Camel Drivers as Info Pros

Apparently where there's a will there's a way.

In 10th Century Persia Grand Vizier Abdul Kassem Ismael was loath to part with his 117,000 volume library. When traveling he carried the collection along in a caravan of 400 camels trained to walk in alphabetical order (A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel.) Thus his camel drivers were able to deliver volumes to the master upon request.



The Library Book: The Story of Libraries from Camels to Computers (for young readers) gives us a nice visual image of what that might have looked like.

I'm guessing Grand Vizier Ismael would have been an early adopter of the e-book.

AuthorMapper

Springer offers a cool tool that puts its authors on a map so that you can visualize patterns in scientific research. AuthorMapper integrates content with mapping technology. Besides mapping author locations, the technology also delivers graphs, timelines, and keyword tag clouds that visually summarize the data and can also be selected to further refine your search terms.

Although the site includes 150 years of articles from 1,900 journals, it's too bad more journals are not included. By way of comparison, PubMed indexes approximately 5,200 journals and the database contains over 18 million citations.

In any case, AuthorMapper creates graphs that illustrate publication year, author names, journal titles, countries, subject, and institution. Keyword searches on terms like leprosy, polio, and carbon footprint yield interesting results, leading to further exploration of why publishing patterns appear the way they do. Searching on a known author's name can produce a geographical view of his or her collaborators and co-authors. Be careful, however, in interpreting the results. AuthorMapper is a work in progress and developers have not given clear guidance on how it parses and responds to a query.

Furl Becomes Part of Diigo.com

If you Furl your bookmarks or favorites, you'll want to know that Furl has become part of Diigo.com. The Furl team has handed the torch to Diigo.com as they offer users a link for exporting data from Furl to Diigo. It's pretty seamless. In fact, it's a two-click process that seems to take care of itself, even if you don't already have a Diigo account.

So what's the deal with Diigo? Here's what they say - "Diigo is two services in one -- it is a research and collaborative research tool on the one hand, and a knowledge-sharing community and social content site on the other." Diigo stands for Digest of Internet Information, Groups, and Other stuff. It is pronounced Dee'go.

Enjoy!