WAAL 2008: Gary Price keynote

Gary Price

• Presentation: http://tinyurl.com/4xqhqn
• ResourceShelf.com
• Started this site
• Updated daily, even during his honeymoon!
• Calls himself an "intropreneur"
• It's one thing to have a website, and it's another thing to keep people coming to your website
• RSS isn't as widely-used as people think it is - many people don't know what it is or how to use it
• I send out a weekly email reminder - everyone still knows what it is
• 25-50 names added to email list a week - up to 50,000 subscribers (?)
• Information overload
• Docuticker.com
• Started this site, maintained by Shirl Kennedy
• Reports from think tanks, government agencies, universities, etc.
• Also updated daily, with weekly e-mail reminders
• People tell me that the only reason they come is the teaser email message: "This is a little bit of what we've posted this week..."
• Both sites popular with journalists
• Comes down to using the right tool at the right time: online tools, books, licensed databases
• Many people have no idea what the library of today or future has to offer
• "Go to the library" is important message, but not the only one
• Share your experiences:
• UW Sheboygan - instruction for Philosophy 101 class, student trying to cite sources, and all were ".com" websites, and the assignment called for books and articles. Were you in my class? Yeah, but I knew where I was going to get my sources.
• Is it the instructors we need to get to?
• UW Stout - depends on instructor. If they emphasize use variety of sources, then students will do it. Sometimes, instructors say I didn't even know you had this.
• Can you use something you don't even know about?
• Comment: Instructors are astounded, and then make their assignments more appropriate.
• What does this mean in the long term? For libraries, licensed tools, companies?
• Audience: If become an instructor, should take a "library course"
• Gary: They're just as Googlified as anyone else?
• Audience: Correct. In grad school, I surveyed high school teachers, and none of them had library training, only knew from being little kids - no one has been teaching the teachers.
• I talked to teachers, and they're getting into turf wars with public libraries, which offer databases. Don't talk to each other. Money wasted.
• Audience: Bigger problem. Teaching distance education for grad school. Assigned annotated bibliography, and grad students only sent websites. They "couldn't find anything"
• Gary: Same thing happened to me. They don't know what their academic library can do for them.
• Audience: I work at the public library in Manitowoc. College students come in and they don't know the difference. I got this at school, can I get it again. Customers are the same. They don't understand what we're doing.
• I don't understand database vendors - they don't help us with their marketing know-how to get to end-users. Told they're afraid of placing ads in school newspapers because they'll step on librarians' toes.
• Told to keep secret, because if too many people use them, vendors will raise prices, and then we won't have any access.
• Once they sell database, should do more to support use of it. Librarians also need to do a better job of marketing - I've seen "Come use EBSCOHost" - federated searching solution?
• BadgerNet is a best-kept secret in Wisconsin
• Audience: Difficult time working with students - convince them to struggle as librarian is struggling.
• Gary: 45 million things in Proquest, ABI, etc. - makes difficult. Remove duplicates. End user doesn't care where it comes from (vendor).
• Audience: Better term than fee-based database?
• Gary: Stuff you're not going to find in Google.
• If we do things RIGHT, we get one of the most valuable commodities that everyone wants - we can save time, effort and aggravation finding the information they need.
• I don't know what Web2.0 means - where do they get these names? some are junk, but we don't know what 2.0 means either.
• KillerStartups.com - reviews the good and bad
• Discussion/message boards are still big, in addition to blogs - some are moderated, without the spam
• Blogpulse - like best, Nielsen Buzz Metrics
• Bloglines
• Technorati
• I'm running Windows and Apple at the same time - had to send back Ask.com computers, I'm addicted to Windows but I wanted an Apple so badly, so got MacBook Pro with VMware Fusion to run both OS's
• Market Research Library - U.S. Commercial Service
• Comment: this was online, then only supposed to be StatsBase, but now it looks like it's back for free
• CiteSeerX - over 10 years - think Google Scholar, but just IT/CS - new interface
• "Autonomous citation indexing"
• Over a million citations - IEEE paper - "My CiteSeer / MetaCart" - list by # cites
• From Penn State U.
• Gotta be backing things up remotely - I learned the hard (and heart) way - your life can feel like it's about to be over
• I use Mozy $100/year for 3 hard drives - every night, automatically to Utah
• Teaching people how to back things up could be an entire instruction session from the libraries
• I've had my hard drive fail on me, and $3,700 later, the data came back
• VTuner and PublicRadioFan.com - trend - multimedia material - in lower grades can learn a language this way
• PRF - what's playing on public radio around the world? listen online or download podcasts.
• I've been told that I could be Michael Feldman's second or third cousin
• CoolIris
• Firefox users? Lots of people. I'm a huge users, so many addons.
• "Price is my name. Free is my game."
• MelissaData - lookups - demographics
• MobiTV
• Comment: Why search blogosphere?
• Gary: Find out what people are talking about, including latest publications
• Topix - 50,000+ mainstream news sources - more than Google News - local and browsable - metrics (?)
• Used to work for chain of newspapers around Chicago called Pioneer Press - we used to learn about how ads placed near articles can change intention - online it's automatic, so you get "Anti-Christ" ads on "Pope" search
• News Now - 31,000 sources, from UK but global news - by subject - auto refresh with new content - virtual news ticker
• Comment: Are sources lasting? here today, gone tomorrow?
• Gary: I try to show things that I think will be around - but alot of Web2.0 funding is from venture capital - they want to know "what's your endgame?" - and that may be to get bought out by Google, etc.
• 99% of Google's revenue is from ads on side of pages, or syndicated to other sites (like NYT)
• Google still a phenomenal search engine
• people have problems with busy Yahoo homepage - now have search.yahoo.com, looks like Google
• Aerial imagery - TerraFly from FL Intl U. - around before Google Earth - great data
• MS Birdseye imagery is remarkable
• MS also digitizing books
• MS Live Search Academic - Google Scholar alternative - I'm sure linking will come in future -
• G Scholar - what's the actual version that's published? Questionable.
• SearchPickr - for different kinds of searches - one-stop search
• "Is this new for everyone? Anyone using this? Good, there's x new resources."
• CustomizeGoogle.com - lots of options - including removing ads! - Search in Google, then run same search on other engines
• What happens when more and more people remove ads from the results page?
• Google used to have 8 ads per page - now up to 11
• Jux2 - compare 2 search engines at one time - what ONLY google, yahoo, MSN found
• Thumbshots - graphic comparison of search results
• Exalead - from France, but in English - I like how results are presented - which can be of huge value to end user - point and click limits
• Clusty - what you know, and what you don't know - dynamically clusters results using words on page (not pre-built categories)
• ClusterMed - PubMed is fielded searching, so allows lots of clusters
• Amazon "Search inside the book" - using to find new books? - metrics - readability - # characters, fun stats (words per dollar/ounce) - concordance of frequently used words - around a little longer than Google Books - determined by publisher for new books (not retrospective)
• The Online Books Page - Univ of PA - full text, out of copyright, this person is completely out of his mind (tons added every day)
• ChaCha - 800-2-chacha - Indiana Univ. - live voice-activated searching - response by text messaging - next generation virtual reference - all results have to come from open web, which is where we started our discussion... - focus on casual user - bar bets
• Pandora - shows power and importance of good metadata - instruments, meter, etc. - several thousand musicians and musicologists to listen to tracks and tag - find related music
• What is the deep/invisible web in 2008? (Wrote book 7 years ago) - General search engines weren't indexing much material - better, but invisible web is bigger than it was then - if it's not in first 5-6 results, may as well be invisible to user - need to show advanced searching and variety of searches and share individualized resources with people who can use them [liaison]
• 85% people don't go to 2nd search results page
• Search engines are also huge marketing tools - spammers do what they can - some optimizers do it above board (white hats) - that's why good to use multiple
• most people do simple searches - used to be 2, now 2.8-3 words on average
• Spock - people searching -
• quality of information is what I worry about - anyone can go in and manipulate - huge on wikipedia
• Zoominfo - takes open web info and builds dossiers - I never worked for Ask S.A, I worked for Ask.com. Ask S.A sells RFID.
• Spokeo - track your online social network friends across 22 networks
• Rubble88 = Gary Price
• HouseFront - also works on mobile - nosy neighbor tool - data by property address - have blog: celebrity houses for sale with aerial views