Google alerts

I decided to be creative and to do a fairly narrow search on Google: sheep diseases, and set this up as an alert. I had also chosen this topic for the Proquest exercise, but didn't get any new feeds coming through at all - at first I thought I had done something wrong, even though I'd followed the work-around to make sure I would get feeds, so reloaded the alert, but no, obviously there's not much academic stuff being written about sheep diseases at the moment - maybe I should fill the gap? However I did get alerts through from Google, not many, but better than nothing. So I decided to re-run the exercise searching for something wider - prostate cancer (being Movember and all) and this time got lots of alerts, plus some good RSS feeds from Proquest. My own preference is still to use RSS feeds and alerts for Reading Experience-type things - new books, author talks, events, but patrons wanting information on evolving technologies, eg. xenotransplantation (Y12/13 biology); human rights; current affairs; new IT developments, etc. etc. can have the information delivered right to their desktop through these alerts - perfect for the time-poor Generation Y and Z.

Evaluating websites

The first website I looked at was the Guardian Bookclub. The Guardian is a well-respected English newspaper, rather than a tabloid, which gave me confidence in the site's content (I wouldn't bother looking at book reviews in say, the Sun or Daily Mirror, even if they had them, snob that I am). On the first page is a reassuring bio of the host, John Mullan, Professor of English at UCL, so I checked his credentials through Google and all was correct. The sources of all content are clearly stated, the links work and are easily navigable, and the content is readable, informative, and up-to-date. I had just read in today's Herald about a scientist, Dr. Brooke Magnanti, who has admitted to being the author of Belle du Jour. The article in the Guardian Bookclub links to articles and discussions about pseudonyms, cyber-bullying and more. As an aside, I also looked at what podcasts were featured, and again found Lynne Truss, this time talking about Eats Shoots and Leaves, so thought I'd give her a second online chance. Sadly she proved to be equally disappointing, being totally eclipsed by the host, John Mullan, which gave me even more faith in him and the beyond-criticism Guardian bookclub.

The Book Seer was a little more tricky to investigate. I checked out Apt Labs, who created it, and was reassured as to their authority as their clients include Hachette, Pan MacMillan and HarperCollins. But because the site's function is merely to link to lists from LibraryThing and Amazon of "If you enjoyed x, you'll probably enjoy y" the other evaluating criteria don't apply. The LibraryThing and Amazon records themselves are very current and accessible.

Revish, and some of the other sites in this module, including BookBrowse, Revish and Open Books Radio seem to be in their infancy and would need to develop and expand considerably to be of much help to our patrons in suggesting what to read next. Given the limited amount of time staff have to help patrons with suggestions, they would certainly not be ones I would suggest. Instead I would point them towards some of the sites we covered in The Reading Experience, and Guardian Bookclub or Encompass.

An author's perspective

I looked through the alphabetical archive of Authors on Tour, and was delighted to find J. Maarten Troost, whose books I have previously enjoyed, speaking about his book which I am in the middle of - "Lost on Planet China". Hearing him talk really enhanced my enjoyment of the book - I often try and imagine authors' voices when I read their books, and his was very much as I had imagined it to be. He began his talk by being openly critical of China's politics, pollution and state control, surprising me by being so outspoken. He then read a passage from the book, about visiting the Siberian tiger park in Harbin when one of the tigers escapes, in a casual and deadpan manner, finding a droll humour in a potentially life-threatening situation.

I then listened to Lynne Truss talking about her book on manners "Talk to the hand". Although I enjoyed the book, I found her voice irritating, and began counting the times she said "you know". She seemed self-consciously determined to elicit a laugh at the end of every sentence, so the podcast came across as a bad piece of stand-up comedy. So I had the opposite reaction to her podcast.

I've often felt that it would be really good for NSL to podcast our own author talks through the website, if the authors were agreeable. We are fortunate to have so many great author events and to be able to reach a wider audience would be a good thing. For new authors, or even some not-so-new NZ authors, any exposure through non-print media would be a plus. I wonder how many book clubs are aware of the Authors on Tour site? And how many patrons? And if it could be linked to our website under The Reading Experience? Another really enjoyable exercise - thank you.

File Converters

Google Docs is a great tool to use when patrons are having trouble opening documents that others have sent them. It often seems to happen with CVs, online travel bookings, etc. so again, this is pretty vital stuff to know if you are helping on the public PCs, and a great Brownie point scorer for staff - librarians to the rescue! The margins are different - the main body of the text changed from 3 lines to 1, the table aligned to the left, and the bullets were plain rather than fancy, but in the scheme of things that's pretty unimportant as long as the text remains the same. The original document was 40KB, but the Google docs would only accept 25KB, so that could be a problem with bigger documents, I guess.

Readers and Booklovers

Spent all morning looking at these - got well and truly waylaid with the lovely Guardian bookclub, and even better Encompass (run by the British Book Council), ending up requesting umpteen books and having to force myself to stop browsing. There were a few links that didn't work - BookTalk and BookLamp, but plenty of others to keep me entertained. I chose Alan Bennett's Untold Stories for similar recommendations, and my favourite site was The Book Seer, which relies on Amazon and LibraryThing. I had read about 70% of their recommended lists, so they were pretty spot-on. I had a look at weRead, which differentiated the various authors named Alan Bennett by including middle initials or qualifications, so my Alan Bennett came up as Alan Bennett PhD, which seemed a rather strange way of going about things. Revish has potential but is obviously in its infancy, with just over 2000 books currently reviewed, and no reviews of Untold Stories. Lots to return to in this module and again, lots that I had never heard of (including Encompass).

Specialist Search Engines

Once again I found myself like Alice down the rabbit hole, getting sidetracked into all kinds of interesting things in this module. I searched for All Blacks on both Blinkx (limiting it to Reuters, BBC and Channel 4) and YouTube, getting predictable results on both, and unsurprisingly the YouTube one had much greater NZ content. Of course the Blinkx selected content was more serious, whereas I went off at a tangent on YouTube finding not just game footage, but also a very strange French rabbit haka, and the gingerbread men haka too. One could spend HOURS on YouTube - hats off to the wonderful AP competition for the reference interview by the way, and good to see so many familiar faces on screen. While there I just had to listen to Dewey Rap and the Librarian's Song too.



I chose Life magazine in Google Book Search, and searched for Auckland across all issues. A lot of travel ads came up, but also some great articles and photos of the Lawson quints, Peter Snell, Edmund Hillary, etc. Flicking through various issues my first thought was how wonderful some of the old ads are for Y12 Media Studies students, but also for social history purposes from an overseas perspective. Some of the magazines on our e-Resources are not retrospectively indexed as far back as many of the mags here, so this resource is really useful, not just for students, but for pleasure and leisure reading too. Google Books also had some real treasures in full-text for me - I looked up some old Spanish picaresque novels I'd studied some 35 years ago and there they all were - they would probably be incredibly difficult to source from a bookstore, but up they popped on screen, large as life. NZ is making much headway in digitising its books too, though NZETC and others, so we are not getting left behind. Great stuff!

Google web searches

Wow, what's the collective noun for search engines? A plethora? A deluge? A string? I had never heard of some of these - Carrot, Clusty, and even Exalead. For fear of this being the longest blogpost in the history of Sheepshifter, here's just a few comments. Loved the Google wonderwheel, which is a good complement to student mindmapping and a huge help in refining topics and choosing keywords. I also particularly liked the Google timeline, which went right up to October 2009 with information on the swine flu pandemic. I didn't like Quintura's cloud tag, which seemed too whimsical, but Carrot, Clusty and iBoogie seemed no-nonsense and provided good responses to my searches. I particularly liked Yahoo, which I use for webmail, but have never explored its possibilities - the Search Pad feature is fantastic - I could see that really taking off, again particularly with secondary and uni students, and I can't think why other search engines haven't thought of this before. Bing was a disappointment mainly because the previews on the right hand side quite often showed "no information available" and the ones that did have a preview weren't particularly useful. I much preferred Exalead - I liked the Advanced search opening up in the same window, and especially liked the thumbnails. It's interesting to see how important web design now is in appealing to users - just like judging a book by its cover really. I'll definitely use Exalead again, it gave me good results with no unnecessary frills.

Dogpile has been around for many moons, and was always a favourite metasearch engine when I worked in schools, but I was sad to see the dog had been updated for a less friendly looking one, and was no longer animated, so that when you clicked on "Go fetch" it just remained seated behind its computer - maybe we can campaign for the old dog's return. It's still as good as ever though, as is Metacrawler, although that now has a "dated" look about it.

This particular module would be perfect as part of Reference Two training. So many of our patrons (and staff) just do basic Google searches without ever knowing about all these other fantastic search engines, and indeed without ever knowing about all the added extras that Google can offer. Just as Google has become the search engine of choice, it seems that after initial mistrust, wikipedia is gaining a place as the encyclopedia of choice, purely because of its ease of access and breadth of content, even if the accuracy of that content may be questionable at times. I am watching future progress with interest.