Category: Discovery
-
Some tweaks at Google Scholar
Somehow I wasn't subscribed to the Google Scholar blog already, and missed last week's announcement that they'd made some tweaks to the interface of Google Scholar. Today though I was presented with a big link under the search box to the post on their blog touting Better ways of getting around. I've gotta say I…
-
Sorry, the new Wayback Machine extension for Chrome needs some work!
Feb 2, 2017 update: improvements have been made! The other day I saw a headline about a new extension for the Chrome browser from the Internet Archive, Wayback Machine. I had initially ignored this, assuming it was the same thing as Wayback Chrome, but upon further inspection, the latter, which has been around for quite…
-
Tammy and Paula’s Most Wonderful, Best-Ever, Holiday Book List 2016
Over at the Apples with Many Seeds blog, which is attached to our Education Library, Tammy and Paula are putting together a great book list for this holiday season. Want to impress the young folk in your life with an awesome book or two this holiday season? Want to avoid the disappointed /horrified / mortified…
-
Mita makes the case: Why Libraries Should Maintain the Open Data of Their Communities
Mita Williams has an excellent blog post titled Why Libraries Should Maintain the Open Data of Their Communities. It's a long (for a blog post), but important read, and includes an excellent history of how Canadian government data has evolved, and how it compares (poorly) to US government data . I've been making the same…
-
Bookmarklet to convert open.canada.ca JSON to HTML
Somewhere along the line I subscribed to the JSON feed of the Govt. of Canada Open Data releases, so I get something that looks great in my Feedly list: But when I click through I get the JSON data instead of the actual HTML descriptive page with pretty separate download the CSV etc buttons. Too…
-
Recreating Hilary Mason’s Research-quality data sets bitly bundle
I'm about halfway through an excellent Coursera MOOC called Getting and Cleaning Data, part of my plan to learn R. We were just shown a slide listing a bunch of collections where we could find data sets to play with, and the first one on the list had disappeared. Turns out it was originally created…
-
Fun with OpenDataSoft – Mapping Calgary City Amenities
Earlier this month I happened across a blog post from a company called OpenDataSoft (ODS) in which they described how they put together and mapped a list of over 1,600 Open Data portals around the world. I thought that was pretty cool, and did a little exploration of their web-based platform and decided to try my…
-
Amazon.ca now supported by Library Extension for Chrome
Following up on a post from earlier this summer, the developer of this excellent extension for Chrome has now updated it to include Amazon.ca. (And the University of Calgary) Remember to choose your library(ies) from the Options menu in Tools / Extensions: