A common complaint by end users is how difficult it is to find books, whether online, or in a print bookshop. A recent presentation by Kat Meyer of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), a trade association of publishers, revealed how BISG members are …
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Ben Ratliff, a music critic on the New York Times, wrote in The Guardian about Spotify’s Discover Weekly recommendation engine (“Slave to the algorithm: how music fans can reclaim their playlists from Spotify” 21 Feb 2016). This service provides an automatically generated weekly playlist for …
“We find users prefer one answer.” This was the comment of Google’s Behshad Behzadi when presenting Google’s new Ultimate Assistant. In case you don’t already know, Google’s Ultimate Assistant will answer your questions, whether you key them in or (in Google’s opinion the most …
My first response when looking at hypothes.is was uncertainty. I’ve seen quite a bit of publicity, lots of mentions in discussion forums about hypothes.is, but it wasn’t very clear to me on looking at the website just what was proposed. “Annotate with anyone, anywhere” doesn’t …
“Users’ expectations are different for these two. When you search books you expect an answer; when you search journal articles, a scholar expects a list of things to read. A book represents late-stage work, not the early-stage work of journal articles.”
Thus Anurag …
It is commonplace nowadays to predict the inexorable decline of print as it is steadly replaced by online information. Without wishing to be a luddite, I an intrigued when there are examples of print surviving and even prospering in the face of digital competition, especially …
Anurag Acharya, one of the founders of Google Scholar, gave the keynote address at the recent ALPSP Annual Conference. His wide-ranging overview of the effect of full-text searching on academic content raised many good points, but one that struck me as perhaps the …
Despite(or perhaps because of) being the world’s biggest online bookstore, Amazon is a nightmare to use when searching for well-known books. The problem of finding a book on Amazon that exists in several versions has been very succinctly stated by Jim O’Donnell on a recent …
You might think that there need be no war over creating a taxonomy. When should you use a hierarchical classification, and when a set of facets? You might think it hardly worth bothering over. Yet some thesaurus experts fight to defend hierarchical taxonomies; you feel …
A recent ISKO meeting (“Taming the News Beast”, 1 April, London) presented the current state of the art for text analytics relating to news publishing. Although the presentations were excellent, and the organisations represented were leading edge, I found the day valuable not for what …