Impact of Social Sciences Blog

Posted by Celia Walter | 8 Apr, 2011

Welcome to the Impact of Social Sciences blog, a joint project between the LSE, Imperial College, and the University of Leeds that seeks to provide a forum for academics, researchers, and others interested in increasing the impact of social science research on government and policymaking, business and civil society. The blog will also be the main site for disseminating our research findings and a nine chapter Handbook for academics on maximizing the impact of their research. The blog is updated daily with news articles and event notices as well as longer comment pieces written by academics and those interested in impact in the UK and abroad. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/

We invite comments, posts, articles, event notices, and research materials from people interested in the impacts debate; please contact the team at impactofsocialsciences@lse.ac.uk for more information.

 

Some recent posts:

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Google Scholar Blog

Posted by Celia Walter | 17 Jun, 2010

Google Debuts the Google Scholar Blog

June 16th, 2010

No, we’re not kidding. Many info pros, academics, students, and Google groupies have wondered for a long time if Google would ever create a Google Scholar Blog.

Well, as of today, it’s now available. You can find it at:

http://googlescholar.blogspot.com/

The first Google Scholar Blog post focuses on Google Scholar Alerts (not to be be confused with Google Alerts).

Those of you who read/skim/scan ResourceShelf on a regular basis (thanks!) are slightly ahead of the curve on this topic. Google Scholar Alerts debuted about five weeks ago and we posted an overview of the service on opening day along with a few ideas about other services worth a look.

While compiling our May post we were also very fortunate to have an e-mail chat with Anurag Acharya, Distinguished Engineer at Google and Founding Engineer of Google Scholar. He was invaluable in making sure we were clear on several points.

Today’s Google Scholar post also provides a bit of info about something many have wondered about for a long time. How often is the Google Scholar database updated with new material.

We now add new articles to Google Scholar twice a week; we plan to further increase this frequency.

Now, if we could get a catalog of some of what’s in the database. While a lot of majority of material is found via web crawls, there are some Google Scholar sources from academic and other publishers. A directory of just these titles would be a great start.

We’ve been running several Google Scholar Alerts since day one and two things are worth mentioning at this point.

1) You might want to begin with a broad search but BE PREPARED to come back to focus and develop a more precise query to eliminate the many false drops you’ll likely receive with a more general query. As the blog post points out, personal names can often be a challenge.

2) It’s important if not essential to think “scholar or scholarly” in the broadest sense of the term. In other words, if you or those you’re working with are only looking for published peer-reviewed articles, using a database that allows the searcher to limit to only this type of material might be a more effective use of their time.

It’s probably a good idea to do some preemptive searching with Google Scholar so you can get an idea of what is and is not in the database.

Links

+ There Here, E-Mail Alerts for Google Scholar Now Available Direct from Google (ResourceShelf, May 10, 2010)

+ Google Scholar Blog

+ First Google Scholar Blog Post: Google Alerts

 

From Resourceshelf

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State of the Blogosphere 2009 Report

Posted by Celia Walter | 26 Oct, 2009

Technorati has published their annual State of the Blogosphere Report for 2009. The entire report will be released this week over five consecutive days. For this year’s study, Technorati took a closeup look at professional blogging and conducted interviews with several successful bloggers. Here’s a summary of what’s new for the 2009 report:

  • “We took a deeper dive into the entire blogosphere, with a focus on professional bloggers
  • Professional blogging activities
  • Brands in the blogosphere
  • Monetization
  • Twitter & micro-blogging
  • Bloggers impact on US and World events
  • Our largest survey ever conducted by market research firm Penn Schoen and Berland: 2,900 bloggers
  • Interviews and profiles of some of the leading professional bloggers
  • In addition to Technorati index data, we’re also looking at data from search tool provider Lijit.”"
October 20th, 2009 iLibrarian blog

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Blogs and Wikis in the library field

Posted by Celia Walter | 11 Feb, 2009

Blogs & Wikis - Shiny Toys or Useful Tools?

Walt Crawford discusses the current state of blogs and wikis in the library field in this month’s issue of Cites & Insights. Based on his presentation at the 2009 OLA SuperConference in Toronto, his article Shiny Toys or Useful Tools? discusses trends and presents over 30 success stories.

“We’re out of the shiny new toy phase for blogs (and
wikis). I’m guessing most libraries these days will only
start blogs after making reasonably certain the blogs
will serve real purposes and will be updated regularly.
I’m guessing very few library people start blogs in the
expectation of becoming rich and famous.”

via Librarian.net

From iLibrarian blog 

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Generating New Reference Questions By Blogging Old Ones

Posted by Celia Walter | 30 Jan, 2009

Presentation: I’ll Have What Shes Having: Generating New Reference Questions By Blogging Old Ones

January 29th, 2009

From the Abstract:

Increased off-site reference traffic has prompted the need for good tracking mechanisms, but why keep the subject of the reference question a secret? Why not use one researcher’s question to aid another? At Dickinson College, we developed a reference blog using Drupal that combines a public side, for sharing with a global audience the reference questions we’ve received and how we’ve responded, with a private side, for recording information about the transaction. We can now track off-site usage more effectively. Meanwhile, new patrons can discover our resources through blog entries of previous requestors.

Direct to PowerPoint Slides

Source: EDUCAUSE

Resourceshelf permalink

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How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website

Posted by Celia Walter | 16 Jan, 2009

Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration provides detailed instructions for How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website. This helpful post explains the steps to embedding over 20 widgets and media items in your blog or website. Here are some of his most interesting suggestions:

  • Embed LinkedIn Profile
  • Embed your Lifestream in a Web Page
  • Embed Chat in your Blog
  • Embed High Quality or HD YouTube Videos
  • Embed Very Large Photographs
  • Embed Another Webpage in your Blog
  • Embed Google Maps in Web Pages
iLibrarian permalink

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Internet Resources newsletter, No. 168, December 2008

Posted by Celia Walter | 5 Dec, 2008

http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/irn/irn168/irn168.html

Partial Contents:

A-Z NEW & NOTABLE WEB SITES

 

NICE WEB SITES: TOCs of journals

SciFeeds
http://www.scifeeds.com/

ticTOCs - Tables of Contents Service
http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/

CiteULike Current Issues
http://www.citeulike.org/journals/

FeedNavigator
http://www.terkko.helsinki.fi/feednavigator/

MyJournals.org
http://www.myjournals.org/

 Zetoc RSS
http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/rssjnllist.html

 

BLOGORAMA:  Selected interesting blogs, RSS feeds and news items

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State of the Blogosphere 2008

Posted by Celia Walter | 2 Oct, 2008

Blog search engine Technorati posted the new State of the Blogosphere 2008 report last week in segments over five days. This incredibly detailed report which discusses the who, what, why, and how of blogging has now been posted in its entirety and is divided into the following sections:



iLIbrarian blog

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RSP blog directory

Posted by Celia Walter | 11 Sep, 2008
RSP blog directory
An extremely useful directory of links to RSS news feeds from blogs by and about institutional and open access respositories which is maintained by the JISC funded Repositories Support Project (RSP). It includes sub-sections for open access repositories, blogs maintained by individual institutions and blogs maintained by 'evangelists ' of the open access movement. All these would be extremely useful for keeping up with the latest developments and research in the field. Intute.ac.uk
http://rsp.ac.uk/blogs/

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Digital reference blog

Posted by Celia Walter | 20 May, 2008
News and views on chat reference, IM reference, email reference, VoIP reference, video reference, SMS reference, phone reference, roving reference, and face-to-face reference.
 
Some recent posts:

Choosing between self-archived articles and the publisher's version

Open access journals in Library Literature

Referring patrons to open access resources

Video of my presentation on social networking sites and reference services

How Wikipedia stacked up against subscription databases

Wikipedia vs. Subscription Reference Sources

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Blogging

Posted by Celia Walter | 19 May, 2008

150 Blogger Templates & Tools

http://oedb.org/blogs/ilibrarian/2008/150-blogger-templates-tools/ 

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3 Quarks Daily from Scout Report weblog

Posted by Celia Walter | 4 May, 2008
3 Quarks Daily My Monday morning blog-rounds are especially delicious because of 3 Quarks Daily; each Monday they present original and quirky writings on science, design, literature, current affairs, art and anything else "inherently fascinating." From sleep apnea to Facebook poetry, the columns never cease to introduce visitors to things we may have never learned without it. The rest of the time, this blog culls other interesting items from the Monster Web, such as an article on the politics of renaming in New York from the February 25th edition of the New York Times. The site's most important factor is its seeming randomness, a liberal arts way of looking at "stuff from all over," that makes it a great daily visit for any curious mind.

Posted April 28, 2008 by AC http://scout.wisc.edu/Weblog/SWL--ViewWeblogEntry.php?EntryId=923

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fictionarium.com

Posted by Celia Walter | 20 Apr, 2008
fictionarium.com
Fictionarium.com was created to link authors, not alphabetically, but by likeness. If you enjoyed one author, you can just click their genre and find a new author with similar qualities! You can also add new authors to help others find new books. Check out the "featured author" for something different! This site allows people to find something new to read, while basically guaranteeing a book you’ll like. Scout Weblog

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The Top 25 Blogs. Time magazine

Posted by Celia Walter | 20 Apr, 2008
The Top 25 Blogs
"From millions of blogs about nothing, [Time.com has] selected the 25 best about something -- from politics and global affairs to shopping and sports." This "first annual blog index" provides a brief description of each blog, with a link to the blog and to a sample post. From Time.com. Annotation copyright LII.ORHG
URL: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/0,28757,1725323,00.html
LII Item: http://lii.org/cs/lii/view/item/25884

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Learning through Blogging: Graduate Student Experiences

Posted by Celia Walter | 31 Mar, 2008

Learning through Blogging: Graduate Student Experiences
By Robert Davison, City University of Hong Kong

Communication is a fundamental part of learning. As instructors, we communicate with each other, as well as with our students, who also interact with us and each other. Indeed, we can go further and assert that communication is a fundamental aspect of the human experience. It is not surprising therefore that a wide variety of IT-based communication tools have been developed, and that many of these have found application in the context of learning.

It is also true that, at least in more traditional "chalk-talk" forms of learning, participating (or chatting) by students is discouraged or prohibited. Furthermore, even when IT-supported communication is accepted in the andragogical (learning through life experience) space, the "older" tools such as email tend to dominate. Recently developed tools such as instant messaging and weblogs are often relegated, perhaps by virtue of their perceived informality, to a less preferred status. However, over the last few years, I have successfully incorporated a blogging assignment into the coursework component of my graduate level (MBA and similar) classes...

From:  

http://elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=best_practices&article=44-1

 

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