I’ll be honest. This morning I wasn’t overly excited about day one of the conference compared to the rest of the week, but I did enjoy the searching sessions I attended. Overall, the sessions scheduled for Monday just didn’t seem as interesting to me. Maybe my expectations for Wednesday’s Content Management and Preservation Track and Thursday’s Data Curation workshop are too high. We’ll see.
Today I only attended three sessions, and none of the keynotes. I planned for a partial day at the conference since I would be working a full shift at work tonight (I didn’t want to ask someone else to cover my closing shift). Below are some of the highlights from the sessions I attended.
Super Searcher Strategies and Tips
- Google has a word proximity search operator: AROUND (#) # = number of word proximity
- Google Books’ data mining lab: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com
- Yahoo Clues shows search trends and demographics.
- DuckDuckGo.com doesn’t track your search results, so past searches won’t influence future ones.
- Blekko.com blocks spam and content farms. You can also use specialized slash tags, such as /relevance and /date to organize results.
Building Community with Faculty and Suppliers
- When creating a digital repository, start small with a focus but also dream big for the future.
- Be ready to do it all yourself.
- Plan ahead, but stay flexible.
- After implementing the repository, constantly assess what people are looking at and downloading.
- You need to have both anecdotes and data to demonstrate the repository’s worth.
Search: Quick Tips for Adding Value
- In Google, use an asterisk in place of wildcard words (e.g. john * kennedy) – but be careful, each asterisk insists presence of a word.
- Microsoft Academic Search: Google Scholar on steroids?
- Topsy.com archives tweets and allows you to search images and videos linked in tweets.
- IssueMap.org and Many Eyes allow you to create data visualizations without knowing code.
- Google has a command for searching only specific file types: filetype:[extension] (e.g. [search terms] filetype:ppt)
- Google also has an operator for searching within number ranges: .. (e.g. 1984..1999)
If you’re interested in more details about the searching sessions, Librarian in Black (who moderated the sessions) live-blogged each one.
anthroarchivist 
Micah Vandegrift
March 21, 2011 at 11:27 pm
Super jealous that you get to attend, but really glad you’re blogging it. If you ever learn how to use Blekko, let me know. I still haven’t really figured it out.
rose l chou
March 21, 2011 at 11:31 pm
Is it the slashtags that are confusing you? I don’t quite understand them all either, as I only started playing around tonight — but this gives a good summary of the built-in slashtags.
http://blekko.com/tag/show
xinz
April 8, 2011 at 2:51 am
> Microsoft Academic Search: Google Scholar on steroids?
it’s going to cover more domains now…