Google has yet another new feature – Google Scholar. It indexes scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.
It debuted late last year. I think it’s a neat tool – but it has some pros and cons:
Pro – It filters out a ton of junk that you would normally find on Google. (The items in Google Scholar are also in big Google; but items in big Google are obviously not all in Google Scholar.)
Pro- There’s no advertising (aka sponsored links).
Pro – You can link from citations in many articles in Google directly to the cited resources, or at least to the abstract.
Pro – It appears as if you can search by keyword, author, publication, or date. I did a little testing and was impressed.
Con – Sometimes you cannot access the actual item listed in Google -only the abstract. You can often get full articles from your local library but it can take a few days. As I pointed out to students when I worked at an academic librarian – that doesn’t help if the assignment is due tomorrow.
Con – What Google Scholar defines as scholarly might not qualify for many of us as scholarly. Sometimes it matters; sometimes it doesn’t. They don’t have a list of what is included in their database or even list their criteria for inclusion.
I have to put in a plug for traditional scholarly “Googles” that you can find in your local library – and can often access remotely. Traditional journal indices will let you hone your search even more – such as searching by subject terms, which are determined by info specialists and can be very helpful.
The Byte is a day early this week so that I can tell you that today is free scoop day at Ben & Jerry’s – available noon to 8 pm. Really any news pales in comparison to free ice cream, but…
The rest of the Byte is for folks with web sites and/or an interest in search engine optimization (getting your site to rank highly with the search engines). Marketleap has three online tools to help you track the “searchability” of your site:
Keyword Verification – Tell you if your site is in the top three pages of a search engine result for a certain keyword.
Search Engine Saturation – Tells you how many of the pages within your web site are indexed (found) by search engines.
Link Popularity Check – Tells you how many pages link to your site and compares that info to other sites in your industry.
Thanks to Jan in Wisconsin for telling me about Market Leap.
Today’s Byte is for those of us who wish we had more time or money to give to charity – but we don’t. Here are little ways to “do good” that either take little effort or capitalize on things you were going to do anyways.
Dining Out for Life
This is a national event, held of different days (April 28 in Minnesota), where participating restaurants will donate part of their proceeds to AIDS research. (It’s good excuse to eat out!)
The Animal Rescue Site
This is one of those sites where you click on a link and the sponsoring web site will donate a small amount of money to a given charity (in this case animal rescue). The idea is that if you link daily the donations will add up. (I know that many of you have your own favorite sites like this – send ‘em to me and I’ll send them on in the bottom of next week’s Byte.)
Guidestar
When you want to or can write a check, this is a great place to research nonprofit organizations.
Volunteer March
When you want to or can donate some time to volunteer, this is a place to search for possibilities by location and/or interest area. I noticed that many of the jobs in my area were actually online jobs – so if I had the time I wouldn’t even have to leave my home.
Today’s Byte is for anyone who ever plans conferences. (For those who don’t, here’s a quick link to kids’ worksheets. It kept my kids going for hours during spring break.) Back to the conference planners…
Last month I worked with an online registration service that was new to me – Regonline. As the name implies, it facilitates online registration for events. It’s not free. The cost is a few dollars per registrant add 5% transaction fee IF you use them as a merchant account to accept credit cards. We were really happy with it – so happy that even though it wasn’t free I’m writing about it here.
Of the 100+ registrants, only one had trouble using Regonline – and she eventually figured it out. Attendees received an automated email confirmation of registration and were able to modify their registration at any point with an assigned password. Attendees could register and/or pay on site.
All of the conference planners had access to the registration and attendees through the web site. I could run reports and post them on a password-protected web site for the less technical or less involved planners. It was easy to set up name tags, tickets, and a voucher system. There were a lot of lodging options that we didn’t use.
So, there you go – - an unsolicited (and unrewarded) plug for Regonline for conference planners. (They appear to do member management too – but I can’t speak to that service.)
