It’s finally springtime in the Northeast

Season Spotter

Last time I posted, I commented on the fact that winter temperatures in New Hampshire were almost 7°C warmer in 2016 than 2015, and that “spring 2016 is just around the corner.”

It turns out that spring has been a long time coming. While it isn’t a particularly late year overall, it does seem that it is a particularly slow year. Take a look at the “greenness” data we derive from imagery from our PhenoCam overlooking the Boston Common. What you will notice is the much more gradual rise in greenness compared to previous years. In 2016, greenness began to trend upward in mid-March, and isn’t going to peak until late May.  By comparison, in 2015, greeness began to trend upwards beginning in late April, and it reached its peak by mid-May.

The pictures below compare April 19, 2015 (left) with March 19, 2016 (right) – they look pretty…

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A lot goes a long way: data quality improvement at DOAJ

DOAJ News Service

Since 2012, DOAJ has been on a path of data quality improvement. DOAJ metadata is used all over the world and all over the Web. Improving and fixing the quality of our metadata can be painstaking work but the effort goes a long way as changes propagate across the Web via search engines, aggregator databases, library portals and other databases.

Along these lines, the largest publisher (in terms of the number of journals) in DOAJ recently added missing abstracts to over 100,000 articles and fixed broken special characters in approximately 2000 more. This was a huge effort on their part and DOAJ is grateful for the work that has gone into this project. It is an achievement that will be welcomed by DOAJ metadata consumers.

To date, Hindawi has 161,334 articles loaded to DOAJ and until recently was the largest contributor of metadata to our index. That title was taken…

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