Austin, TX; Las Vegas, NV; Sacramento and San Diego are the Most Digital Savvy Cities, According to Scarborough Research (PDF; 22 KB)

Austin, TX, is the most “Digital Savvy” city, according to a new analysis from consumer and media research firm Scarborough Research. Twelve percent of Austin adults are Digital Savvy*, and they are almost twice as likely as the national average to be in this leading edge consumer segment. Las Vegas, NV, Sacramento and San Diego are also leading Digital Savvy cities, with 10 percent of their residents having this higher level of technological orientation and adoption. Nationally, six percent of all consumers are classified as Digital Savvy.
…
In terms of purchasing patterns, Digitally Savvy consumers are a luxury-oriented group. They are 56 percent more likely than the average consumer to own or lease a luxury vehicle; 175 percent more likely to have spent $500 or more on men’s or women’s business clothing during the past year and 49 percent more likely to own a second home. Online, this consumer group is equally high-end in its shopping behavior. More than half (54 percent) of the Digital Savvy spent more than $500 online during the past year, and 35 percent spent upwards of $1,000 during that timeframe. They are far more likely to spend online in high-end purchasing categories, such as automotive and travel, as well as every day items, such as books and clothing.

+ Full Report — Understanding the Digital Savvy Consumer (PDF; 270 KB)

Source: Scarborough Research

Hat tip: Al’s Morning Meeting

Web accessibility Guidelines for UN Websites (MS Word)

From the news blurb:

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is developing an Advanced Search option for PubMed. A beta version (which may undergo changes) has been released for users to try. Look for the link next to the search box buttons. Comments can be sent to NCBI via the “Write to the Help Desk” link at the bottom of the screen and will be helpful in developing the design and format of this feature.

Source: NLM Tech Bulletin
Hat tip, Pete Weiss.

From the introduction:

With this site, Library and Archives Canada (LAC), in co-operation with the Canada Gazette Directorate, Public Works and Government of Services Canada, will make the Gazette available online, in its entirety, for the first time.

Current issues of the Canada Gazette have been available to Canadians at most libraries and through subscription, and the Canada Gazette Directorate has a searchable database on its website of all issues since 1998 (http://canadagazette.gc.ca/index-e.html). However, an online database that includes all issues of the Canada Gazette dating back to 1841 and searchable by keyword is a major achievement that allows even greater access to this very important resource.

By the end of 2008, visitors to this site will be able to access all issues of the Canada Gazette, from its beginning in 1841 until 1998. For those issues currently available on this site, please go to Search the Canada Gazette.

The database comprises images taken from microfilm, microfiche and rare original copies of the Gazette held by LAC. The digitization of this material, which began in 2007, is still underway. By the end of 2008, visitors to this site will be able to access all issues of the Canada Gazette, from its beginning in 1841 until 1998. For those issues currently available on this site, please go to Search the Canada Gazette.

Source: Library and Archives Canada

The National Diet Library of Japan (NDL) has announced the publication of “Ensuring long-term preservation and usability of digital information” on its website. This page describes the needs to ensure long-term preservation and accessibility of digital information, including Internet resources and packaged digital publications such as CDs, DVDs and software.

Direct to Full Text Report (in English)

Source: National Diet Library of Japan

From the news release:

The Action Plan from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council is the result of extensive consultation and engagement with stakeholders and sets out an agenda for change for public libraries in England with the aspiration of making every public library a great public library.

Source: MLA

PubChemSR: A search and retrieval tool for PubChem

Background: Recent years have seen an explosion in the amount of publicly available chemical and related biological information. A significant step has been the emergence of PubChem, which contains property information for millions of chemical structures, and acts as a repository of compounds and bioassay screening data for the NIH Roadmap. There is a strong need for tools designed for scientists that permit easy download and use of these data. We present one such tool, PubChemSR. Implementation PubChemSR (Search and Retrieve) is a freely available desktop application written for Windows using Microsoft .NET that is designed to assist scientists in search, retrieval and organization of chemical and biological data from the PubChem database. It employs SOAP web services made available by NCBI for extraction of information from PubChem. Results and Discussion: The program supports a wide range of searching techniques, including queries based on assay or compound keywords and chemical substructures. Results can be examined individually or downloaded and exported in batch for use in other programs such as Microsoft Excel. We believe that PubChemSR makes it straightforward for researchers to utilize the chemical, biological and screening data available in PubChem. We present several examples of how it can be used.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 670 KB)
Source: Chemistry Central Journal

+ Explore Wikipedia with Live Maps

+ NIST Tool Helps Internet Master Top-level Domains

+ Scholarly Communication Discussion Guides Updated and Expanded (via ARL)

UNESCO popular documents

The UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) library catalogue UNESDOC has a feature to display the most popular items in a week: Top ten of the week, most consulted documents of last 8 days. This week, the list includes a report entitled, “Towards information literacy indicators” (full text, pdf, 337 KB).

Source: UN Pulse

Surfing the Web on a personal computer will become old-fashioned in less than ten years when the majority of Internet users are expected to access the Net through their mobile handsets, Geraldine Wilson, vice president of Yahoo! Europe Connected Life, told EurActiv in an interview.

Direct to the interview.

Source: EurActiv.com

Posted 16 May 2008 on DocuTicker:
+ Privacy and Funeral Protests (University of Missouri School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper)
+ Multistate Outbreak of Human Salmonella Infections Caused by Contaminated Dry Dog Food — United States, 2006–2007 (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report)
+ The Afghan-Pakistan War: A Status Report (Center for Strategic & International Studies)

From the abstract:

Despite the tremendous growth in the importance and reach of the Web, users unfortunately have little recourse when a Web page fails to load. Web browsers currently provide little feedback on such failures, and typically suggest re-checking the URL or the machine’s network settings. As a result, users are often unable to accurately diagnose Web access problems, and resort to heuristic attempts at resolution, such as haphazardly modifying their settings or simply trying again later. Our system, WebProfiler, leverages end-host cooperation to pool together observations on the success or failure of individual Web accesses from multiple vantage points. These are fed into a simple, collaborative blame attribution algorithm which, as our evaluation on a controlled testbed shows, can accurately diagnose 3.6 times as many failures than would be possible from a single client’s perspective. We present the design of WebProfiler and our prototype implementation, which targets Web failure diagnosis in an enterprise network. We also discuss the additional challenges involved in extending WebProfiler to accommodate clients spread in the wide-area Internet.

Source: Microsoft Research

By Researchers at Google:

Full Text: Query Logs Alone are not Enough
7 pages; PDF.

Abstract:

The practice of guiding a search engine based on query logs observed from the engine’s user population provides large volumes of data but potentially also sacrifices the privacy of the user. In this paper, we ask the following question: Is it possible, given rich instrumented data from a panel and usability study data, to observe complete information without routinely analyzing query logs? What unique benefits to the user could hypothetically be derived from analyzing query logs? We demonstrate that three different modes of collecting data, the field study, the instrumented user panel, and the raw query log, provide complementary sources of data. The query log is the least rich source of data for individual events, but has irreplaceable information for understanding the scope of resources that a search engine needs to provide for the user.

Direct to FRD’s 20 page, PDF file.

See Also: Links to All FRD Country Profiles

From the article:

Will the world’s biggest book seller become the world’s biggest book publisher? Authors hope so.

What would this mean for libraries, cataloging, and bibliographic control?

Source: Forbes