Booksearch Lookup

When you’re on an Amazon product page, click this bookmarklet and you’ll be taken to the Google Booksearch results for the book.  If previewing is allowed for the book, you’ll be able to leaf through it before you purchase/borrow/walk to your shelf.  To install the bookmarklet, drag the booksearch lookup link to your bookmarks folder.

Some quick notes on Booksearch:

• Booksearch has changed the way I look at digital books (for the better).  I’m a fan of print, and I’ve always had a hard time imagining reading a book on the computer.  I still have a hard time with digital long form, but the mistake I made was to think all books were the same.  Many books, especially the reference/textbook/manual genre are analogous to large webpages.  If you’re searching for a specific bit of information and Google Booksearch can give you the chunk you need, that’s a wondeful case.
• Booksearch has also changed how I look at publishers and libraries.  You know how today if you buy an LP, a band will throw a CD in for free?  Publishers have to get there, and fast.  Libraries need to give me a virtual shelf that houses digital copies of all the books I’ve checked out (and even the ones I’ve returned).  We’re simply wasting too much time and money chasing around print resources when a digital resource will do.
• It is unfortunate that Google is the monopoly, but you have to give them credit for taking on a task that would have taken an inter-intitutional consortium eons.  Sometimes the market wins.  I just wish that the research libraries had thought twice before signing their collections over in perpetuity.
• Finally, I remember a time (not long ago) where music was a scarce resource.  To hear a band, you actually had to find a copy of an album or swap a tape.  Lots of stuff was like that pre-digital.  One of the few places I see that attitude today is around the scholarly book.  If there’s a book you need, you’ve got to search it out.  If your library doesn’t have it, if ILL is going to take 6 months, if none of your friends are hoarding a copy, you’ve got to plunk down the 50 or 100 or 150 dollars to order the book from somewhere far away.  It is totally frustrating, but there’s also a weird sense of pre-digital accomplishment that goes with it – knowing that you posess an actual scarce resource.  I know that in a few years my students will just booksearch every version of that book I spent so much time and effort to acquire.  I imagine it will feel a little like knowing that there’s a torrent of all the 7″ your favorite band put out, when you worked so hard just to collect a few.  Bottom line is we’ll have to get over it, albeit grudgingly.

Amazon Wishlists solves this problem – you keep a single list, which is always accessible, and you get the value-add of Amazon’s recommendations.  It is Amazon’s recommendations that make this sustainable for me: it is extra work to look up books in Amazon and add them to my wish list, but the product page is so rich with information that I often find one or two other interesting books.  This is virtual equivalent of stacks-browsing you just don’t get in most OPAC’s.

A couple of quick notes: If you already use wish lists for your actual wishes, you will want to create a separate list.  I named mine “Reading List” and include a warning that I don’t want these books purchased for me by some kind soul.  If you don’t do this, you may find an obscure $200 stats book under the Christmas tree instead of the iPod Touch.  You can also make your list private, which solves the problem.  To simplify the Amazon-to-OPAC lookup, I’ve created a bookmarklet that does an OPAC lookup from the Amazon product page.  My bookmarklet is configured for UNC but if you want to hack it for your school, feel free.

Note: For the times you actually have to buy books, I’ve been working on some software that profiles your wish list and predicts the best time for you to buy a book (based on historical pricing data). Watch this space for more details.

The first step has two parts.  If you don’t have a Gmail account, I assume that you know how to fix that.  Lit alerts are a little more challenging, as different domains will have different publishers.  If you’re doing the kind of research I do, then setting up alerts with Sage, ScienceDirect and the ACM Digital Library (ToC alerts are free, but search alerts require an ACM membership) is a good start (Springer, Wiley and IEEE are also useful).   You’ll need to create accounts with all of these sites for lit alerts to work.

Literature alerts come in two forms (as far as I know).  The first is a table of contents alert.  This means you can get notified when a new journal or proceedings is published.  The second is a search alert.  Search alerts are saved searches (i.e. Facebook AND College Student); the system notifies you when new results are found.  You’ll want to set up these alerts and direct them to your Gmail account.

Over the next few days your inbox will begin filling with literature alerts (assuming you’re looking at an active subject).  Because you’re not always going to want an inbox filled with lit alerts, what you’re going to do is set up filters.  For each publisher that emails you, click on the email and select “Filter all messages like this” from the dropdown.  I then set the filter to skip the inbox, and apply the label “Alerts.”  After a few days, you’ll have filtered all of the alert messages to a label – meaning you can process them on your own time.

Two important notes.  First, when signing up for searches, opt in to get the most verbose alerts possible.  You want abstracts, etc.  Second, rather than deleting alerts after they are done, you’re simply going to leave them read in the labeled folder.  Here’s where the fun begins.  Over time, you’re building a portable, personal archive of all new literature on your topic.  And because you’ve set up the alerts across publishers and libraries, you’ll be able to search for new literature across publications easily – without authenticating to a library or running a meta search across publishers.  All of the new literature will be in your gmail, searchable with the “label:alerts” key.  For example, if I want to know all of the new literature matching Facebook and psychology, I simply go into my Gmail and search “label:alerts facebook psychology.”

This kind of management strategy would also work for mailing lists, fare alerts from airlines, etc. In my dreams I’d have a Gmail plugin that would add impact factors in to the subject headings. The rest of my literature alerts come in via RSS (lots of open-access journals only offer RSS alerts), and I’m slowly moving those over email (via RSS-to-email). How do you manage your literature alerts?

The problem with GS cited by is that there is no easy means for searching within the results.  This is fine if your publication is cited only a few times and you can eyeball the results.  But as the citation count scales up, being able to search within the results becomes pretty important.

The good news is that you can search within GS cited by, it just requires a little URL hacking.  In my case, I was looking for publications about web surveys that cite the Reeves and Nass book “The Media Equation.”  We’ll do this step by step:

1. Open up GS, and search for “The Media Equation“
2. The first result is the Reeves and Nass book.  Click on the “Cited by 1598” link.
3. The URL will look something like this:

   http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=50&hl=en&lr=&cites=12773235514158955901

   You will want to select that list bit, the “&cites=12773235514158955901″.

4. Now, open up GS in a new tab and run a search for “Web Survey.”
5. Finally, paste the “&cites=12773235514158955901″ onto the end Web Survey URL, so it looks something like this:

   http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=50&hl=en&lr=&q=Web+Survey&btnG=Search&cites=12773235514158955901

6. Voila!  You’ve found the 337 publications matching Web Surveys that cite the Reeves and Nass book.  The first one looks like a very promising publication from some highly regarded methodologists.  Win!

I was unable to run a comparison in the WoS database as it doesn’t seem to know about the Reeves and Nass book.  Are there any other places you use for Cited By searches (i.e. other databases, vendors, search engine hacks)?  And if there is some easy way to do this search in the GS interface, please let me know.  I’ve read the advanced searching docs and researched this, but it doesn’t appear there is a simple way to search within citations.

twitter has replaced the class listserv. for years, i’ve used a listserv (alternatively called a mailing list or discussion list) to extend our discussions beyond the classroom. these days, when we want to continue conversations, the 12 students in DMP, the 17 students in ESF, and i use twitter.

twitter has replaced email announcements. in the past, if something’s come up, or i want to add a reading, or we have a location change, i would send all the students in class an email. these days, when i have something to announce, or when my students have something to announce, we use twitter.

twitter has replaced the cardboard box i used to bring to class on due dates. in the past, my students would print out their papers and bring them to class; i’d collect them in a box and take them back to the office to grade. these days, my students write blogs, design flickr sets, upload video, and post works-in-progress. when finished, they tweet about it so that i – and, more importantly, their peers – can check it out.

This is instructive for designers of educational technology.  The “traditional” trajectory of educational technology is specialization and feature-creep.  For example, a class must have an email list, a forum, website/CMS, each with its own space and identity.  When I log into BlackBoard, I see about 30 different things I can do, and for each I have to click a link and go to a page to do the action.  Twitter strips away the features, instead using an inherently flexible textual space to facilitate communication, accomplishing the same goal of other feature-ridden “course technology.”

I see Twitter’s artificial limit on post size as an important factor in classroom success.  First, it keeps the information space managable, meaning information is economized and easily retrievable.  Second, and this is pure speculation, but I see Twitter’s short form as a communication equalizer.  In any class, you’re going to have verbose individuals and quiet individuals – the same applies online.  Twitter forces the verbose to be concise, and it makes it easy for the quiet/reluctant to contribute “normally.”  To illustrate this point, let’s imagine a traditional class forum.  Our verbose individuals may contibute multi-paragraph posts.  Our quiet individuals may look at those long posts, struggle to replicate them, and end up not enjoying or participating in online communication.  We’ve lost “communication” because a student struggled to replicate a “form.”  In the case of Twitter, the difference between the verbose and the quiet is 140 characters.  Form goes away, more or less, and the forum focuses primarily on the communication of raw ideas.  Again, this is just speculation – but there’s plent of research in CMC on media richness and form effects that might provide theoretical basis for this sort of research question.

In my class, we’ve used Facebook groups for discussions with (in my opinion) great success.  We’ve also experimented with Ning, where that success was not replicated.  I believe that Ning suffered from the problems endemic to BlackBoard and other CMS – too many functions, too many buttons to push, too many markup styles to remember.  This “overfunctioning” leads to a segmentation of communication, and in an online discussion where communicants may be reluctant, segmentation is death.  Twitter is the opposite of segmentation, forcing all communication through a single, flexible channel.  This creates the impression of activity, again stimulating discussion.

If I were going to build a CMS (Course Management Software), I would start with Twitter as the prototype, and only add features to the dashboard screen.  In this sense, the CMS would only have one page, and everything would tie into and key off the communication sream (i.e I would join Twitter with something like Facebook’s News Feed).  If I were to employ Twitter in my classes, one thing I might ask for is “Groups” or “Rooms.”  It would be a challenge for me to keep track of all of my student communication (though a second Twitter account would probably suffice).

BibTex4Word is an add-in for Microsoft Word that allows the citation of references from a BibTex database. BibTex4Word will insert a bibliography into your document using your choice formatting style.

It is intended for three types of user:

1. LateX users who need to use Microsoft Word. BibTex4Word allows you to use your existing BibTex database and favourite bibliography style.

2. Word users who can’t afford a commercial bibliography package but need to insert citations and bibliographies into their documents. Everything you need to manage references is available free.

3. Word users who have a commercial bibliography package but who don’t like it. BibTex4Word is lightweight, transparent and doesn’t mess up your documents. It is also free.

I’m completely married to Bibdesk as my reference manager, but the lack of Word integration has always caused headaches.  I’m very excited to have found an answer.

Fred Stutzman, a Ph.D. student and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science, may not have had Rousseau in mind when he created the “Freedom” application. But he does believe that to escape the siren song of social media, scholars might need to freely impose restrictions on themselves. “When there’s wireless everywhere,” he told The Chronicle, “how do we really escape the Internet?”

Mr. Stutzman’s answer is to relinquish one’s right to surf the Web to the supervision of a sort of robotic schoolmarm. Freedom is a shareware application that users instruct to disable their computers’ network adapters for a fixed period of time, leaving them unable to browse the Internet for up to eight hours.

Mr. Stutzman created Freedom as a tool for researchers and writers such as himself who, like many Internet users, have become so restless that they must exile themselves from cyberspace in order to concentrate on their work. “As a doctoral student, it’s something that we’re all familiar with,” he said. “Anybody who needs to do long writing or Internet research … it’s hard to draw the line between work and time-wasting.”

Freedom’s current version is 0.4.1, and you can download it here for free (thanks to iBiblio for the hosting!).  I also enjoy reading feedback or feature requests on blogs and Twitter, or you can email me privately.  Windows users, I’m sorry, but there are no plans to develop a Windows version.

The first stage, which is crucial, is a completely disorganized capture of every little snippet of text that seems vaguely interesting. I grab paragraphs from web pages, from digital books, and transcribe pages from printed text — and each little snippet I just drop into Devonthink with no organization other than a citation of where it came from. This goes on for months and months; I read in a completely unplanned and exploratory way (increasingly online, thanks to Google Books and other sources) and just drag anything that seems at all interesting into Devonthink.

….in the last stage before I actually start writing, I create a little folder in Devonthink for each of the chapters. And then I sit down and read through every single little snippet that I’ve uncovered over the past year or so of research. And as I’m reading them on the screen, I just drag them into the chapter folder where I think they will be most useful. Some snippets get dragged to multiple folders; most don’t make it into any folder. But I read through them all, and in reading through them all, I have a completely new contextual experience of them, because I’m at the end of the research cycle, not at the beginning. They feel like pieces of a puzzle that’s coming together, instead of hints or hunches.

Read the full article: DIY: How to write a book – Boing Boing.

Freedom v0.4 remains Mac only, and it is tested through OS 10.5.6.  This new version was paid for (thank you!) by those who have donated in the past.  I strongly recommend that all users upgrade as soon as possible.

Download Freedom directly (.dmg)

Freedom’s website.

If you run into any problems/have suggestions please leave them in the comments.  I do not plan on developing a Windows version, sorry.

Previous posts about Freedom:

Productive Unit Structures: Introducing Freedom
New Version of Freedom: v0.3
Freedom in the Telegraph

To “solve” this problem, I’ve found that you can set a bookmark that will set your preferences each time it is clicked.  While this doesn’t solve the problem of Google forgetting preferences between sessions, it will save you the time and effort of having to reset your preferences each time.  You will need to custom-craft your bookmark.  Here’s mine:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_setprefs?num=50&scis=yes&scisf=4&submit=Save+Preferences

As you can see, in with I’m passing some options to “scholar_setprefs” – i.e. the mechanism that sets your Google Scholar preferences.  I’m manipulating two options, Number of Results (num=50) and Bibliography manager (scis=yes&scisf=4).  I could also directly manipulate the interface and search language, library links, and if the results opened new windows or not (I don’t because I’m happy with the GS defaults).

The options accept a range of values, which I’ll describe briefly:

Number of results (num), accepts:

• 10
• 20
• 30
• 50
• 100

If you’d like 100 results to be displayed, you’d change the url so that num=100.

Bibliography manager (scis=yes&scisf=4).  Google Scholar supports a number of different export formats, and to change their default, you’ll need to change the scisf value.  Here are the corresponding values:

• 4 (Bibtex)
• 3 (EndNote)
• 2 (RefMan)
• 1 (RefWorks)
• 5 (WenXianWang)

If you’re a RefWorks user, you’d change the string so that it looked like this scis=yes&scisf=1.

Putting it all together, if you’re a RefWorks user who wants 100 results displayed, you’d set your bookmark as follows:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_setprefs?num=100&scis=yes&scisf=1&submit=Save+Preferences

Finally, if you’re accessing GS through your library proxy, you’ll need to add the proxy information into the URL. In the case of UNC we place the proxy information directly in the url. Therefore, my proxied bookmark looks like this:

http://scholar.google.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/scholar_setprefs?num=50&scis=yes&scisf=4&submit=Save+Preferences

As you can see, I’ve added .libproxy.lib.unc.edu to the beginning of the URL. This will vary by library, so you’ll want to look at other proxied URL’s at your institution to get a feel for where the proxy information goes.  As I noted above, there are a bunch of other options you can change directly. If you’d like to change those, simply view the source of the Google Scholar preferences page, look for the option and value pairs in the form, and tack them into the URL (making sure to add & before the option/value pair).