Robbins Library Notes

Good morning, readers!  Happy Monday, and March, to you!

Last week, I received an e-mail from Victor Henning, one of the co-founders of a new research paper management tool called Mendeley.

In his e-mail to me, Henning writes:

Mendeley is a combination of free desktop software (available for Windows, Mac and Linux) and website for managing and sharing research papers, as well as for discovering research trends and like-minded academics. You can have a look at the features here: http://www.mendeley.com/tour.

After looking at this, and some reviews from others, what Mendeley is good for is organizing the mass of PDF and Word papers that you’ve accumulated in the course of your research, and sharing them with others.  As another reviewer writes:

A relatively new program, still in beta, Mendeley works with Macs, PCs, & the Linux operating system. It lets you manage your papers online, discover research trends, connect with other researchers in your field, and coming soon, learn about the readership of your own publications: how many readers you have, what disciplines they’re in, & where they’re from.

You can insert citations & create bibliographies in your Word documents using Mendeley, although it is a much less sophisticated system than EndNote, for example. But you can export the information that you collect through Mendeley into other citation management programs, if you wish.

You can also add a public profile & follow other researchers profile updates (think LinkedIn or Facebook.)

In other words, Mendeley is a helpful tool to use in conjunction with citation management programs like Zotero and EndNote.  And, you can follow (and be followed by) other researchers if you create a public profile.  Here’s a great way to network, collaborate, and share research.

Do check Mendeley out.  I have signed up for a free account myself, and am planning on experimenting with it in the next few weeks.

Good morning, readers! Happy Monday to you!

A reader commenting on my post about Soople last year let me know about another search engine, Onlyjust.net. This is a very cool search engine that puts all of Google’s functionality, including some of its hidden functionality, in one place. Definitely take this out for a spin, if you are a heavy Google user.

Good morning, readers!

Via Garrett Eastman’s Library News & Notes: “100 Powerful Web Tools to Organize Your Thoughts and Ideas,” By Alisa Miller.

Here’s Miller’s introduction:

Whether you are a busy executive, a single parent, a freelancer working from home, a student, or a combination of these, you have probably found yourself needing help when it comes to organizing all your thoughts and ideas that occur throughout your busy day. Now you can turn to these tools found on the Internet that will help you with tasks such as note-taking, bookmarking websites, highlighting important text during online research, creating mind maps, tracking time, keeping up with appointments, collaborating with others, managing projects, and much more.

Enjoy!

Good morning, readers!

I received an announcement yesterday about the launch of PhilPapers.org, a new “virtual environment for philosophical research.”  Here’s the text:

PhilPapers

http://philpapers.org

I’m pleased to announce the launch of PhilPapers, a virtual environment for philosophical research.  PhilPapers has been developed at the ANU Centre for Consciousness by David Bourget and me, with significant help from Wolfgang Schwarz.  PhilPapers is an outgrowth of the MindPapers project in the philosophy of mind, but it is much greater in scope and ambition.  PhilPapers encompasses all areas of philosophy, and it has many features that MindPapers lacks.

The core of PhilPapers is a database of close to 200,000 articles and  books in philosophy, concentrating especially although not exclusively on items that are available online.  Around this database, the site has all sorts of tools for accessing the articles and books online wherever possible, for discussing them in discussion forums, for classifying them in relevant areas of philosophy, for searching and browsing in many different ways, for creating personal bibliographies and personal content alerts, and much more.

The best way to get an idea of what PhilPapers can do is to go to http://philpapers.org and try it yourself.  A casual browser can browse listings for new and old papers, search for papers in a given area or by a specific author, read the discussion forums, and so on. However, we encourage you to create a user account, which enables many more sophisticated features.  If you do this, you’ll have a profile page from which you can set up personal research tools such as bibliographies, filters, and content alerts (via RSS or email).  Your profile page will include a list of your own work (compiled via name matching), which you can edit where appropriate.  With a user account, you can also submit new entries (giving publication information and/or a link, and optionally uploading a paper to our repository), edit and categorize existing entries, and contribute to discussion forums.

At the moment, the PhilPapers database includes entries for 188,000 articles (typically via publication information and/or links, with full papers stored elsewhere).  The database has been compiled mainly through automatically harvesting many Internet sources.  It includes entries for (i) 124,000 journal articles harvested from the websites of more than 200 philosophical journals, (ii) 33,000 books harvested from the Library of Congress database, (iii) 18,000 books and articles from the MindPapers database, (iv) 7000 papers harvested from more than 1000 personal websites, (v) 5000 papers harvested from Internet archives, (vi) 1300 historical e-texts from the Episteme Links database, and (vii) a few hundred user submissions.  About 95% of the articles are available online (via links to journal sites, personal sites, archives, and so on), while about 17% of the books are available online (typically via a Google Books preview).  The database itself is growing fast.  For example, the addition of books has just started and is still in progress (so far we have only added books published after 1970).

A key feature of PhilPapers is a fine-grained category system for philosophical areas.  The system is an extension of the MindPapers category system, and now has about 3000 categories under five main clusters with 6-8 main areas each.  Of course the category system is still very tentative and is subject to ongoing refinement.  To date, there has been only very partial categorization of papers, through limited automatic and manual classification, and through inheriting categories from MindPapers. However, we have developed a number of categorization tools (e.g., a “categorize” link under each paper) that users can use to classify entries themselves.  Our hope is that over time, in a Wiki-like way, this will lead to every entry being categorized in 1-3 categories, with resulting dynamic bibliographies for all sorts of areas of philosophy.  If you have relevant expertise, please contribute by categorizing papers.  The PhilPapers site has much more information under the “help” menu.

Discussion forums are another key feature of PhilPapers.  These are devoted to discussing the papers and books in PhilPapers, as well as to discussing other philosophical and professional issues.  By clicking “Discuss” under a paper or book, you will be given the opportunity either to create a discussion forum for that item, or to contribute to an ongoing discussion.  Each such forum will be included in turn in encompassing forums for associated areas of philosophy, where these encompassing forums can also include other discussion threads, not associated with papers and books.  There are also forums for general philosophical discussion, for discussion of professional issues, and for discussion of PhilPapers itself.  These forums are something of a grand experiment, but we encourage users to use them, in the hope that these might become a central locus for discussion among philosophers.

PhilPapers is primarily intended for professional philosophers and graduate students, although anyone interested in the field is welcome to use it.  Non-professionals are subject to some restrictions in contributing articles (contributions are possible, but they won’t be included in the default “professional authors only” filter for listing entries), and in contributing to the discussion forums (for which they are subject to a daily posting limit).  We hope that this arrangement strikes a reasonable balance between keeping the site accessible to all, and maintaining a high quality that will maximize the value of the site to researchers in the field.

PhilPapers has been through a month or so of beta testing with a limited number of users, who have uncovered various bugs and other issues, but there are certainly many problems that remain.  For now, the site remains in “beta” mode, and we encourage all users to report any bugs that they encounter, via the bug report link at the top of every page, or through the bug report forum.  (So far we’ve mainly optimized the site for recent versions of Firefox and Explorer, and there may be problems with other browsers.)  There are also numerous glitches in the database, especially for articles harvested from personal websites.  In these cases, we encourage users who know the correct information to correct the entries themselves, using the “edit” link under each entry.  We’ll monitor edits, but we hope that the editing functionality will lead to a self-correcting system over time.  (Users might start by correcting any errors in the listings for their own articles.)  More generally, we encourage you to give feedback and suggestions in the forums dedicated to discussion of PhilPapers.

Finally, I should say that this site is largely a product of the programming and design genius of David Bourget, who had the idea for the project in the first place and who has done most of the hard work. He has done this in the middle of writing his Ph.D. thesis and having articles published in Nous, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and the Blackwell Companion to Consciousness.  (My own role has mainly been limited to designing the category system and to endless discussion.)  A major role has also been played by Wolfgang Schwarz, who designed the system for harvesting papers from individuals’ websites, and who has contributed some very useful Javascript features to the site.

–David Chalmers.

Good morning, readers!

Today is the start of the Spring 2009 term, and I’m set and ready to help you with your information needs!

To get you started:

• Helpful cheat sheets on searching
• Useful databases for philosophical research
  

With what else can I help you?

Good morning, readers!

While browsing through Bookforum.com yesterday, I came across Robert Darnton’s “Google and the Future of Books,” from the latest issue of the New York Review of Books.

Darnton offers an interesting analysis of Google’s recent settlement with the Authors’ Guild, taking us through an historical examination of the Republic of Letters and the development of copyright law, and how this applies to present times.

Quite fascinating, and worth reading, especially since he raises some excellent questions about the power we are giving Google.

Good morning, readers!  Happy Monday to you!

Some of you may not know about Project MUSE, a database of online journals maintained by Johns Hopkins University.  Project MUSE is a great database to use for research in the humanities, and especially in philosophy.

Last week, I was sent a link to a vodcast (video podcast), highlighting how to use the Library of Congress (LC) subject headings to refine your searching in Project MUSE, and, by extension, in library catalogs.  Here’s the promotion from Project MUSE:

A vodcast is a video podcast. The MUSE vodcast is a tool for both users and librarians and runs just over three minutes in length. Users can learn, on their own, what subject headings are, where to find them in MUSE, and how they help locate articles specific to a research topic. Librarians may find the vodcast useful as a supplement to instruction classes. The vodcast is a lighthearted approach to demystifying the notion of Library of Congress Subject Headings as they appear in MUSE.

On the MUSE website, find the link for the vodcast in the Training Materials section under the Tools & Resources and Librarians tabs, http://muse.jhu.edu/about/resources/vodcasts.html.

I’ve watched the video, and it is indeed amusing and funny, and very helpful in showing someone how to use the LC subject headings in Project MUSE.  It’s a good illustration of using search limiters to target a search and locate articles on the topic you’re researching.

If you’d like to learn more, please contact me to arrange a bibliographic instruction session.  I’d love to show you!

Good morning, readers!

I found a few items on Google and searching yesterday that you might find of interest:

• Google SearchWiki – A Beginner’s Guide
• Google Introduces SearchWiki, But Does It Have a Downside?
• Can you ditch Google for a metasearch engine?
• The future of search: Do you ask Google or the gaggle?

A hat-tip to Garrett Eastman and the Rowland Institute at Harvard’s Library News & Notes, December 12, 2008 for these links.

Good morning, readers!

Thanks to those of you who have sent in suggestions — they are greatly appreciated.  Please keep them coming in.  I’m happy to receive them.

A few days ago, I received a suggestion in which the reader asked the question: “Which feeds, mailing lists, webpages, etc. should one monitor to get ALL of the information on new publications?”  The reader, interested in early modern philosophy, and Kant in particular, wants to know if there is a way in which one can be informed of the latest publications from publishers, without having to search through publisher catalogs and Web sites.  It’s a very good question — here’s what I’ve found in answer to it.

I have not, to date, located one aggregator site or place that lists every new publication in philosophy.  Given the large number of books published every year — including philosophy — I’m not sure how feasible creating such an aggregator site or resource would be.

However, there are several resources that, used together, will likely give you a fairly robust list of new philosophy publications.  The majority of the books provided by these resources will be in English, though other languages (most notably German and French) will appear also.

• Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.  This is a great site to learn about new philosophy books.  Oftentimes, I learn about books of potential interest from reading the reviews.

• Philosopher’s Index. This database is probably the closest thing to an aggregator site at present, though it is far from complete.  The database does list books among its records, and with the CSA Illumina interface, you can view records by book, book chapter, article, book review, and so forth.

Example — You want to search for recent books on Kant listed in Philosopher’s Index.  When you login, go to the Advanced Search Screen, if this is not set as your default search option.  Enter in “Kant” for your search term in the first line, setting the limiter to “Keyword.”  (Why?  Because this will focus the search more on books that specifically deal with Kant, rather than those that merely mention him off-hand.)  Next, go down to the “Date Range” field, to limit your search to the last year or so.  I chose 2007-2009 as a range.  Below that, in the Philosopher’s Index Indexes & Limits section, click on the “Browse Publication Type” link, and in the window that opens, click on “book,” then “Add to Search.”  When that window closes, click on “Search” and you should get 329 results, which are subdivided into books, chapters/essays, and book reviews, respectively.

• Book Reviews in Journals. Many philosophy journals carry book reviews, which are worth checking out, some more extensive than others.  (The Review of Metaphysics has an especially in-depth one once a year, for example.)  For those interested in Kant, e.g., Kant-Studien offers book reviews.  Thus, I’d suggesting checking out whatever journals focus on your interests, as they may let you know about the latest and greatest books in your area(s) of interest.

• Philosophical Books. This is a great journal to read in order to learn about new books being published in philosophy.  As the blurb on the Wiley-Interscience site reads, “Philosophical Books carries extensive discussions of major new publications in all areas of analytic philosophy.  The journal includes: book symposia in which two or three writers discuss a book and the author replies; articles discussing recent work in particular fields; full-blown critical notices; and short, one-page reviews”  I’d check this journal out on a regular basis.

• Publisher Web Sites: E-mail and RSS Feeds. Many publisher Web sites now offer the option of signing up for periodic e-mails and RSS feeds of notifications of new materials.  I’ve known several scholars who have done this, who then let me know so that we can look into acquiring the book for the Robbins collection.  A quick look reveals that Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Harvard University Press, and Yale University Press all offer e-mail alerts and RSS feeds.  So these might be worth subscribing to.  Other university and academic presses will likely have them as well.

• Ask Your Friendly, Neighborhood Librarian. Seriously!  I get a number of catalogs on a regular basis, so, if you ask me to keep an eye out for certain topics, persons, and the like, I’d be very happy to let you know when something new comes out.

Are there other resources out there that my readers use which might be of help?  What about non-English philosophy books?

Good morning readers!

Just over a year ago, I wrote a post about MindPapers, an online bibliography of approximately 18,000 published papers and online papers in the philosophy of mind maintained by David Chalmers and David Bourget.  Chalmers maintains several directories of online philosophy papers on his Web site, with the help of others.

It seems that Chalmers and Bourget have a new philosophy paper directory project in mind, according to a recent post on Chalmers’ blog, Fragments of Consciousness:

Now back to philosophy.  Or at least, to philosophical taxonomy. David Bourget and I are finalizing a new project for access to online work in philosophy.  To a very rough first approximation it will be like MindPapers generalized to all of philosophy, although there will be many significant differences (it will be less ambitious in some respects, more ambitious in others).  More on that when it goes public, hopefully within the next month or so.

Chalmers and Bourget are requesting help with setting up and refining the taxonomy which they will be using to organize the papers.  So, if you would like to review the taxonomy and offered suggestions, take a look at Chalmers’ post for instructions on where and how to do so.

A hat-tip to Manuel Vargas, on The Garden of Forking Paths, for this information.