When I worked full-time as a taxonomy designer for a big international database company, one of my key learning experiences from our user testing was that, no matter how good the browse options you offer, the majority of people will always prefer to search rather than to browse. I was, therefore, unsurprised but very interested by this finding ...

Thanks to Pamela Ben-Eliezer for pointing out Richard Horton’s opinion piece on libraries in this week’s Lancet In it, he provides an entertaining tour of the library’s historical purpose as custodian of knowledge and argues that today’s medical libraries should band together to provide a global digital storehouse of ...

Thanks to Guus van den Brekel for highlighting the latest tracking report from the Center for Studying Health System Change , which charts an 18% rise in Americans using the Internet to look for health information since 2001: In 2007, approximately 56 percent of all American adults—more than 122 million people—reported seeking information [...]

I didn’t make it to the HLG Conference, having chosen to attend the Health Statistics User Group Conference instead (More on that once the slides are online). Posters and presentations from HLG are available from the Cilip website, of which these caught my eye: The role of the information specialist in the topic selection process at [...]

Feedky. This is a nice little resource. Simply whack in a few search terms and it'll go off and search YouTube, DailyMotion, Metacafe, Vpod, Google Video, Yahoo Video, Youku, Flickr, Viddler and Blip.TV. It'll then show you either a web page or you can have the content as an RSS feed if you prefer.I created a webpage for the terms librarian, ...

100 Useful Niche Search Engines You'€™ve Never Heard Of. Actually, you've probably heard of a good number of them, especially if you read this weblog on a regular basis! However, it's a good collection, focussed on US students though, so some of the engines will not be useful. It's arranged into categories:ExtracurricularQuick AnswersCity guides ...

HowDoYa. is a search engine that I've mentioned before - it finds sites or pages that show you how to do things - plan a wedding, clean a car and so on. When you've done a search you get to see some keywords that match up with What, Who, Why and Where. Now they've added in a spectacles option, or X-Ray vision as they term it, which allows you to ...

Iconfinder is a simple to use engine that finds icons for you. It also provides you with access to the licensing options too, so you can quickly see what you're allowed to use an image for. The image below shows the result that you get for the word 'search'. Iconfinder - Search for: Search - Icon search made easy! via kwout

I few days ago I mentioned Songza, which I was, and am very taken with. However, there is a bunch of other similar engines out there, so I thought I'd take a quick look. I did several searches for different artists, unusual tracks and so on. All very unscientific, but if you want more than that, well - feel free to experiment yourself and post the ...

I've played around with a lot of different music sites, and they've always left me slightly dissatisfied - they don't have the (odd, very odd) tunes that I like, or I have to listen to their selection based on a few of mine, or the interface is poor. Finally however (thanks to lo-fi librarian) I've discovered Songza: The music search engine & ...