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Factcheck.org, which is one of my five favorite research-oriented websites, has just composed a surprisingly complete timeline of what happened in the days preceding and following Katrina:
They state right up front that it will take months to get past all the bluster and B.S., but it’s a pretty decent resource, and I trust these guys’ judgement quite a lot.
This is from the NYAM Info Notes blog:
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH
NIH News
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Friday, September 9, 2005
CONTACT: Christine Bruske, 919-541-3665, rmackar@niehs.nih.gov
NIEHS LAUNCHES WEBSITE WITH GLOBAL INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR ASSESSING
ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS FROM HURRICANE KATRINA
Secrets of the Mummy’s Medicine Chest
The link leads to an article about the NYAM’s 4,00 year old medical papyrus ( officially the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, the oldest surving medical document in the world) which is now on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of their exhibit "The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt". (this from yesterday’s New York Times.) It’s a good artivle with photos and everything (very high-quality photos.) For those of you who don’t care for photos, I clipped the article text and hid it behind the cut below. (No photos, but that’s what the link is for.)
Good stuff, folks.
There’s already tons of material available on the web regarding New Orleans vs. Katrina, so I won’t post it here. Except for a few choice tidbits that I found:
SciGuy’s science blog had these immortal (and not a littl creepy considering how things turned out) words from Mark Twain words about Men Vs. The Mississippi River.
Dottie Hiebing recently posted this note from Ray LaFever of the New York State Archives this message on METRO-L:
"The damage/destruction to cultural and
historical institutions in Louisiana pales next to the incredible human
suffering, but we worry about them none-the-less. The American Association of
Museums is developing pages on its website to report on museums affected by
Hurricane Katrina and recovery efforts."
One thing I noticed over the weekend trying to locate resources on the library collections in the city is that 90% of their websites were simply not responding to queries. That’s starting to change now as servers come back online but it’ll probably be a while before they’re back in force. I did hear that the staff of Tulane U. moved most of the first floor collection onto upper floors in the building before the waters came, and Cornell U. has been helping them out. Inside Higher Ed News has a bit more on Katrina-displaced students.
Actually, most of the on-line articles I’ve found have to do with the hit the U.S. economy will take because of the wrecked oil rigs in the Gulf Region . . . they generally ignore the real point, though which is that New Orleans is the biggest port in the United States. I’ll say it again: New Orleans is the biggest port in the United States. George Friedman points out just what that implies for our active living lives even here on the east coast.
Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can’t Index
Believe it . . . or not.
The New York Academy of Medicine, former host in the GL Conference Series, has signed on as co-sponsor in the Seventh International Conference on Grey Literature.
Here is the Text Release from the GL7 Program and Conference Bureau.
Molly Ivins has a piece in today’s Alternet.org on the issue of free speech (as in guaranteed by the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution) and the growing use of the Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (aka "SLAPP"). The idea behind the SLAPP is that a large (or merely well-funded) corporate entity can bring these suits against people who publicly disagree with them, with the intention of the SLAPPed party shutting up due to lackof money to successfully defend against the suit. Trouble is that it works more often than not especially in major David vs. Goliath situations.
So I wonder if these suits have ever been used against a library or librarian. It wouldn’t take much, and it it’s not that different from folks merely stealing the books they don’t like out of libraries or resorting to political pressure to have books banned in libraries, schools, etc. Just wondering on this.
Meanwhile, Lara is on her way to the offices of the Queens Chronicle to talk about her book.
I think Gary North is a bit of a kook. I don’t agree with his politics or his religious view more than rarely, but having said that I read his Reality Check newsletter twice a week, because he sees things I don’t see, and that’s a big deal to me. You can never have too many ideas come your way.
So here’s the question: with library budgets getting smaller almost by the hour, has anyone seriously investigated using video technology to produce small -scale videos of the workings of libraries? I can imagine a bunch of applications for this: 5-minute technology demonstrations, sample reference interviews, tours of library service areas, etc., any one (or more) of which could be marketed online for almost no cost but with the potential to bring in additional funds. Who in libraryland has tried to do this in the past? Anyone? Did they succeed, and if so why? Did they fail? Granted, I don’t see any librarians dropping everything to become videographers any time soon, but is this not something to think about? Or am I merely crazy?
Anyway the article (including a few links) is below the cut; I’d really like to hear what people think of this.
"Google, the Naked Emperor," by Roy Tennant, from this week’s Library Journal.
The upshot: Google relies on search algorithms that do some things very well and other things (say, finding brand new web pages or even finding the last entry in the web index) very poorly. Google is just not in the business of providing information the same way Dialog is, so we need to keep these limitations in mind when searching to fill patron requests. Now let’s say it all together: "Hmmm . . . something to think about."
The reference staff of the New York Academy of Medicine has its own blog, now, which I was just informed of. (Actually, I knew about this a couple of weeks ago but between spending most of last week in California, and being swamped with testing/implementing LinkFinder Plus, I just got around to posting it now.
It’s mostly for internal use which means that you have to be invited to post to the blog, but anybody is free to read it. It’s got tons of info about items and projects that go on here, so I’d suggest you take a look through it if medical libraries are your thing. Even if it’s not your thing specifically, blogging seems to becoming more popular in libraryland by the hour, so why not us? I’m also kind of happy to see it since it means I’m free to not necessarily make every other post about NYAM, although I’ll still post links to features on our website from time to time.
The blog is here and I’ve also made it a permanent link in the typelist sidebar.
For those of you really into RSS feeds instead (or as well), Bloglines, which is a decent RSS reader can be found here. Also, a list of related feeds and explanations of what they are can be found at the University of Manitoba. Good stuff, yo. Enjoy!
This comes courtesy of Lily Pregill, NYAM’s Special Projects Mgr.:
Worth Remembering for the Google Addicted
Chris Sherman, points to a new study that shows that the various generic web search engines (the big 4), have even less overlap in their results than in previous studies and that’s not much overlap. You can find his posting here. Just how unique are the results on each engine? On average: 73.9% of Ask Jeeves first page results were unique to Ask Jeeves 71.2% of Yahoo first page results were unique to Yahoo 70.8% of MSN search first page results were unique to MSN search 66.4% of Google first page results were unique to Google Hmmmm. The study looked at results listings for more than 485,000 first page search results. First page results have two key qualities that are important. If I remember my old studies something like 98% of ‘ordinary’ searchers do not go past the third page of results and 95% don’t get past the first. Also, the first page is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for search engine optimization (SEO) consultants – those folks who attempt to ensure that their clients’ pages (not just their ads or sponsored links) show up on the first page of hits by using a wide range of techniques and strategies. The study also found that: 84.9% of total results are unique to one engine
11.4% of total results were shared by any two engines
2.6% of total results were shared by any three engines
1.1% of total results were shared by any four engines
It’s worth a quick read and the questions I would ask about our library strategies would be: 1. We offer many databases for searching inside the library’s walls and many for virtual access through our websites. I think that we can safely assume that the ‘quality’ information in our licensed resources has even less overlap with the public web content acessible through searches. 2. I think we can also assume that few hits in our licensed resources are being manipulated extensively by marketers and SEO experts. 3. Many of our library websites choose to offer our users a link to one or more of the popular search engines. With such little overlap in the search results (which could be driven by the sorting or search algorithm or by the web harvesting differences or even by the timing of the scrapes for the search index)should we be preferring a metasearch engine like Dogpile or building our own using federated searching technologies and OpenURL resolvers? 4. Can we get better service delivered to our users by combining OPAC results seamlessly into web searches? Our experience at SirsiDynix is that OPAC use goes up exponentially when users ‘trip’ over the results in a federated search instead of having to ‘remember’ to use the rich OPAC, usually a library’s most vauable asset when meaasured by investment over time. There are a lot of questions here and the answers may be quite different for different types of libraries and commnunities. It’s also interesting though. You can review stuff about Sirsi SingleSearch or Sirsi Resolver on our website.
Here’s a bit of librarian humor that’s just too funny not to share. Sometimes a good cartoon gets the point across better than reams of text.