Current Cites August 2005

Here are a couple of citations that I thought looked interesting from this month's Current Cites. To add to the never dwindling pile of professional reading...

Cohen, Laura B.."Finding Scholarly Content on the Web: From Google Scholar to RSS Feeds" Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries 42(Web IX)(September 2005):7-17. - After a hiatus, Laura Cohen is back in the Choice special Web issue with another nicely organized overview of current web technology useful for academic research. Bombarded as we are with news of recent innovations, it is hard to see the forest for the trees sometimes, and this article takes the step back for you. In her discussion of search engines, concept clustering, scholarly content in the deep web, blogs and RSS feeds, she always does a thorough job of describing what behaviors to expect from the tools and what particular use they can be put to in an academic setting. Librarians in other types of libraries should read it, too - while the sample searches and subjects are appropriate for the intended readership, the knowledge to be gained about web technology is good for all. For further exploration, Cohen appends a complete list of sources cited. - JR

Crawford, Walt."Investigating the Biblioblogosphere" Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large 5(10)(2005):2-13. (http://cites.boisestate.edu/v5i10b.htm). - In this article, Crawford ranks top library Weblogs (blogs) on various criteria (see the Wikipedia entry for blogosphere to help decipher the article's title). Over 200 blogs were winnowed down to 60 finalists using a weighted "reach" formula that took into account Bloglines readership data and AlltheWeb, Google, and MSN "link:" search data (see the analysis spreadsheet). Blogs were then analyzed on a variety of criteria (e.g., starting date, frequency of posts, total and average length of posts, and number of comments) for specific periods in 2005 (see the expanded spreadsheet). Blogs were then grouped by "reach" into three groups. Needless to say, this study provoked considerable comment, especially by library bloggers (blogging is one of the most personal forms of publication and ego investment is likely to be high). One of the most interesting follow-up postings was "Library Blogs and Google PageRank" by Michael Lorenzen, whose analysis suggests a different rank order for library blogs, although some blogs, such as the ResearchBuzz, remained top blogs in the biblioblogosphere. - CB