edna.edu.au

Faceted search

The edna simple search project beta has been quietly alive since the beginning of 2010. It was interesting to view the statistics for visits over Term 1.
Read more about the project at http://www.edna.edu.au/edna/go/about/labs/searchlabs

 In this period frequently searched topics were:

1. adolescent health / sport young people / lifestyle youth (service=resources & sector=school)
2. chinese new year (service=resources & sector=school)
3. winter olympics
4. lesson plans
5. assessment (sector=higher education)
6. sustainable living
7. interactive resources (sector=preschool)
8. cooking (type=movie)
9. astronomy (userlevel=Year 5-6)
10. national+curriculum+and+vet

Tags: search projects
Posted at 04:14PM Apr 17, 2010 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[0]

Finding Free Stuff

This is a list of favourite starter resources for the Finding Free Stuff hands-on workshop

National Library Australia Prototype
Explore Australian library collections and worldwide online sources through prototype service. Bookmark a url for bibliographic records and include library location in comment

edna curriculum resources
Use the edna curriculum search to find learning resources across the national key learning areas. Not all resources have open licences

Scootle (The Le@rning Federation)
Digital content for Australian schools K-10 including curriculum related learning objects and images. TLF licensed resources are free for Australian schools but may only be republished within the school. Login required. Check

flickrCC
Search easily for photos on flickr that are released under the Creative Commons license. Built in editing options and attribution

Wikimedia Commons
Freely licensed photographs, diagrams, animations, music, spoken text, video clips, and media

Open Education Resources (OER)
OER are digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research.
Check the Smartcopying website for further details

Handout for this workshop [313K Word doc]

Tags: information literacy oer resources ipshaa tl search
Posted at 11:45PM Jun 18, 2009 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[0]

OCLC update

This morning I had one of those booster doses of seminar that make you realise you've been caught sleeping on updates to a particular service you thought you knew well. Given the changes in Libraries Australia in the corresponding time period, I shouldn't have been surprised at what WorldCat and OCLC look like now.

WorldCat's byline is Find items in libraries near you
1.4 billion items available here

A search for wikis provides results with the now classic faceted results on LH side of screen (6 or 7 facets), and when you select a result (eg Wikis: tools for information work) there is a display of libraries nearby holding the item, reviews, ratings, tagging, recommendations etc. Fairly standard stuff I suppose, but a nice interface and probably as close to comprehensive as it can get at this stage. Google apparently didn't want to deal with the whole 1.4 billion, prefering only the most popular results. Search api and mobile/iPhone apps available to member organisations.

On the news front, OCLC are developing an fully hosted Integrated Library Management System which will obviously be very well integrated with WorldCat, and challenge existing models of library systems. News to me also that OCLC has purchased Amlib!

WorldCat Identities is worth a look, bringing together Publications about a person and Publications by that person on a timeline, plus the most widely held works, and related people as well as subject headings and a tag cloud of associated subjects.
eg. Douglas Mawson

Digital collections are not forgotten. Contentdm software can also be hosted, is based on Dublin Core metadata and has batch ingest. Metadata fields fully configurable for pdf, local history archives, newspapers, books, maps, slide libraries or audio/video.

OCLC also provides the Virtual Reference software, QuestionPoint. The knowledge base that comes as part of this service bears much thinking about for a couple of reference services I can think of.

Tags: libraries cataloguing search
Posted at 12:23AM May 19, 2009 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[0]

Search relevance my way

An alert to a new release saw me returning to Wikia Search tonight after a few months absence http://re.search.wikia.com/
What fun! The very slippery interface took a bit of getting used to - the results seemed to be continually moving around under my mouse - but the ease of editing, annotating, rating, commenting, spotlighting and deleting results is addictive.
I fiddled with a search string I feel fairly confident in: education australia

The results are so weird most people will be compelled to take up the challenge and start editing, so next time I'll work on something a little more specific. There's only a five star rating system that I could find for moving things around. It would be good to have arrows for positioning more precisely, but presumably ratings get munged amongst the community anyway.

I really like the way the Wikia principles are clearly stated under the search box: Transparency, Community, Privacy, and Quality

I managed to add the edna search as an additional option but it's slipped off again now. So much to take in, and many questions but this could become an obsession. 

Tags: search personalisation quality wikia
Posted at 07:10AM Jun 04, 2008 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[4]