Google Librarian Newsletter is back!

The Google Librarian Newsletter is back after a one year hiatus (you can subscribe at the bottom of that page). The corresponding Librarian Central blog, however, will not be returning.

This particular issue of the newsletter covers the following:

• Improvements and Additions to Google Book Search: Books showing up in regular Google search results, the ability to report bad scans, and the Dynamic Links API which allows libraries to link to specific books in Google Books from records within the catalog.
• Google Sky: Now available through your browser, in addition to it's inclusion in the downloadable Google Earth.
• Google Health: Allows patients to store, manage, and share their health information with medical providers. This would have been quite useful in determining what shots I have and have not received that are important for my upcoming trip to China.
  

There is also a Google for Educators resource center that might be worth checking out.

Also, I leave tomorrow for China and will not be returning until July 24th. I know my blog posting is sparse anyway, but don't expect to be reading any new posts for a while. :)

TMI

There is just too much information out there, and with the Internet, the amount of information continues to grow exponentially. An article in the New York Times discusses the problem of information overload and what tech companies plan to do about it.

Google, Intel, Microsoft, and IBM have gotten together and formed the Information Overload Research Group, which aims to study this problem, publish information, and find ways to solve it. Their focus is primarily around workers who are easily distracted by incoming emails. I must confess, I'm definitely one of them - Outlook's feature displaying snippets of each incoming email in the bottom corner of the screen is just so distracting, yet I can't make myself turn it off!

Some possible solutions, or at least steps in the right direction:
1. Check email less often
2. Send emails more frugally (I wish some of the listservs I am on would practice this)
3. Be sure to reply to only those who need to hear your response.

And some interesting statistics:
1. "A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times" (really? only 50 times?)
2. "In the United States, more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions"

Search Engine for Free Full-text E-Journals

I have moved and started my new job! I didn't post for a while because, well, moving and starting a new job keeps one quite busy. But never fear, I'm back. :)

More about my new job later, but for now, I wanted to point out that I've been monkeying around with a new Google Custom Search Engine (see below in this post and also in the right-hand column of this blog). I'm now at a college that has access to far fewer electronic journals than I am used to in the wonderful land of Ohio Library Utopia. Therefore, I thought it would be a great idea to create a search engine that searches only those sites that contain full-text online journals.

I easily added all the Public Library of Science Journals. Google can search those without any problem. However, I'm having quite a bit of difficulty with Cornell's and the University of Michigan's Making of American Journals. I'm not sure if Google is just unable to search them because of the way the site is formatted, or if I'm just not picking the right URLs. With Cornell, I tried several to no avail.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Also, if you know of any online free full-text journals, send me an email and I'll add them to my search engine!

Search Free Full-Text E-Journals

More E-Readers

According to a New York Times article, Amazon is apparently breaking into the E-Reader market, whatever that market might be. So far, E-Readers have not taken off.

Amazon also intends to make their e-books proprietary - only accessible with Amazon's particular E-Reader. Personally, I think that's a rather stupid marketing decision. Cross-platform usability is a much better idea, and hopefully Amazon will realize that soon.

Also mentioned is that Google is going to start charging users for access to the books under copyright on Google Book Search. While this is a logical next step for Google, I feel rather irritated. I just know students will use that and pay for access to these books, when they could use the library and get the books through the OhioLINK catalog for free in 2-3 business days. Sigh. We already try to warn students against paying for articles they find through Google (the library offers so many of those for free electronically), and now here's another one to counter. Fun.

Google is Cool

Sometimes Google does something really nifty. I got the most recent Google Librarian Newsletter in my email at some point in the not-too-distant past and after reading the very first article, I'm already playing around with a Google tool: Custom Search Engine. I've created a psychology search engine using the high quality psychology websites listed on our Psychology Subject Guide. What a neat tool! We could make a separate customized search engine for each Subject Guide. AND sites could be added to it over time - Google makes that very easy. It's even collaboration friendly! Too bad we are in a content management system that makes adding something like this tricky!

Still, pretty sweet! Try my wonderful psychology search engine below!