Updates to:

Research Strategies: Finding your Way through the Information Fog, 3rd edition. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse.com, 2008. 

p. 8-9 - October 2008 - Sony released a new version of its e-book at $399.  The Sony PRS- 700 is apparently targetted at college students. See http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/10/sonys-new-e-boo.html and http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&productId=8198552921665562069  for more information.

p. 8-10 - Scribd (http://www.scribd.com/) bills itself as the YouTube of the written word.  As of May 2009, Scribd has added Scribd Store, which enables publishers to sell e-books or portions of them directly to users.  Thus, whether simply mounting your documents for free viewing, or selling chapters or whole books, Scribd appears to be one of the simpler distributors of text.  See http://www.scribd.com/about for more.

p. 8-10 - For a good introduction to e-books, see Jane Lee, "E-books: Understanding the Basics" http://www.cdlib.org/inside/assess/evaluation_activities/docs/2009/e-book_basics_june2009.pdf

p. 9 - As of 2008 a new e-ink based e-book reader is available - Readius.  It boasts the first flexible e-ink screen, enabling a cell-phone sized device to roll out a 5 inch screen.  It is also a phone and can receive e-mails and text downloads. See a promo on YouTube
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQMBzXaCmqY&feature=related) or read about it at the producer's site (http://www.polymervision.com/).  

p. 9 - February 10, 2008, amazon released Kindle2, which they bill as having a clearer screen image, longer lasting power, more storage and thinner profile.  The new Kindle costs $359 and can access up to 230,000 books now available, with 1500 book storage capability. Kindle continues to use e-ink technology.  In July 2009, amazon lowered the cost of Kindle to $299.

June 26, 2009, amazon released KindleDX, with a larger 9.7" screen, ability to display PDFs and to rotate the screen to read content across the breadth or length of the device.  Cost is $489.

November 2009 marks the release of the newest reader, also using e-ink:  Nook, from Barnes &
Noble.  It offers a buy-the-book download opportunity from the B & N online bookstore, like
amazon Kindle, but is also part of a deal with Google Book to offer about 500,000 free digital
books.  Beware, however, because these are out of copyright books and thus generally old.  Nook
allows you to lend books to your friends for up to 2 weeks and has note-taking and highlighting
features.  Cost is $289, similar to Kindle2.  For info, see http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/index.asp  

January 27, 2001, Apple unveiled the iPad, a tablet that combines features of an e-book reader and notebook computer.  By offering publishers a higher percentage of profits on e-books, Apple may well corner much of the book market in the same way that it has done with music through iTunes.

(From http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/a-closer-look-at-apples-new-tablet-the-ipad/)

January 2010 - This year is going to be the year of the e-book reader wars, especially with the
promised release of Blio, a free software package that can download to computers and numerous
portable devices, allowing users to carry a book with them that they have previously been reading
on another device. You can make any book a flipbook, and an audio feature is included for those who want to hear their book. Note-taking ability is part of the software, and Blio will sell more than a million titles from its website.  While not e-paper, like Kindle, Blio will be a clear competitor to the iPad.  Due for release in February, 2010 - http://www.blioreader.com/

p. 9 - Windows Live Books has been cancelled.  See announcement on p. 110 below. 

p. 9 - A paper by Richard K. Johnson released on September 25, 2008 spells out warnings for current book digitization projects (one example just above) and makes suggestions for a new course of action: http://www.blc.org/news/BLC_summit_white_paper_9-29-08.pdf

p. 9 - March 23, 2009, the University of Michigan Press announced that it will be changing its emphasis from paper publication to primarily electronic publication.  Of its normal 60 new titles per year, 50 of them will be digital-only within two years.  The press argues that the business model for paper publication is no longer working in university presses and that savings on not having to do print runs will mean that good, non-commercial books can be published and more effort can be devoted to editing manuscripts.

p. 9 - Both Google and Hewlett-Packard/amazon are creating venues to sell print-on-demand paperback copies of books Google has digitized that are public domain (out of copyright and thus generally quite old).  Paperbacks will sell for $8 - $15 on average.  Ironic, isn't it?  For all the digitization going on, there still appears to be a profitable demand for paper bound books.     http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20091021/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_techbit_hp_book_publishing

p.9 - December 2009 - EnTourage has released a dual reader.  One side is e-ink and the other is a regular netbook screen.  It can function as a netbook and a reader.  What is more, graphics from the e-ink side can be displayed in color on the netbook side, or you can use the netbook side to compose notes.  It is possible that such hybrids will eventually win the day over exclusively e-book or computer screen devices.  See http://www.entourageedge.com/entourage-edge.html 

p. 10-11 - A dramatic and fairly aggressive plan to replace existing commercial journals with open  access ones comes from SCOAP³  This initiative has gathered a list of subscribers to 6 key particle physics journals who are willing to cancel their subscriptions and turn the funds over to SCOAP³ which will fund the changeover of these journals to open access, should these journals (now lacking subcriptions) agree.  If the existing journals do not agree, applications will be received for new open access alternatives.  See http://scoap3.org/files/Scoap3WPReport.pdf

June, 2009, the University of Kansas announced that it is now putting its professors' research papers into open access (2000-4000 papers per year).  This follows on a similar announcement from Harvard in April, 2009. See http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3857&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

p. 20-23 - January 22, 2009, Britannica announced that it is allowing users to edit existing articles or write new ones.  Unlike Wikipedia, however, all changes will have to be approved by paid editors. (http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10148087-2.html?tag=mncol;txt)

p. 23-24 - January 26, 2009, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia announced that he is considering having all updates approved by "reliable users," a group of watchdogs who volunteer to guard quality.  (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10149648-93.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0) In the end, he has decided to reserve this watchdog function only to creation and changes in personal articles (articles about people).

August 2009, Wikipedia announced that all articles on people will have to be vetted by trusted editors.  As of Fall 2009, there will be a new feature called WikiTrust that will allow those interested to see a color code of every word in Wikipedia based on the reliability of its author and the length of time it has persisted on the page.

March 31, 2009 - Microsoft has announced that it will be discontinuing its Encarta encyclopedia product, primarily in face of the fact that Wikipedia has led the way to a different path in encyclopedia production, making Encarta unprofitable.  Encarta websites will be unavailable before the end of 2009.   (http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090331/tc_nm/us_microsoft_encarta)

September 28, 2009 - Farhad Manjoo, writing in Time Magazine argued that the drop in rate of increase of articles in Wikipedia since 2007 may be spelling out both a limitation in its possible growth and perhaps a coming implosion as a small circle of editors (about 1000 of them) become more traditional and fewer new people want to write or edit Wikipedia articles.  Will Wikipedia survive? (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1924492-1,00.html)

p. 42-44 - Hierarchies.  For a cool way to help you visualize hierarchies, try the online graphical dictionary available at http://www.visuwords.com/.
 

p. 46-47- Grokker is no longer in business, and the search engine is no longer available.

p. 47, etc. - EBSCO has overhauled its search interface as of July 2008.  This represents a dramatic change in EBSCO's "look."  Since Research Strategies uses EBSCO screenshots (pp. 47, 66, 81, 82, 90, 91), we have reproduced all screen shots in the new EBSCO design (see http://www.acts.twu.ca/lbr/NewEBSCO.htm) . 

Here's a sample of the new look:

p. 75 - October, 2008: Google Book Search reached a settlement with the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers which will add a fee base to much in-copyright material and will free up most out of print material for public viewing.  In future, libraries may be able to subscribe to Google Book full text, even copyrighted text, and individuals will be able to purchase copyrighted text from Google Book. At this point, these increased access points will only be available within the US. See http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/index.html for more detail.  The full agreement is available at http://books.google.com/booksrightsholders/agreement-contents.html

p. 75 - Windows Live Books has been cancelled.  See announcement on p. 110 below. 

p. 78-79 - The open access movement is heating up.  Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, in February 2008, voted to add articles written by its professors to its electronic open access repository.  Then, as of April 2008, all publications funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) must be made publicly available through PubMed no later than 12 months after publication by a scholarly publisher.  This will put 80,000 articles, etc. into open access every year.

Source: http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00014755/01/ELIS_OTDCF_v24no3.pdf

April, 2009 - The Directory of Open Access Journals introduced the beginning of a long-term plan to preserve open access journals, thus guaranteeing that they will not suddenly disappear.  See http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=loadTempl&templ=090401 

p. 83 -  Here is an example of a citation in APA, 6th ed., format, with a DOI added.  The
DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is a unique code assigned to a particular journal article, making
that article universally identifiable:

(credit to Duncan Dixon, Trinity Western University, who created the image).

p. 96-99 - Plans are unfolding to "re-do" the Worldwide Web, starting now but ramping up by 2010.
See the interesting article: "2020 Vision: Why you Won't Recognize the 'Net in 10 Years."
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/010410-outlook-vision.html (Jan. 4, 2010).

p. 106ff. - Cuil is a new player in the search engine market.  Developed by former employees of Google, it offers what it claims to be the largest number of websites ever and organizes results in semantic domains.  The initial reaction has been muted - a number of users see the results display and the results themselves to be unusual.  For a press release, see http://www.cuil.com/info/news_press/.  Try it out at:  http://www.cuil.com/

Microsoft released a Beta version of its cooperative search program SearchTogether, April 24, 2008 ( http://research.microsoft.com/searchtogether/ ).  As a plugin for Internet Explorer only, it allows more than one person to work on a search project and pool results.

ChaCha is not exactly a search engine but a free search service that allows you to text or phone in a question and get a text message answer ( http://www.chacha.com/ ).  There is not charge for the service, though normal charges apply from your cell phone service provider for using your phone live or with messaging (if you have to pay for messages).  The site also archives answers to previous questions.  

p. 107ff. - Google's blog for September 18, 2008 has some predictions about the way search might look in 2019 - cloud computing on a major scale, search engines learning from the collective experiences of web searchers, concept searching, etc.: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/intelligent-cloud.html

November 20, 2008, Google introduced SearchWiki, which enables you, if logged in to Google, to rearrange search results, and add notes to websites in results, among other things, while retaining all of your customizations each time you do the same search.  There is information and a video at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-search-your-own.html.

May 12, 2009, Google added Search Options, a link on results that allows you to specify particular aspects of a topic.  See the video explaining this at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtirDMfcOKE&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogleblog.blogspot.com%2F2009%2F05%2Fmore-search-options-and-other-updates.html&feature=player_embedded.  "Search Options" is here on your results page (no download or configuration needed):

The Firefox browser now has a downloadable plug-in called Search Cloudlet (http://www.getcloudlet.com/).  Once downloaded, every time you do a Google search in Firefox, you get a tag cloud that picks up the most significant words from searches.  Clicking on any one of them will give you a narrower subset of results.  For example, searching on Badke (why not?  You Google yourself too, I'll bet), I get results like Research and William, as well as a tag for my brother's work on Medieval Bestiaries (manuscripts about animals):

 (Thanks for Mary Ellen Bates for pointing out this cool tool).

p. 110 - Ask.com - [February-March 2008] This search engine has laid off a portion of its staff and announced that it will now provide primary service to its main users - married women.  While denying that it is giving up on being a general search engine, several pundits are predicting that ask.com will soon be insignificant or dead in the search business (http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2008/03/asks_new_strate.html) Following upon such reports, Ask.com has announced that it will now concentrate on its core demographic - women - and cease being "all things to all people" (http://www.bluhalo.com/news/view/283/ask-com-says-it-will-still-be-strong-on-search)

p. 110 - Windows Live Academic is dead - [May 23, 2008] This is a portion of Microsoft's announcement: