New Way to Search

Dear Information Librarian - have you got the right mindset? Yahoo thinks it does, with a new (beta mode) way of searching. It's called 'Yahoo! Mindset' and it ranks sites by the degree of commercial information they have or do not have. The intent is to minimize the chances of finding commercial sites with relatively little useful content. Try it and see. Impressive start.
http://mindset.research.yahoo.com/

I am looking forward to the movie spectacular 'Google Versus Yahoo' starring Sylvester Stallone as 'Captain Google' and Arnold Schwarzenegger as 'Major Yahoo' as they fight for world domination of the online information field. I bet a script is in the pipeline.

Biomedical Search Options

Vivisimo has created a new life sciences or biomedical search facility. It uses their 'velocity' software to search a number of important sources. It includes biochemistry. You can designate specific sources to search. Vivisimo are one of the search engines worth keeping an eye on. Maybe two.
http://biometacluster.com/

Information Literacy

I came across the following site and wanted to share it with you. It's from USA and comprises resources for teaching information skills in year 12. Some of the material may prove useful to us as we search for good ways to put ourselves out of a job.
http://www.mmischools.com/Categories/CategoryIndex.aspx?CategoryID=83

Making information accessible - Chucking chat for roving reference

Firstly thanks everyone for helping with the information access project of Leonie's. Just wanted to highlight something Helen found - Another way of providing a reference service discussed in the first of the abstracts for the 7th Annual Virtual Reference Desk Conference "Chucking chat: Going to Where our Students REALLY are" .The Uni of Texas Library found no one was really using chat so they set up a 'reference outreach program' called Roving Reference. I look forward to seeing the whole paper (the conference isn't until November).
http://www.vrd.org/conferences/VRD2005/track_abs.cfm?TrackID=4

CSIRO to help develop web standards

You wouldn't think CSIRO had much to do with the Web and the enclosed article doesn't make it clear exactly but CSIRO has won a bid to be the Australian office of the World Wide Web Consortium.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200510/s1476554.htm

Covert Censorship

Interesting article in the May (54:2) Aust Library Journal for those of you who might not usually get to see it, about covert censorship. Following on from the example of Mike Moore's Stupid White Men that was published largely due to the advocacy of American librarians, it discussing how 'independent' publications can be inadvertantly censored once they are purchased by a library presuming that we have ordered them at all because they are not heavily promoted. Worth a quick read.

Roll Over Google

With apologies to Chuck Berry.
It’s time to put your internet searching skills to even better use, by constructing your own ‘database’ for users to search directly. With Rollyo you can create a set of websites on a theme, which then becomes a database that your users can search directly. For instance, I could create a set of top class websites on Jazz Music, give it a title (‘All That Jazz’) and it becomes a ‘database’ that our music students can search directly. It’s a kind of advanced, domain search facility, which search engines provide anyway, but is rarely used by students with poor InfoLit skills. With Rollyo, you take that step for your users and then make the ‘database’ available to them. It uses Yahoo searching and is currently in Beta testing. It goes that extra step of creating a searchable ‘database’. This information comes from the incomparable Gary Price of ‘Resource Shelf”. Try some of the featured ‘databases’ or create one yourself on a topic. This could be a useful service capability for us to have, given the upgrading of Tafe courses.
http://www.rollyo.com/

Digital Information Fluency

‘Digital Information Fluency (DIF) is the ability to find, evaluate
and use digital information effectively, efficiently and ethically.’
As a library professional – are you up to it? Do the test and see. There are ideas you can use to teach or evaluate DIF, which is rapidly becoming the major chunk of IL. There is a level one test for turning a research topic into search terms – what we try and teach all the time as a starting point. Think before you search.
http://21cif.imsa.edu/