Google now hosts 199 digitised magazine titles, and for the sake of 10 minutes’ work every few months it would be a shame to miss out on the extra full-text coverage, which often complements the “library” sources for a title.

E.g. for the frankly un-put-downable Estonian Journal of Archaeology (available as an Open Access (OA) journal from 2006-, and indexed in Art Full Text), Google provides the missing articles from 1997 (vol.1) up to 2006.

I’d like to be able to harvest the Google Books content to build my list using the standard mashlib toolkit (Google spreadsheets; Yahoo! Pipes; some coffee)… but while use of Google’s =ImportHtml() function is limited to 50 per spreadsheet, and because Google search pages block robots.txt files, I can’t figure out a way of doing so.

Instead, I’ve been copying-and-pasting the search results pages into an ordinary Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (thanks, again, Google, for making this possible through your magazine browse page), then using a custom Excel function to ‘unmask’ the URL hidden behind each hyperlinked magazine title.

Finally, I use a bit of text-to-column splitting, search/replace, and filling-in of package-wide fields, to give me a compatible, tab-delimited text file which I then upload to our e-journals knowledge base (which happens to be EBSCO A-to-Z) – I used EBSCO’s custom notes feature to link to Google’s cover image to each entry in the file.

• 199 magazine titles from Google books on the University of Lincoln’s e-journals A-to-Z

mosaic.2008.level1.1265378452.0000001.xml

The University of Lincoln collected one academic year’s worth of its own library book circulation data (“user activity data”) for the JISC-funded MOSAIC project, which set out to investigate the technical feasibility, service value and issues around exploiting user activity data. Data was collected for the period 1 September 2008 – 31 August 2009. Lincoln’s data was processed according to a data schema common to all participants in the MOSAIC project; any data that might be used to identify an individual library user was removed or anonymised.

View this item on the University Repository: http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/2164/

Here I am at the inaugural Mashed Libraries UK 2008, wearing a black sweatshirt:

And at Mash Oop North, wearing a black short-sleeved shirt: quite racy.

Gesticulating, and possibly speaking, at Middlemash, wearing a black sweatshirt:

On the left at Liver and Mash. Black sweatshirt: check. Special mashlib beard: check.

Finally, last month’s Chips and Mash.

OK… here my story gets a little thin through lack of supporting evidence. Apparently I was behind a pillar (or walking the streets of Huddersfield with a pile of takeaway pizzas) for the whole day, and there’s no convincing photographic evidence I was there.

Possibly it’s all a ruse on the part of Professor Moriarty to discredit my claim, and claim the mashlib crown for himself. But I’ll swear I’m in the background of this photo, talking to @garygre and @chrisl1953.

If it adds any weight to my argument, I was wearing a black sweatshirt.

Taken from: Chapman, J. (2009) Issues in contemporary documentary (with additional research by Kate Allison). Cambridge: Polity Press [Google book preview]

And:

Taken from: Chapman, J. (2007) Documentary in practice: filmmakers and production choices. Cambridge: Polity Press [Google book preview]

The_first_six_tools_for_practical_web_2.htm

A list of six free Web 2.0 tools and technologies that may be of use to libraries. Adapted from a post on the University of Lincoln’s library staff blog.

View this item on the University Repository: http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/2528/

UKCoRR, the United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories, is an “independent body for repository managers, administrators and staff in the UK“.

Because I manage the Library’s work in supporting our own Lincoln Repository at the University, I’ve been a member of UKCoRR for several years: and since April 2010 I’ve been sitting on the 5-person UKCoRR committee as ‘External Liaison Officer’; my purpose being to “develop the relationship between UKCoRR and other organisations working in repository management & development, publishing & OA, research support, academia and librarianship”.

The UKCoRR website, including minutes of the committee’s meetings, is at: http://www.ukcorr.org/

My original website was a series of plain HTML documents; now instead of maintaining my own installation of WordPress I’m using the University of Lincoln’s (i.e. my employer’s) WordPress MU / BuddyPress server at blogs.lincoln.ac.uk, but mapped to my own domain. This way I can participate in the social-networking features of BuddyPress, while still maintaining my own, personal online presence outside the University.