What exactly IS a "federated search engine"? The March/April 2004 issue of Online includes an article, "Federated Search Engines" by Donna Fryer that defines federated search, distinguishes it from meta and enterprise searching, and explains how it all works.
Managing Partner Magazine recently released an entire issue devoted to Knowledge Management. My favorite article of the bunch was "The right culture for KM" by Gretta Rusanow.
OCLC Worldcat contains detailed information on more than 53 million books, serials, tapes, videos, etc. held by thousands of libraries, essentially pointers to hard copy materials and where they can be found. Though OCLC was originally conceived to help libraries share cataloging information, it's also a very valuable research tool. Even Google thinks so! They plan to include 2 million Worldcat records in their search results in the near future.
In the March/April issue of Online Magazine, Peter Jasco discusses how to use Worldcat to answer the question "Which is the best book on __________________?" He suggests searching on a topic, then sorting search results by the number of libraries that hold each item, showing the most popular titles at the top of the list.
Spotted on Inter-Alia, you can now search Findlaw's Directory of Lawyers from within Word 2003's research pane. Hmmm, that's nice. It saves the trouble of opening the browser, which I usually have open anyway. But hey, Microsoft, how about allowing us to dump search results from the directory into Access or Excel? THAT would be handy.
Recently on the law-lib email discussion list, the question was asked, "What are other firms doing in relation to their document management systems to maintain a 'brief bank'?" The responses indicate that most firms are still struggling to find ways to collect and search their firm's work product. Document management systems are not the panacea that perhaps some thought they would be, in some part due to difficulties with cross-office searching in addition to generally poor full-text searching capability. Firms with fewer locations seem to fare better using their DMS for work product retrieval.
Amazon.com's new "Search the Book" feature allows users to search and view the full-text of more than 120,000 books. Sales of books included in the full-text database have increased by 9 percent AND the information contained in these books is much more accessible to researchers, a win-win situation if I ever heard one. Michael A. Banks provides details on how to search this full-text database in his article "Amazon.com Opens the Books" (Online, March/April 2004).
Email is in a precarious state. The mainstream press is questioning whether email can survive. Now mailing lists are in jeopardy. Are we doomed to return to the days of snail mail, phone calls and answering machines?
I can't solve all your email problems, but here's one solution to the tyranny of mailing list email, Bloglines email subscriptions. With the recent release of the new Bloglines display feature, Bloglines has become an obvious choice for managing your mailing list email in addition to your RSS feeds.
On Tuesday I wrote, "My only complaint with the Bloglines display is that you have to page through all headlines complete with summaries." On Thursday Bloglines announced a new display feature that gives you the option to view expandable headlines for your subscriptions instead of the full entries. Yippee!! This makes reviewing items very quick and easy. Let me show you how this new option looks, and how to change it on your Bloglines account.
While it's true that there are other web-based RSS aggregators out there such as MyFeedster, DailyWhirl, Newsgator, even MyYahoo, none hold a candle to Bloglines. I've recently switched from my desktop aggregator, Newzcrawler, to Bloglines and haven't looked back. Now I can access my feeds from any computer. Bloglines also offers some unique features that I think you'll like. More on that later. Let's start with the basics.
Is RSS a useful means of delivering current information to attorneys and/or staff? Jennifer Klyse, an enterprise application analyst at a Washington DC law firm thinks so. She is in the process of implementing the Newsgator news aggregator for selected users at Patton Boggs. She also updates her project team via an RSS feed. That just two examples of the use of RSS in an enterprise environment included in the Econtent article, Can RSS Relieve Information Overload?
If only we could quantify the cost, monetary and otherwise, of not finding the information we need. If only we knew when we weren't finding it! The classic example of such failure is the volunteer on a Johns Hopkins research project who died when given a drug whose adverse effects were documented in the medial literature prior to 1966, literature that wasn't found by the researchers. Susan Feldman further discusses the implications of NOT finding information in her KM World article, "The High Cost of Not Finding Information."
Lexis and Westlaw introduced the web versions of their popular research services in 1998. The eventual phase out of the classic software was predicted and discussed on lawlib that same year. Since then law students have been trained exclusively on the web. But will we have to wait for a full generation before discarding the software? It's beginning to seem so! The results of a recent LawLibTech poll shows that 67% of law firms still offer the classic software of one or both vendors.
I remember the exact moment that I became interested in the potential of RSS for research. I'd been familiar with RSS for several years and played around with feeds a bit, but RSS just wasn't thrilling me. Then I read Steven Cohen's article in Information Outlook, "The RSS revolution: Using RSS: An Explanation and Guide." When he said that he monitored news on a particular company via RSS I was hooked. My only complaint? He didn't detail how to do so in that particular article. But that's okay....he wrote a book!
Last week I discussed "What is RSS?". Now that you know what RSS is and what it can do, let's talk RSS aggregators, those wonderful things that make sense of RSS files.
There's been talk in certain librarian circles for several years now about the failings of MARC format. MARC was designed when catalog cards were the norm, and considering today's technology, seems quite unnecessarily complex and inflexible. Online library catalogs, typically based on the MARC format, suffer in comparison to Amazon.com's full-featured system for displaying all kinds of information about books including pictures, reviews, reader ratings and even the full-text of the item. The gap widens each time Amazon introduces a new feature to its bookstore.
