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ALiNUS Home

Academic Library Newsletters in the United States
Updated October 30, 2012

ALiNUS is a dynamic Internet gateway to more than 600 online academic library newsletters published by US institutions of higher education. From its inception in March 1999, the primary purpose of the ALiNUS Directory is to encourage communication among academic librarians. The prototype of this active database was a listing provided by the College Libraries Section, The Association of College & Research Libraries.

Revisions
Since URL's are highly fluid, revisions to the newsletter URL's should also be forwarded to the editor. Resuming in June 2012,a linkcheck analysis of this database will be run monthly to ensure the timeliness of the information. It is our experience that five percent of the addresses are unreachable at any given moment. The ALiNUS Directory is searchable by newsletter or university name, and by Carnegie Classification.

The database currently provided was collected via an experimental data mining approach. Beginning with the Index of American Universities and their websites provided by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Florida, we searched each site using Google Custom Search for the words "newsletter" (in the title) and "libraries", also the institution name and the name of past newsletters, if known. That of course, results in errors both of recall, and of precision. Looking at the frequency of occurrence of the terms "library", "collection", "book", *source*" and "*search*", a data mining decision rule algorithm was run to separate a known set of library newsletter pages from those that were known not to be from libraries. A simplified version of that rule set is applied here to eliminate some of the chaff. We expect to refine the database and/or method over the summer.

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