Congratulation to Puneet Gupta and his team for closing $3.5 Million of first round financing. Connectbeam has been a good example of how a company can change its strategy (from trying to serve academic market to enterprise) and adapt to market opportunities. via PaidContent

INIST database coming to you through Exalead

INIST ( L'Institut de l'Infromation Scientifique et Technique) which is a good source for scientific articles has reached an agreement with Exalead to provide public access to its content through Exalead search engine. Exalead has a great opportunity here to leverage the metadata that they will get from INIST and really create a better retrieval solution than Google Scholar or Live Academic. They will not have the massive content that Google Scholar has but they can bring much better intelligence - using their "refinement" tools- to the results set and more discovery options to users. via ResourceShelf

MIT integrates del.icio.us in their reference system

MIT provides a good example how social bookmarking can be integrated within library services.

Shelfari application in Facebook

Nice integration to Facebook.

Employee Retention and being a winning company

Marc Andreessen addresses some very valid points to be a winning company and eliminate retention issue.

He concludes by

In general, the intangibles that keep great people are: the quality of the people they're working with, the interestingness level of their projects, and whether they are learning and growing.

The tangibles are: winning, and a high stock price.

As the leader, you have to really believe that you can get your company back to winning and therefore back to a high stock price.

If not, you should sell the company.

Indeed this Friday evening I was talking with a colleague and we touched the same intangibles points to keep talents in the company. One additional thing that we had was having fun with what we are doing.

It's not fear of Google; it's all about ease of access

David Utter's "Elsevier has no fear of Google Scholar" titled post finds our move a "sensible solution". This is a very logical move for any primary publisher in STM world. Dean Giustini explains a bit why this is logical when he says that we can't ignore Google Scholar. There are some other sites like WorldwideScience and Scitopia where you can search scientific content on the web but unless they really leverage technology to provide answers to search queries it will be challenging for them to be a destination site. Hopefully all the content that is available in these two sites will be indexed by large search engines like Google or Live where most of our users start their searches.

By the way: Johnson & Johnson is blogging

The new Johnson & Johnson Blog is called JNJ BTW

Marc Monseau got this definetly right :

By The Way... Everyone else is talking about our company, so why can’t we? There are more than 120,000 people who work for Johnson & Johnson and its operating companies. I’m one of them, and through JNJ BTW, I will try to find a voice that often gets lost in formal communications."

via BBGM

Want revenue growth? Find new set of customers

From Business Week interview with Clayton Christensen:

In The Innovator's Dilemma you warn that the maxim "staying close to your customers" can lead you astray. Wouldn't a cursory reading of the book say "don't listen to your customers?"

You're exactly right. The cursory reading is "don't listen." The deep reading is you have to be careful which customers you listen to, and then you need to watch what they do, not listen to what they say. This is catching on with one of the big automobile companies in Detroit. If you look for the jobs that people hire a car to do, the opportunities for innovation are extraordinary.

There are about 30 million Americans for whom [a car] serves as their office. Isn't it interesting that nobody has designed a car to work as an office? They pull up to Starbucks (SBUX) and go in to use their T-Mobile hot spot or if they're in Silicon Valley they'll pull up next to someone's apartment building to mooch off their Wi-Fi because they can't access the Internet in their car.

They stop at a stoplight, their notebook computer falls onto the floor. They can't recharge their computer because the electrical system was not designed to do it and there's no docking station. They throw sales literature in the backseats. Nobody's designed a car to do that job. If you understand the job, the opportunities to differentiate are just extraordinary.

To do that, though, you do have to "stay close to your customers" to see what jobs they need. In a sense, they will lead you to the answer, not astray. Shouldn't Dilemma have been clearer on that, or expanded on that idea?

Yes. The problem is when you say "listen to your customers," your customers are only going to lead you in a direction that they want to go in. Generally, that will never lead you to disruptive growth. You've got to find that new set of customers, and listen to them and follow them. That's the trick. Once you have customers, they hold you captive to their needs.

Librarian: A new facebook application for library information resources

Brad Czerniak who is a student in the Wayne State University Graduate School, Library and Information Science Program developped something similar that I was looking for subscription databases for public sites. You can also ask questions directly to a voluntee librarian. Thanks to Gery McKiernan for announcing this service.

Elsevier Journals in Google

Peter Brantley got the insight from my colleague Ale deVries and posted about our initiative of integrating Elsevier's journals in Google. That's a very logical and correct move on our part.

The value of blogs, wikis and RSS for Intel

Jeff Moriarty's post describes how Intel is using Blogs, Wikis, forums and RSS in internal communication and information sharing. In summary:

"The summary is that the major value I see in these tools is smashing through internal behavioral and cultural walls. Breaking those down will bring benefits in reducing redundancy, breaking down silos, improving product quality, and increasing team agility."

Google Killer or not? Is better search (or finding) around the corner?

I do want to kill Google but improve the results that we get there. Do we really want to search? No, we want to find answers to our questions and get out or do some discovery "berry picking" while finding the answers. There has been a lot coverage lately about Powerset
and their PowerLab and how they may change the information retrieval.

Pinhead's Progress: Powerset and Powerlabs, roundup
Kevin Burton's NEW FeedBlog: Powerset - Out of Stealth
Matt Labbe's whirn: Powerset Opens Up
Ashkan Karbasfrooshan on HipMojo: Right Now, PoweRset Stands For PR

via Nitin Karandikar



From the coverage one can see that Powerset was able to attract great talents, and from a recent post in their blog, it seems that they are also working with Marti Hearst's group at UC Berkeley which created Flamenco Search Interface and BioText among other projects.

Scientific publishers' changing role in today's online world

Timo Hannay has an excellent post in Nature's Nascent blog where he makes some very interesting points:

"Above all, publishers need to be leading the online charge, not following the scientists we serve. We are the information dissemination experts, so if we aren't pushing the boundaries and testing what's possible in this new world then we're not merely missing out, we're also not doing our jobs. Cynics will point out that most apparent 'opportunities' are a long way from turning a profit, and many probably never will. They're right. Do any of the STM projects I've mentioned above make a lot of money? No. But are they representative of the future of scientific communication, and do they provide a platform on which to build information businesses of the future? You'd better believe it."

"On top of that, they need to become better at cooperating — with each other and with other organisations outside the industry. This particularly applies to online interoperability (even horror of horrors, with competitors), which is a positive-sum game that can benefit all participants. CrossRef has blazed a trail in this area, and we should build in its success."

Last Friday I attended an NFAIS meeting at Philadelphia where I met Hilary Spencer who is the product manager for recently launched Precedings. In our brief chat in which I commended Hilary with Nature's recent online experiments and I told her how these experiments can be important on the input side of the publishing we also briefly touched on this cooperation point that Timo is higlighting. Who knows may be we should be looking into something similar that Marc Canter is proposing for Idendity Hub and create one for Scientific Hub

Dr. Eugene Garfield is like the Energizer,

he keeps going..... His new project is scheduled to launch in July 2007. Histcite which is also protected under US Patent # 6,728,725 is a tool that would help researchers in visualizing the results of literature searches in the Web of Science. I was wondering if this will be included as a feature in WoS. Hats off to you Dr. Garfield on this initiative. Now the question is that if this software can be used with Scopus data?