Knowledge Handler

Information Sources & Information Sifting Techniques

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Location: Independence, Ohio, United States

I am a retired librarian, most recently serving at Indiana Wesleyan University's Cleveland Education Center.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Journal Table of Contents Service

The Journal Table of Contents Service indexes over 14,000 journals from over 700 publishers. Some of the journals offer free full-text, and other journal texts may be available through database subscriptions. Originating in the UK, the Journal Table of Contents Service seems to have a European content emphasis.


-DD

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Friday, July 15, 2011

Ubiquitous Information and Retrieval

Joab Jackson writes about "search engines supplanting our memory" in ComputerWorld. Researchers have found that students memorize less material if the information can be located later. Researchers also found that students were more likely to recall the source where they found information than the information itself.


Jackson summarized John Bohannon's article Searching for the Google Effect on People's Memory which appeared in the July 15, 2011 issue of Science and another article on the Science website entitle "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips" by Betty Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel M. Wegner. Jackson provides this quote from Betty Sparrow:

I don't think that the parts of our brain that can remember information are atrophied," she said. While the Internet is fairly new, the act of relying on external resources for memory is not new for humans. People have long relied on friends, co-workers and family to keep track of information that they themselves have forgotten. The researchers call this phenomena "transactive memory."


[I suspect that disruption of transactive memory may be a cause for homesickness, and partially explain why when one spouse dies, the other is so devastated.]


-DD

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David Kapuler wrote about "Ten Educational Apps for Facebook" in Tech and Learning. These links include tools for tagging recently read books, a typing test, and even Zoho Office.

-DD

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Monday, July 11, 2011

Apple Users and Mozilla FireFox

Macintosh users may have some support issues with Mozilla Firefox according to a recent article by Gregg Keizer in Network World. The issue involves the display of downloaded fonts, and seems to affect FireFox version 5.0.0 and before. Those users with FireFox 3.6 will have their ability to download web fonts disabled if they use the new Lion operating system, while later versions of FireFox will update to the 5.0.1 version.


-DD

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Thursday, July 07, 2011

Business Intelligence

Sandra Gitlen wrote a ComputerWorld article on business intelligence for mid-sized companies.

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