The wonderful logo of ISKO, suggesting a Enlightenment masonic-like capturing of all knowledge in a harmonious whole
Knowledge Organization! A mention of the subject leaves the average person scratching their heads. What exactly is it? In truth, attending a conference on …
Reading Time: 3minutesThe legendary “Liddell and Scott” Greek-English Lexicon of 1842, for many years the standard way to of searching for ancient Greek words. Search has got simpler since then!
The famous 1954 paper showing the causative link between smoking and lung cancer
Ken Hyland wrote an interesting post (16 May 2023) on the appropriately named LSE Impact Blog, with the melodramatic title “Crucial! New! Essential! – The rise of hype …
The news this week that Google is merging its two AI initiatives, Deep Mind, and Google Brain caused a stir, but commentators have struggled to interpret this development consistently. According to the Financial Times (““Deep …
Academic studies of reading appear to be influenced by romantic ideas about how we read print (Corot, Woman reading in the country, around 1868-70, Metropolitan Museum)
Where did this idea come from, and is it valid? It seems to me an …
Reading Time: 4minutesThe barn-like SEC, where UKSG was held
Now that the UKSG annual conference has got back to something like normality following the pandemic years, it seems a good moment to explore some fundamental questions. What is UKSG for?
The European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) seems to have emerged from the pandemic stronger than ever. This year, in Dublin, saw the highest number of attendees ever, I’m told, at over 380 in-person and virtual attendees. I’m not a computing …
We can all agree that a lot of research, perhaps most research, starts with asking questions. Does smoking cause cancer? What are the causes of the French Revolution? What causes inflation? The next step is …
Reading Time: 3minutesSubject coverage of some of the collections evaluated. “GSC”, Google Scholar, has the largest collection, fairly evenly spread across subjects. Others, such as PubMed (PMD), are heavily focused on medical subjects.
Choosing where to search is a central part of the …
