The world of search is about to be flipped completely on its head. As part of that sea change, today’s reactive Web-based searches are about to give way to proactive, geo-fenced answers that will pop up before you even frame the question.
In many cases, you won’t be searching for content – content will be searching for you via Forget Searching For Content – Content Is About To Start Searching For You – ReadWrite.
Text-mining programs go further, categorizing information, making links between otherwise unconnected documents and providing visual maps via What is Text Mining? | Information Space.
Text mining, or the indexing of content, is important because it allows us to make sense and extract meaning out of large amounts of data. Text-mining is an activity also related to data curation, the semantic web, big data and bioinformatics. Its becoming more popular as a way to conduct research and information retrieval within databases.
Here is an informative presentation called The Library as Dataset: Text Mining at Million-Book Scale from Yale University, which discusses a text mining method, digital humanities and libraries.
Here is an article with an information science perspective called Text Mining and Information Retrieval, Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, 2011, 35(3), pp. 223-227, if you have access to scholarly databases.
You can now re-visit the first web page ever — built 21 years ago — by directing your browser to the first ever web address. On Monday, the files for the website were put back online at the first ever URL: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.
via 1st website ever restored to its 1992 glory – Technology & Science – CBC News.
Very cool to view the first website – all text and hyperlinks. Not all the links are valid. As an information professional, I especially appreciate How Can I Help ? and What’s out there? by Subject (classified by subject of interest). Project Gutenberg has been around a long time!
In 2012, scientists achieved an engineering feat which combined billions of years of development by nature and the next generation of bio-engineering, opening the gate to a new frontier of bleeding edge data storage technology.
This new data storage solution is encoding DNA to store digital data that can hold millions of gigabytes of data for thousands of years without any power. Researchers, since then, have sought means to code DNA like a data storage device and the results of these works have been nothing short of ground-breaking. After all, DNA is nature’s storage device, replicating and propagating genetic code over thousands of generations.
via Digital Data Finds an Ancient Abode in DNA | Information Space
“After two and a half years of planning, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), the U.S.’s first public online-only library, opened its doors today — or at least was made publicly available on the Internet.
The DPLA is a free, open-source resource that makes a number of digital collections and archives across the country available in one place. It launched as a series of partnerships with the Smithsonian, the National Archives, New York Public Library, the University of Virginia, Harvard, Digital Library of Georgia, Minnesota Digital Library, Mountain West Digital Library and others. All of the text, photos, videos and audio contained in the DPLA can be searched, or browsed by place or time on the DPLA website” via Digital Public Library Of America (DPLA) Launches To Public | Mashable.
Vision of the DPLA Website:
The vision of a national digital library has been circulating among librarians, scholars, educators, and private industry representatives since the early 1990s. Efforts led by a range of organizations, including the Library of Congress, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive, have successfully built resources that provide books, images, historic records, and audiovisual materials to anyone with Internet access. Many universities, public libraries, and other public-spirited organizations have digitized materials, but these digital collections often exist in silos. The DPLA brings these different viewpoints, experiences, and collections together in a single platform and portal, providing open and coherent access to our society’s digitized cultural heritage.
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What is the DPLA? by John Palfrey | The Digital Shift
Quotable: “There are two key points about what the DPLA “is,” at least as of April 2013. First, the DPLA will be what we, the people, decide to make of it, as a shared, public-spirited resource. Second, the DPLA is the community of people who have devoted themselves (ourselves, in fact) to pursuing an ambitious, public-spirited vision of what the future might hold. On day one, we will present a radically open platform that will make a lot of exciting material available more broadly, as well as a lot of code and services with which technologists can do interesting things.”
Closure of fisheries’ libraries called ‘a ‘disaster’ for science | Canada.com
Quotables
“Seven DFO libraries across Canada are to close by the fall, including two that have been amassing books and technical reports on the aquatic realm for more than a century.”
“It is information destruction unworthy of a democracy,” said Peter Wells, an ocean pollution expert at Dalhousie University in Halifax, who describes the closing of the libraries as a “national tragedy.”
“It will likely be a decade or more before all DFO’s technical reports are all digitized and available online, the librarian said. But most of the reference books and materials in the DFO libraries – like Russia’s fishing monograms – cannot be digitized by the department because of copyright restrictions.”
“Wells see the library closures as more evidence of the way the federal government is “eviscerating” aquatic science by cutting jobs and eliminating programs, labs and services. “Libraries cannot simply be replaced by digitized collections,” he said.”
Please note this is not an exhaustive list. Thanks for the spark Jeanne K!
Quotable: “Digital maps provide amazing opportunities for integrating and displaying large sets of data and research in innovative and interactive ways and the world’s taking notice!” via Interactive Maps: Why They’re Awesome for Connecting the Dots | Information Space
Digital Libraries
Visualize Interactive Maps
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Attribution: Description snippets pulled from corresponding website’s about/summary/tagline.
“In a move that will allow libraries and independent software developers to write programs accessing over one million digital objects and records, the New York Public Library this week released an application programming interface (API) that facilitates connection to the NYPL Digital Gallery.” via NYPL Releases Digital Collections API to Public | The Digital Shift
infophile 