So guys, JISC tells us they will shortly announce a rapid innovation
call. Tweetdeck is a one-person hack built on Adobe Air and quite
portable (useful despite being not the greatest UI, IMHO). Anyone
willing to have a go at something Tweetdeck-like for IRs for Roddy?
One noteworthy difference is that IRs change much slower than
Tweetdeck. It is perhaps questionable to leave an application open so
it could run a search for you every few minutes against services
updated < once per day.
--
Chris Rusbridge
Director, Digital Curation Centre
Email: [log in to unmask] Phone 0131 6513823
University of Edinburgh
Appleton Tower, Crichton St, Edinburgh EH8 9LE
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
On 19 Mar 2009, at 15:52, MacLeod, Roderick A wrote:
> Yes, interests change subtly. Current awareness that built on this
> very
> notion of changing interests was part of the Gold Dust project
> http://www.hull.ac.uk/golddust/ . Gold Dust investigated ways to find
> relevant new content which would evolve with the evolution of
> researchers' interests, including content from about 100 IRs taken
> from
> IR RSS feeds, without the need for the researchers in question to have
> to specify search terms. Gold Dust's results were quite good WRT IR
> content, because the metadata in question was similar to the metadata
> used to create the Gold Dust Personal Interest Profiles. Gold Dust's
> matching results for some other categories of feeds, eg. component
> announcements, were poor, because the metadata contents were quite
> different.
>
> To get back to the original rant - Saved searches are better than
> nothing. RSS feeds for new content are a must. Saved searches by RSS
> are useful. But none of those things compare with the ease of use,
> WRT
> current awareness scanning, of something vaguely resembling TweetDeck
> for IRs.
>
> Roddy MacLeod
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Repositories discussion list
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Chris
>> Rusbridge
>> Sent: 19 March 2009 15:31
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: $millions of expenditure on repositories and you
>> still can't easily scan new items
>>
>> I looked at the DRIVER portal, and while it does not appear
>> to have a RSS feed, it does have a MyDRIVER service allowing
>> you to save your searches and have them run periodically in
>> the background. There is a fairly substantial but not
>> complete set of repositories registered for cross-searching.
>> How well "subject searches" work (and especially subject
>> searches for new items only) is another matter; my experience
>> with ALL such offerings from any provider is that they are
>> useless for several reasons, not least because interests
>> change subtly, and it's very difficult to specify the search
>> well. But then, I'm not a librarian with years of training in
>> searching...
>>
>> --
>> Chris Rusbridge
>> Director, Digital Curation Centre
>> Email: [log in to unmask] Phone 0131 6513823
>> University of Edinburgh
>> Appleton Tower, Crichton St, Edinburgh EH8 9LE
>>
>> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered
>> in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
>>
>>
>>
>> On 13 Mar 2009, at 12:58, MacLeod, Roderick A wrote:
>>
>>> Thanks for that response, Ian. The core concepts may be in place,
>>> yes, but the fact remains that after $millions of expenditure on
>>> repositories, I (or rather the researchers I serve) can't, without
>>> considerable effort and some know-how, easily scan new
>> items appearing
>>> in multi-repositories, or easily save a search for new items in
>>> repositories of their choice and scan futureresults.
>>>
>>> Which is shurley a mishtake. Something vaguely similar to
>> TweetDeck,
>>> but containing new repository materials, would surely do
>> more for the
>>> repository cause than...well...an awful lot of other things.
>>>
>>> Roddy
>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: Ian Stuart [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>>>> Sent: 13 March 2009 11:51
>>>> To: MacLeod, Roderick A
>>>> Subject: Re: [JISC-REPOSITORIES] Something different:
>> Twitter search
>>>> on repsitories
>>>>
>>>> MacLeod, Roderick A wrote:
>>>>> Thanks. I think I was being a bit facetious rather than anything.
>>>>> And to continue - what is the URL of the service 'a la
>>>> Tweetdeck' that
>>>>> will allow me to easily choose, say, IRs that are
>>>> particularly good in
>>>>> social science subjects from a list of all IRs, where I can also
>>>>> search across all IRs for, say, items on African politics
>> and have
>>>>> that search saved with no more effort, and have the new
>> results of
>>>>> that search delivered in real time, and also be able to
>>>> scan in real
>>>>> time new items appearing in my selected IRs? And have this
>>>> happen when
>>>>> I click on an icon on my desktop. i.e to treat new items
>>>> in IRs like tweets in Tweetdeck.
>>>>
>>>> There are, I think, two aspects to this:
>>>> 1) Searching Subject Repositories (ala arXive/PubMedCentral) for
>>>> items that match a particular query
>>>> 2) Searching Institutional Repositories for items that
>> match a query,
>>>> which includes a subject classification.
>>>>
>>>> I'm not aware of a list of Subject repositories... as a
>> parallel to
>>>> OpenDOAR for IRs, so any cross-searcher in mode
>>>> (1) would need to be hand-coded.
>>>>
>>>> Subject-based searching in mode (2) seems to be fraught with
>>>> difficulties - not least of which is the one that many IRs don't
>>>> actually have a subject classification!
>>>>
>>>> ... but the rest of it is just a case of search scripts and output
>>>> formats: you ping (well, your interface does it for you) the
>>>> repository with a defined API ( such as
>>>> "my_query?subject=African+politics" ) and you get an Atom/RSS feed
>>>> back...
>>>> (which is, if you think about it, basically what twitter
>> et all do:
>>>> they have a profile of the people you follow, and you ping
>> for a list
>>>> of new tweets based on that list)
>>>>
>>>> ... it needs more thought to flesh it out, and there are
>> bound to be
>>>> a whole pile of issues that need to be sorted - but the
>> core concepts
>>>> are already in place: EPrints.org has feeds for "latest deposits"
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>>
>>>> Ian Stuart.
>>>> Bibliographics and Multimedia Service Delivery team, EDINA, The
>>>> University of Edinburgh.
>>>>
>>>> http://edina.ac.uk/
>>>>
>>>> This email was sent via the University of Edinburgh.
>>>> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
>>>> Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Heriot-Watt University is a Scottish charity registered
>> under charity
>>> number SC000278.
>>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Heriot-Watt University is a Scottish charity
> registered under charity number SC000278.
>
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