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Upheaval at the National Archives
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by Barbie E. Keiser
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Who knew that libraries, records, and archives could be so controversial? It's rare to find an archive as headline news, but 1Q2011 has not ended, and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has seen its name in lights for two seemingly independent issues: suspended development of the Electronic Records Archive (ERA) and closure of the Archives Library and Information Center (ALIC). What happened to set off this furor was the release of two documents: Memorandum 2011-113 issued by the Archivist of the United States (AOTUS), David S. Ferriero, on Feb. 14 and the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) Report to Congressional Committees, Electronic Government: National Archives and Records Administration's Fiscal Year 2011 Expenditure Plan (GAO-11-299) published on March 4.
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Oxford University Scientists Launch Free Collaborative Software
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Oxford University scientists launched free software that seeks to provide researchers the tools they need to collaborate more efficiently and quickly with colleagues working in different research areas. The colwiz (collective wizdom) R&D platform manages the entire research lifecycle from an initial idea, through a complex collaboration, to publication of the results. It is being launched through Isis Innovation's Software Incubator, a new program designed to promote software startups from the University of Oxford.
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Northern Light Introduces Dashboard Tool for SinglePoint Portals
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Northern Light announced the availability of a dashboard tool for its SinglePoint strategic research portals, which lets organizations immediately publish specific content on time-sensitive strategic topics for audiences whose focus needs to be on tasks other than research. SinglePoint dashboards provide executives a snapshot of key information needed to make business decisions and to stay current on developments in their company and industry sector.
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Mendeley Announces $10,001 Contest for App Developers
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Mendeley announced the Mendeley API Binary Battle, challenging talented developers to build an application on top of Mendeley's open database of more than 70 million research papers, usage statistics, reader demographics, social tags, and related research recommendations.
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Search Quality, Content Farms, and Conspiracy Theories
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by Paula J. Hane
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The blogosphere and media outlets have been abuzz lately with reports of low-quality search results from the major search engines. It started in December 2010 with a New York Times, story about an unscrupulous merchant whose bad treatment of customers and negative reviews pushed the site to prominence in Google searches. In response to the flap that arose, Google quickly addressed this with changes to its search algorithms. Since then, there have been a New York Times expose of J.C. Penney's SEO practices ("The Dirty Little Secrets of Search") and Google's subsequent changes to its algorithm, Google's assertion that Microsoft Bing was copying Google search results, Google's banning of spam from low-quality sites and so-called "content farms," and even a conspiracy theory about which company was launching a negative publicity campaign against Google. This has indeed been a wild and crazy time.
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