“Standing on the shoulders of giants” has long been the metaphor of choice to describe the scholarly workflow of discovering, reading, and citing literature. However, for the past decade this workflow has been influenced significantly by the availability of academic search engines. In this field, the search giant Google has come out as the discovery mechanism of choice. How does “standing on the shoulders of the Google giant” impact the scholarly workflow? This is a question I look into in a post on the LSE Impact of Social Science blog. Read the entire post here.
information retrieval
A Decade of Google Scholar
Today marks the tenth birthday of Google Scholar. In anticipation of this celebration, the Google Scholar team has been disseminating more information about what the idea behind Google Scholar is, and how they see the future. Since I wrote a blog post titled “What if Google killed Scholar?” a little over a year ago, an update with answers from Anurag Acharya himself is worthy of a new post.
What if Google killed Scholar?
Ever since Google demoted Scholar from the products bar, people have become anxious as to whether this is a sign that it will be discontinued. This feeling has only strengthened since the demise of Google Reader, which proved that Google is not afraid to discontinue services with (pretty) large and devoted audiences. Why would Google discontinue Scholar, and what would be the consequences?
Oral History Today demo at SUEDL 2013
As I will be attending Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (September 22-26, Valetta, Malta) to present two posters, I was keen to attend the workshop on Supporting Users Exploration of Digital Libraries (short, SUEDL2013) as well. We (i.e. yours truly, Franciska de Jong, Stef Scagliola and Roeland Ordelman) submitted a demo paper titled Research Environment for Exploring Oral History Collections. In this paper we describe the fundamental principles underlying the Oral History Today interface, which we are developing to improve exploration in oral history collections.
“Dutch Journalism in the Digital Age” Abstract
The following is the abstract for the paper on the role of the internet in the research practices of Dutch journalists, which was accepted yesterday for publication. This paper was co-authored with Martijn Kleppe, Bob Nieman and Henri Beunders. Continue reading ““Dutch Journalism in the Digital Age” Abstract”