LISNews: Librarian News

Silentale, the new web service that backs up and archives your contacts and messages from all the communication platforms you use, has now launched into public beta as of this morning. The online application is part universal inbox, part social CRM tool and part contact management solution. But unlike some of its competitors, the best part about Silentale is that it archives your messages - all of your messages, including every single email, Twitter reply or direct message, Facebook message and more and then makes those searchable from one location.

Full article

Increasingly, school librarians feel a need for their students to access alternative search engines as safe alternatives to Google and the other standard general search engines. One way to do this is to make available collections of vetted or "juried" sites, many times selected by other educators and librarians. Some of my favorite such sites for secondary school students include the Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org/), Digital Librarian (http://www.digital-librarian.com/), and BUBL (http://bubl.ac.uk/).

There exist search engines on the Internet that search only sites similar to the three listed above. A lot of these are Google Custom Search engines, free to anyone who wants to sign up at http://www.google.com/cse/ . One such search engine is Infotopia, a Google CSE that I created last November 13, 2009.

Infotopia, http://www.infotopia.info , searches only sites previously selected by librarians, teachers, and educational and library consortia. I have designed Infotopia to search with Google Safe Search always on. No filtering needed, and you get all of the precision and search features of the regular Google search engine. -- Read More

By Jeffrey Beall

Word-sense disambiguation is the ability of an online system to differentiate the different senses, or meanings, of words in online searching. Say for example that you need information on boxers, so you access an Internet search engine and enter "boxers" in the search box. The search engine then finds documents that contain the word "boxers" and returns those documents to you as search results.

You probably already see the problem here -- the word "boxers" is a homonym with several different meanings, and the search engine doesn’t know which meaning you want. Boxers are a breed of dog, a category of athlete, and a kind of men’s garment. It’s also the possessive of a surname, as in "Barbara Boxer’s bill …" Finally, boxers were those who participated in the Boxer Rebellion in China from 1899 to 1901. There may be additional meanings.

Information retrieval in libraries has transitioned from the high precision and recall that legacy library systems offered to the probabilistic and linguistic free-for-all that internet search engines now provide. One of the great values of legacy library databases was that they effectively handled polysemy -- the ability of a term to have multiple meanings -- in searching. Because online searching needs word-sense disambiguation to be effective and precise, it’s important for all librarians to understand the problem and its solutions. -- Read More

In a partnership to be initially rolled out in the United States, Bing plans to use data sets and algorithms from the computational knowledge engine to punch up its search results. Particular emphasis is being placed on Wolfram's quick calculations when it comes to nutrition and health information.

Story at BBC News