I went to another search tips seminar last week. This one was sponsored by the local SLA chapter, re-playing a Special Libraries Association webcast by Rita Vine of Working Faster from earlier in the year.

Here's what I didn't know already.

LINK: searching returns many more results in Yahoo! and MSN than Google. This is the search technique that shows what links to a particular url. So this search in Google finds 58 sites that link to my blog. The same search in Yahoo! finds 708 sites. I use LINK: searching more in web development than in research, but that's still a useful thing for many librarians to know.

When I do use LINK: searching, I always get many results of the site linking to itself. To eliminate that, use the '-' and site operators: link:www.mydomain.com -site:mydomain.com. This search in Yahoo! gets my results down to 434.

I knew about the inurl: field searching operator, but an idea how to make use of it popped in my head during the seminar. I'm sometimes frustrated searching on author's names because lots of bookstore results are listed before any official author's site that might exist. Since an author's name is often in the URL of the official site, a search of inurl:authorname might improve my results.

Google and Yahoo! both have the ability to search only sites with Creative Commons licensing. On Google's Advanced Search page, it's a drop-down box labeled Usage Rights. On Yahoo's Advanced Search page, it's a separate section with check boxes. The presenter didn't have much use for this feature. I would if the search engines would put it on the Advanced Search pages of their Image searches. Unfortunately, neither has yet. I like Creative Commons photos for throwing into a presentation or a web site.

I've used the FILETYPE: search to find PDF files. But apparently it works on many file types, even ones that aren't documented by the search engines. The presenter has had some good luck finding statistics using filetype:xls for Excel files. Since most people don't put the word "statistics" in their metadata about statistics, searching through Excel files is a more effective way to find them. Another tip, this feature has inconsistent syntax across the search engines. It's FILETYPE: in Google. It's ORIGINURLEXTENSION in Yahoo!

Nested Boolean searching is not available in Google. It is avalailable in Yahoo, Exalead, Gigablast, and MSN.

Exalead is the only major search engine that supports truncation--the * replaces one or more characters in the search term. Google and Exalead do automatic stemming of words--however, Google's page ranking algorithm trumps its stemming feature.     #    (0) comments

2006-05-18

Listening to podcasts

I "went" to Greg Schwartz's presentation at the SirsiDynix Institute, yesterday--A Beginner's Guide to Podcasting: Part 1 - A Consumer's Guide.

Part 2 (A Creator's Guide) will probably be of more use to me since I've been consuming podcasts for awhile. But I wanted to get the full picture.

I don't think I've written about podcasts since I got my MP3 player a few months ago. I definitely "get it" better now that I've experienced it. I've yet to pay for any content for my MP3 player. I listen to podcasts and individually downloaded MP3 files.

Greg mentioned the "one minute to one minute" caveat during his talk--and said that you have to be very selective. I listen to my player only when I'm walking or working out. Even on a good day, that's not more than ninety minutes and, most days, it's much less. So, I deal with this problem by subscribing to only a few feeds--then I occasionally augment them with individual programs.

I'm using Juice for my feed reader. Here's what I'm currently subscribed to:

• The Productivity Show


• Open Stacks


• Science Friday


• Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me!

I look like an idiot when I'm listening to that last one--walking around campus laughing out loud at jokes that only I can hear. But I sometimes walk longer than I planned because I'm having such fun.

For now, I've been using my del.icio.us radio tag to hold the links to shows that I will sometimes load episodes that are of interest. But Greg showed us how podcast feeds looked in My Yahoo! and I liked that, so I may put them in there so that I'm a bit more systematic about reviewing those feeds for interesting episodes.     #    (0) comments

2006-05-12

Students and social software

If I put off writing a blog post long enough, someone else writes it for me. Meredith Farkas put together a great long piece on social software and libraries including a nice webliography at the end. She was responding in part to Paul Pival's Thoughts on privacy and libraries and social networks who is having a fascinating cross-blog conversation with Brian Matthews of Alt Ref (see his Perhaps my last comments ever on Facebook and In defense of social networks).

Even with all of that, I still have something to add.

I have ceased to worry about invading the spaces of students on social software sites. If students are laboring under the illusion that their creative efforts on the web are in some way private or anonymous, then I am happy to dispel that illusion. Better that a student is startled by the presence of a friendly librarian than by a knock on his or her dorm door by Campus Police who caught some infraction on a web site. Or, perhaps worse, for that student to remain blithely unaware and have no idea why job opportunities dry up almost as fast as they materialize, when future employers get a load of that student’s Facebook profile.

I also think I’m going to just get over my concern that I don’t know how Brian’s idea of monitoring blogs will scale. It will scale just like reading professional blogs in Bloglines. It will grow organically until I reach the point that it takes as much time as I’m willing to spend and then it will stop growing, or grow very slowly. And that’s good enough. No other outreach activity reaches all the students of a particular type—just because I can’t monitor all student blogs doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t try monitoring some of them. So I’m going to set that up over the summer, starting with the blogs that I’ve already discovered for members of the Class of 2010.     #    (0) comments

2006-05-09

Good evening, may I help you?

I'm working my very first evening shift at the reference desk. Since the students are drifting away this week after their last finals, we're not very busy--which is why this was assigned to be my first evening.

I had been worried about this week, but it's coming together okay. My birthday is on Friday and Mother's Day is on Sunday. My family didn't have very many firm traditions, but we were consistent about getting together in mid-May as a dual celebration of those two events. Last year, we went to a trivia night and a baseball game. So, we did all right for my mother's last Mother's Day.

Before this weekend, we had nothing planned for this week, but people came through for me and I'm coming through for myself.

This morning, since I didn't have to be at work until 1:00, I baked cookies. One of my coworkers brought cupcakes on her birthday a couple of months ago and informed us that she was starting a tradition. So, I'll be bringing oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies for my birthday.

Tomorrow, my brother is taking us out to a restaurant that flies in fresh seafood from both coasts daily. You probably have to live in the Midwest to fully appreciate that.

Friday, we're going to make our first attempt to get out to the cabin on the same day that I work. A long evening commute for me--but the destination includes wonderful features like curving tree-lined roads, Rick's barbecue chicken, and the call of owls.

On Saturday, we'll take the same hike that we took last year on my birthday.

We're going to spend Sunday with Rick's family on the assumption that a crowd of people and lots of activity will be a suitable distraction for me.     #    (0) comments

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