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.

Friday, August 19, 2011

Time's Websites of the Year

Time has announced its choices for the 50 best website of the year. A new search site that supposedly has a tiny staff is Duckduckgo. The site offers view privacy and other configurable settings, but is saddled with such a funny name....


-DD

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Saturday, August 06, 2011

Arguements For Document Scanning

Lincoln Mullen recently posted "Using DocScanner to Scan on the Go" in the "ProfHacker" column of The Chronicle of Higher Education. User comments gave mixed reviews about DocScanner iPhone software (user comments recommended other products) but the discussion and links did provide some rationales for digitizing academic work.


-DD

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Thursday, August 04, 2011

Open Information Extraction

Bob Brown noted in NetworkWorld that Oren Etzioni, the CEO of Decide.com believes that keyword search techniques will be obsolete in a few years. Etzioni believes that computers will be smart enough to answer our verbal questions on general topics, a technology he dubs Open Information Extraction (IE). Etzioni on his corporate blog cites an opinion piece he wrote in Nature where he said that "we will soon view keyword search 'with the same nostalgia and amusement reserved for bygone technologies such as electric type-writers and vinyl records.'”


We will have to wait and see how quickly this technology impacts our handling of knowledge. I suspect that Etzioni's "soon" may be at least a decade in the future, except for some very crude searches or targeted applications.


-DD

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Tuesday, August 02, 2011

Mendeley & Bandcamp for Organizing Information

In a Chronicle article titled "Basecamp for Organizing Student Research," Heather Whitney mentioned a tool for organizing bibliographic information called Mendeley. By organizing information in an Internet cloud, researchers can share their bibliographic information with others, form groups of people with the same passion, and otherwise network with researchers worldwide. I have not downloaded Mendeley, but from its description it possibly will be an inexpensive scholarly resource.


From Instructional


-D.D.

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