Free patents online

I don't usually duplicate either Randy's or Catherine's posts, never mind something they've both posted on, but I think this one is important enough, if only to serve as a reminder to myself what to do next time I get someone looking for a patent full text.

The Free Patents Online site is very good at giving full text of US patents since #4,000,000 (mid-1970's) and in PDF to boot. No fiddling with huge TIFF files -- never mind that our computing department can't seem to get any TIFF readers installed here (don't ask). There is a problem with very new patents, as there is a delay before they're loaded in the database. A search on "cell phone" returned a lot of hits, but the first 25 or so weren't there in full text. It sends you back to the USPTO site. As of today, the publication date of the most recent patent is February 15, 2005. Not too bad, when you think of it.

Free SCI/TECH/ENG Abstract Search Resources

Sarah A.V. Kirby recently polled the ELDNET-L list for some names of good free abstract search engines. She has kindly allowed me to post her summary of the results. Thanks, Sarah!

Here is our list of free resources that contain searchable abstracts for multiple science/technology/engineering journals, magazines, and governmental publications. The abstracts have to be free, but the articles do not. Site registration is o.k., so long as it is free.


US GOVERNMENT (OR GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED) PUBLICATIONS

DOD STINET - http://stinet.dtic.mil/ - Helps the DoD community access pertinent scientific and technical information to meet mission needs effectively.

GPOAccess - http://www.gpoaccess.gov/ - Congressional documents, executive agency announcements (i.e. Federal Register), some government publications (via the Bookstore), locator for federal repositories, and much more.

NASA STI - http://www.sti.nasa.gov/ - Providea desktop access to the STI (scientific and technical information) produced by NASA and the world's aerospace community.

National Technical Information Service - http://www.ntis.gov/ - Serves our nation as the largest central resource for government-funded scientific, technical, engineering, and business related information available today. Here you will find information on more than 600,000 information products covering over 350 subject areas from over 200 federal agencies. Free version of the catalog begins with items published since 1990. You can call customer support to have the database searched back to its beginning (items cataloged in 1964, could be published earlier). http://grc.ntis.gov/ offers subscriptions for a day or a year to search the entire database yourself. EBSCO, Engineering Village 2, and other large database providers frequently have the entire NTIS database as an option.

NIOSH TIC-2 - http://www2.cdc.gov/nioshtic-2/Nioshtic2.htm - NIOSHTIC-2 is a bibliographic database of occupational safety and health publications, documents, grant reports, and other communication products supported in whole or in part by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).

OSTI E-Prints - http://www.osti.gov/eprints/ - The E-print Network is a set of powerful tools that facilitate access to and use of scientific and technical e-prints communicating the results of a wide range of research activities of interest to the Department of Energy. These e-prints reside on thousands of Web sites and data bases, both large and small, at remote locations worldwide, employing a wide variety of technologies, architectures, platforms, formats, software, and search engines to manage and retrieve data.

Agency library OPACs - Many of the agency libraries have Online Public Access Catalogs (OPACs) that include many of their agency's scientific and technical reports, or reports produced for their agency.


GENERAL PUBLICATIONS (MULTIPLE DISICPLINES)

EEVL Ejournal Search - http://www.eevl.ac.uk/eese/eese-eevl.html - Search the content of over 250 freely available full-text ejournals, selected for relevance and quality. Academic journals, professional and trade publications, and Society journals are covered.

Coming in May - EEVL Xtra is a subject-based deep-mining meta-search tool which gives access to material which is largely hidden to normal search engines.

FindArticles - http://www.findarticles.com/ - Not as good as it used to be, but worth a look in computing, automotive, and some biology/botany.

Google Scholar - http://scholar.google.com/ - Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.

HowStuffWorks - http://www.howstuffworks.com/index.htm - HowStuffWorks is widely recognized as the leading source for clear, reliable explanations of how everything around us actually works. Great site for normal English explanations of things, but beware of annoying pop-ups.
some publisher websites

INFOMINE - http://infomine.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/search?category=ejournal - INFOMINE is a virtual library of Internet resources relevant to faculty, students, and research staff at the university level. It contains useful Internet resources such as databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, mailing lists, online library card catalogs, articles, directories of researchers, and many other types of information. INFOMINE is librarian built. Librarians from the University of California, Wake Forest University, California State University, the University of Detroit - Mercy, and other universities and colleges have contributed to building INFOMINE.

IngentaConnect - http://www.ingentaconnect.com/ - IngentaConnect offers one of the most comprehensive collections of academic and professional research articles online - some 17 million articles from 28,000 publications, including 6,100 online.

Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations - http://www.ndltd.org/browse.en.html - Several databases of theses and dissertations that can be freely searched. Access to documents requires a subscription and/or purchasing links are provided.

OAIster - http://www.oaister.org/o/oaister/ - Our goal is to create a collection of freely available, previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources (what are digital resources?) that are easily searchable by anyone.

Scitation - http://scitation.aip.org/ - Scitation is the online home of more than 100 journals from AIP, APS, ASCE, ASME, SPIE, and a host of other prestigious science and engineering societies.

Sirus - http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/ - Scirus is the most comprehensive science-specific search engine on the Internet. Driven by the latest FAST search engine technology (owned by Yahoo!), Scirus returns results from the whole Web, including access-controlled sites that other search engines don't index. Scirus currently covers over 167 million science-related Web pages, including: 58.5 million .edu sites, 18 million .org sites, 6.8 million .ac.uk sites, 18.6 million .com sites, 5 million .gov sites, Over 45 million other relevant STM and University sites from around the world. In addition to Web pages, Scirus indexes the following special sources: 14.6 million MEDLINE citations, 5.5 million ScienceDirect full-text articles, 1.2 million patents from the USPTO, 261,000 e-prints on ArXiv.org, 5,352 BioMed Central full-text articles, 10,600 NASA technical reports, 14,878 full text articles from Project Euclid, 56,000 full-text articles on Crystallography Journals Online, 230,0!
00 full-text journal articles on Scitation.


DIRECTORIES, SEARCH ENGINES, OR WEB SITES WHICH MAY CONTAIN FINDING AIDS OR LINKS TO MAJOR REPOSITORIES OF STI INFO

ALA's Machine Assisted Reference Section's (MARS) Best Free Reference Websites - http://www.ala.org/ala/rusa/rusaourassoc/rusasections/mars/marspubs/publications.htm - A list of librarian-evaluated websites on all sorts of topics.

Article "Science and Technology Sources on the Internet There is Such a Thing as a Free Lunch: Freely Accessible Databases for the Public," Sandy Lewis, Iss Sci Tech Librarianship (29) Win 2001. - http://www.library.ucsb.edu/istl/01-winter/internet.html

EEVL - http://www.eevl.ac.uk/ - EEVL is the Internet Guide to Engineering, Mathematics and Computing. EEVL's mission is to provide access to quality networked engineering, mathematics and computing resources.

Internet Public Library - http://www.ipl.org/ - a public service organization and learning/teaching environment at the University of Michigan School of Information.

Librarian's Index to the Internet - http://lii.org/ - The mission of Librarians' Index to the Internet is to provide a well-organized point of access for reliable, trustworthy, librarian-selected Internet resources, serving California, the nation, and the world.

Memorial University of Newfoundland Database List - http://www.library.mun.ca/eindex/index_nets.asp - You can search by subject or you can check the full alphabetic list. Free indexes all include the phrase "Internet access unrestricted" in the description.

Pinake - http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/pinakes/pinakes.html - A directory of subject directories, including EEVL.

Research and Documentation Online - http://www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/index.html - An extensive annotated list of specialized sources for more than 25 disciplines. The resources are organized by type -- databases and indexes, Web sites, and reference texts

Resource Discovery Network - http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ - The RDN selects, catalogues and delivers high-quality Internet resources for further and higher education: the best of the Web.

Science.gov - http://www.science.gov/ - Each agency selects its best science information for science.gov. Two major types of information are included -- selected authoritative science Web sites and often hard-to-access scientific databases (specific content varies by database). This gateway to government science information allows searches across 30 databases and more than 1,700 science Web sites.

SciTechResources.gov - http://www.SciTechResources.gov - The government catalog that provides the scientist, engineer, and technologist with easy, one-stop access to key U.S. Government web resources. Thousands of web sites are being reviewed to select just those sites that will provide valuable links to government expertise, services, laboratories, information centers, and other important resources.

University of Michigan Documents Center - http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/ - A central reference and referral point for government information, whether local, state, federal, foreign or international.

University of Missouri-Rolla STI List - http://campus.umr.edu/library/gov/sti.html

WWW Virtual Library - http://vlib.org/ - The WWW Virtual Library (VL) is the oldest catalog of the Web, started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of html and the Web itself, in 1991 at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Unlike commercial catalogs, it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert; even though it isn't the biggest index of the Web, the VL pages are widely recognised as being amongst the highest-quality guides to particular sections of the Web.

and the usual suspects (Google, MSN, Yahoo!, DMOZ/ODP, etc.),


SITES THAT FOCUS ON ONE OR A FEW RELATED DISCIPLINES AND ARE NOT MENTIONED ABOVE


COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SCIENCE/ ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

CiteSeer - http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ - A scientific literature digital library and search engine that focuses primarily on the literature in computer and information science.

Energy Citation database -http://www.osti.gov/energycitations - abstracts and a lot of full-text.

IEEE Xplore - Indexed by Google (Use IEEE as one search term)


PHYSICS/CHEMISTRY

Chemweb - http://www.chemweb.com/ - in transition and requires registration but has been very useful and may be so again soon.

Elemental Data Index - http://physics.nist.gov/PhysRefData/Elements/cover.html - Provides access to the holdings of NIST Physics Laboratory online data organized by element. It is intended to simplify the process of retrieving online scientific data for a specific element.

WebElementsTM - http://www.webelements.com/ - aims to be a high quality source of information on the WWW relating to the periodic table.


AGRICULTURAL/BIOLOGICAL/BIOMEDICAL/ENVIRONMENTAL

Agricola - http://agricola.nal.usda.gov/ - For agriculture, plant science, veterinary science, some environmental toxicity and other various areas that relate to agriculture.

AGRIS - http://www.fao.org/agris/ - The international information system for the agricultural sciences and technology. It was created by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in 1974

Eric Weisstein's World of Science - http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/ - Contains budding encyclopedias of astronomy, scientific biography, chemistry, and physics.

Publications of the U.S. Geological Survey - http://usgspubs.georef.org/usgsns.htm - subset of the GeoRef database established by the American Geological Institute. This database provides access to the publications of the USGS and includes references to U.S. Geological Survey reports and maps published from 1880 to date, references to non-USGS publications with USGS authors published from 1983 to date, and 225 references to reports produced by the Hayden, King, Powell, and Wheeler surveys. The database contains more than 130,000 references.

PubMed - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed - for biomedical articles: (sometimes includes other technology articles, e.g. ventilation, when in a fully-indexed journal)


MECHANICAL/AEROSPACE

TRIS online - http://trisonline.bts.gov/search.cfm - From the Transportation Research Board


CIVIL

ASCE Publications - http://www.pubs.asce.org/cedbsrch.html - Index to their publications (fairly substantial for the field of civil engineering)

Quakeline - http://mceer.buffalo.edu/utilities/quakeline.asp - A bibliographic database produced by the MCEER Information Service. It covers earthquakes, earthquake engineering, natural hazard mitigation, and related topics. It includes records for various publication types, such as journal articles, conference papers, technical reports, maps, and videotapes. QUAKELINE was launched in May 1987.


OTHER (MISCELLANEOUS)

ASSIST Quick Search - http://assist.daps.dla.mil/quicksearch/ - For current military specifications

Math Forum - http://mathforum.org/ - A leading center for mathematics and mathematics education on the Internet.

NSSN - http://www.nssn.org/search.html- Setting the pace worldwide in promulgating standards information to a broad constituency. Whether it's searching for a specific standard, tracking the status of a new development project, or identifying a contact person who can interpret a standard, NSSN serves as your one-stop information repository.

ScienceDaily - http://www.sciencedaily.com/ - ScienceDaily is one of the Internet's leading online magazines and Web portals devoted to science, technology, and medicine.

Where to Find Material Safety Data Sheets on the Internet - http://www.ilpi.com/msds/index.html - Directory of MSDS websites

Latest Cites & Insights

Walt Crawford's latest has been posted. I consider C&I to really be required reading, so I don't mention it automatically when a new one comes out. This one I feel that I should point out because it has extensive commentary on the Wikipedia -- what it is, what it isn't and why we should all just get a grip. Personally, I love the thing, and I've suggested my 12 and 9 year old sons use it for their research projects at school. Among the topics: gold and the planets in French. In both cases, it served them very well, better than most other web resources and better than a lot of books I was able to get for them. All this to say is that the Wikipedia has its place, we just have to understand what it is. The naysayers and the utopians are bot a little right and a little wrong. Would I suggest that a York undergrad do all his or her research using the Wikipedia? Of course not. But it can be a good starting place for some basic info that should be certainly supplemented with other books, encyclopedias and perhaps some journal articles, depending on the level.

And speaking of declining enrollments...

It seems to me that part of the problem must be the public perception of engineering. It's just too hard and nerdy, not really in touch with pop culture. When you think about how engineers are viewed on tv, the best you can come up with are the battlebots, giant truck, junkyard wars type shows. While I'll admit to having a soft spot for them, they're not exactly drenched in cool. Let's face it -- they're on Discovery, not MTV or MuchMusic.

But, there's hope. Take a look at this little bit from the most recent IEEE What's New for Students:

10. "GEEKSTA RAP" TRIES TO LURE TEENS INTO ENGINEERING PROFESSION

Can music lure kids into engineering? That's the hope of engineer Rajeev Bajaj and his "Geek Rhythms," a self-proclaimed "geeksta rap" CD about engineering and technology. One track on the CD explains the principles of chemical engineering; another describes the frustrations of computer geeks. Stanford University's radio station has played the CD, and an engineering faculty member at New York's Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute sought permission to play a song from the CD at graduation. Read more at: <http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1003905.cms>

Geeksta Rap. Ya gotta love it.

Ontario University Applications

Statistics for university applications from Ontario secondary school students for 2005-2006 are in. York is doing pretty well, holding its own in the post double cohort era. It's interesting to note, however, that first choice science applications are up over last year while engineering is a bit down. Overall, science is down about the same as the decline in applications overall bit while engineering is down about double that. I would be interested to hear from librarians in other districts to see if similar stats are kept.

In the Beginning was the Command Line

One of the best books I've ever read about the computer person mindset is Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line. It really frames what the "operating system" wars were/are all about and, more importantly, how the techie approaches technology versus the normal person. Well, the book has long been online, but now there's a new twist. Here you can find an online version with extensive, approved-by-the-author annotations by a reader (Garrett Birkel) who is also very well versed in all things techie. The annotations expand and illuminate the original, but not in an overly reverential way. They can certainly snarky and sharp, but I'm sure Stephenson have enjoyed them. A must read for those that want to understand the CS community. via BoingBoing.

Pathfinder terminology report

Also from UC Berkeley, this report on a user survey investigating what terminology should be used in library pathfinders.

Get those covers framed

Via Lisnews, a science librarian at Berkeley has taken to framing and displaying the joural covers when one of the institution's scientist's work is featured on the cover. Check out the story at the UC Berkeley News.

Racial Equity Requires Teaching Elementary School Teachers More Mathematics

Racial Equity Requires Teaching Elementary School Teachers More Mathematics by Patricia Clark Kenschaft is from the February 2005 edition of the Notices of the AMS. via Inside Higher Ed.

Kevin Schofield's Weblog

Check it out here. He's not a librarian, he even appears to work for Microsoft Research, but his blog is nevertheless lively and interesting, with a lot of insights into the techie mind.

Recentish articles on declining CS enrollment

Here's a bunch of "sky is falling" type articles on the problems CS faculties are having these days. Most are 6-12 months old, but as far as I can tell, the problem persists and is worsening:

• Declining computer-science enrollments should worry anyone interested in the future of the U.S. IT industry by Eric Chabrow.
  
• Students saying no to computer science by Ed Frauenheim
  
• Computer Science Slump: College Enrollments in the Field Decline Nationwide by Allan Hoffman
  
• Brutal article on declining computer science enrollments points to a NYT article.
  
• Programming doesn't begin to define computer science by Jim Morris (more hopeful & upbeat, at least)
  

A couple of years ago, when the trend started, CS faculty were happy that the crush of more opportunistic applicants had subsided and that the reduced numbers were students that "really wanted to be in CS." Now, you have to wonder what that core number is, of students that really want to be in computer science. Is it only the hard core techies that still go into CS? Also, what fields are these former CS-bound students going into? Math, physics, biology, business department sponsored IT programs, chemistry, college-level programs on really specific techologies like internet or game programming, certificate programs like the MCSE. Will this trend lead to big shortages in a few years, which will in turn exacerbate the offshoring that everyone is so nervous about?

A few more from recent Prisms

• "Above the fray" by Thomas K. Grose is about how engineering schools tend to use fewer part time faculty that other disciplines and tend to rely mostly on full time, tenure stream faculty. They seem to include CS in this grouping. November.


• "Engineering for everyone" by Bethany Halford is about efforts to create "engineering for non-engineers" courses at various institutions (Princeton is the example here) to foster greater technical literacy and appreciation for engineers & engineering. December.


• "Answering the call" by Robert Gardner is about efforts to get high school students interested in aerospace engineering. December.

Engineering master's degrees

An interesting bit in the November 2004 Prism. It's a list of the different engineering disciplines and the number of masters degrees awarded in the US in 2003:

• comp sci (within engineering): 4997
• electrical: 4125
• electrical/Computer: 3998
• mechanical: 3680
• civil: 3606
• other: 3310
• industrial/manufacturing: 2792
• computer: 1750
• eng management: 1508
• chemical: 1149
• biomedical: 754
• aerospace: 721
• metalug. & materials: 618
• general: 591
• environmental: 457
• eng science & eng physics: 401
• nuclear: 217
• petroleum: 200
• argri: 111
• mining: 27
• computer science (outside eng): 956

I sure wish I knew what "other" included...

Renovations at my library

Finally, the news item on the renos at the library where I work is up. The story was to celebrate the grand opening we had in November. I'm the first on the left in the picture at the bottom.

Cool SF calendar for 2005

Over at the Website at the End of the Universe, they have a very cool calendar for 2005 using old sf paperback covers. I actually have a few of them in my collection. via Locusmag.

While we weren't looking, e-books have become the dominant form of text on the planet.

Huh? Cory Doctorow is one of the most techophilic of the wacko-utopian cyber elite (and hey, count me in too. I love Boing Boing), but even I am shocked by that statement. Read the interview exerpts here from the Locus Magazine interview. Basically, he seems to re define all writing on the web as ebook writing. Gee, and I thought it was all commercial catalogue writing... In any case, I can't wait to get my print copy of Locus so I can read the whole interview. Now back to our regularly scheduled ebook.

Reminder: 28 month Science Librarian position at York U.

The posting is here. I'm the chair of the search committee. Any and all applications welcome.

Exploding the Self-Esteem Myth

This little item by Roy F. Baumeister et al. from SciAm online is pretty interesting from an academic library point of view. I'm not sure I want to comment on it too much, but a lot of the points here really struck a chord.

Happy Chrismakkuh

I don't expect to post much (if at all) until I get back to work the first week in January. Enjoy!

From recent Dlibs

• The Role of RSS in Science Publishing: Syndication and Annotation on the Web by Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, and Ben Lund (Dlib v10i12, Dec 2004)
  
• A Service-Oriented Framework for Bibliography Management by José H. Canós, Manuel Llavador, Carlos Solís and Enrique Ruiz (Dlib v10i11, Nov 2004)
  
• E-Books: Challenges and Opportunities by John Cox (dlib v10i10, Oct 2004)
  
• Visualizing Bibliographic Metadata - A Virtual (Book) Spine Viewer by Naomi Dushay (dlib v10i10, Oct 2004)
  
• Rethinking Scholarly Communication: Building the System that Scholars Deserve by Herbert Van de Sompel, et al. (Dlib v10i9, Sept 2004)

U of M FAQ on Google scanning project + musings

This page from the University of Michigan's news service gives some nitty gritty detail on how copyright will be handled in Google's new collaborative project with various libraries. My take? It's really breathtaking. Access to many thousands of public domain titles will be an amazing resource for students & researchers of all stripes. As well, a window into the copyrighted titles will make it a lot easier for people to identify books they want to track down (buy or borrow). It's interesting to note that Google could almost replace the catalogue for these institutions...hmmm, I wonder if Google's thought of that? I wonder, though, does this kind of thing make the actual collections of academic libraries more likely to be used, or less. Will Google users just not use anything that's more than a click away?

One thing I always wonder about: how often do students buy articles from publishers that they could get access to for free if they only knew about how to access them (online or print) through the library? How often will students buy a copy of a Google book (print or online) because they neither know nor care that they could borrow it for free from their library? (via JoAnn Sears on PAMNET)

York U space research

This is a nice little story about my institiution's space science & engineering researchers and the work they're doing. The York Centre For Research in Earth & Space Science is here.

So, you think you know something about IL?

Then take the Christmas Quiz 2004 from the Information Literacy Weblog.

Welcome to our world

Online Research Worries Many Educators is a story that will be familiar to all academic librarians. A few choice quotes (via Lisnews.):

Georgia Tech professor Amy Bruckman tried to force students to leave their computers by requiring at least one book for a September class project. She wasn't prepared for the response: "Someone raised their hand and asked, "Excuse me, where would I get a book?'"

Alex Halavais, professor of informatics at the University at Buffalo, said students are so accustomed to instant information that 'the idea of spending an hour or two to find that good source is foreign to them.'

"If I'm going to go to the library, chances are somebody hasn't paid a librarian 100 bucks to point me to a particular book," said Beau Brendler, director of the Consumer Reports WebWatch.

Catching up on some EEVL news

A few recent (and not so recent) notes from EEVL:

• New titles available - Free engineering and technical trade publication subscriptions - October 2004. This is a list of publications that EEVL users can subscribe to for free. No strings attached -- as long as you qualify.
  
• An extensive update on recent EEVL developments from Ariadne.
  
• Search the content of over 250 freely available full text ejournals in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing via EESE This press release describes an interface to search numerous free ejournals through the EEVL interface. Here's the title list and here's the main search page for all the modules.

Tech cheating turns professors into sleuths

Another interesting article on plagiarism, this one via Lisnews.

Péter Jacsó on Google Scholar

Check here for Jacsó's very detailed (and highly critical) review of Google Scholar. His main points are:

Google, Inc. has the intellectual and financial resources (and the largest group of cheerleaders) to create a superb resource discovery tool of scholarly publications. It needs to:

• exploit the highly structured and tagged Web pages with rich metadata readily available in the digital archives of most of the scholarly publishers
  
• create field-specific indexes for many distinct data elements
  
• offer an advanced menu with pull-down menus for limiting the search by publisher, journal, document type, publication year, etc.
  
• consolidate cited references through the ever increasing DOI registry
  
• collect information of all the relevant materials from the publishers' archive
  
• develop utilities that enable libraries to launch a known-item federated search in the full-text aggregators' databases licensed by the library in order to check if any have the document from a journal that is not licensed digitally from the publisher.

All valid points, and I hope the fine folk at Google are paying attention to all the free R&D the library community is contributing to their cause. On the other hand, they're probably wishing they were a little less Beta and a bit more Alpha in terms of their content, interface and help files. I find it interesting that there's so much negative commentary, with an almost mean-spirited glee in the product's obvious short comings. It's not perfect, there are glaring shortcomings that will have to be fixed before it can compete with other, more polished, services. But, on the other hand, it is only Beta. The potential is enormous and I think we need to be realistic about what our patrons want to use. They want one search fits all with instant access to free full text. Google Scholar is going to be part of that mix. Services that can't add enough value to their data will find it hard to justify charging the big bucks to libraries and other clients. Publishers that are slow to collaborate with Google will find that they're journals aren't used as much. Is there a tremendous amount if information in the huge datafiles built lovingly over the decades by organizations like Biosis and INSPEC (to name two at random)? No question. That needs to be preserved. We should be especially concerned about the indexing of publications like conferences, defunct journals and mountains of grey literature. But, we also need to recognize that it won't be librarians that will spell the success or failure of Google Scholar. It will be our patrons: faculty, staff, students and the general public. (via OAN.)

The web is a very strange place

Like most bloggers, I keep an eye on the hit stats. Not obsessively, but every day or two I check to see what's happening. I'm particularly interested by the referer stats that I get. In any case, the hits have really jumped the last week or two -- all thanks to Noah Wiley and his new movie The Librarian. As you may recall, I mentioned the existence of the flick a while back, not reviewing it or anything. So, you can imagine my amusement to see all the hits coming in. Bizarrely, as of this morning, I'm in the top ten google hits on Noah Wiley and number 1 for Noah Wiley librarian and "noah wiley" librarian. This post will no doubt only make it worse.

Big Cheats on Campus

On a considerably less cheerful note, this ABC News story on cheating at universities is eye-opening.

Another couple from SciAm this time

• Top Sci/Tech Gifts 2004 -- Our favorite presents to give and get this holiday season is one full of great hints for the scitech librarians in our lives. I kinda like the USB swiss army knife thingy myself. Or the Einstein Action Figure.
  
• Back to the Future: Physicists gaze into the crystal ball by Graham P. Collins is an interesting conference report from the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. The idea was that the physicist were to speculate about the trends in physics research in the future, almost trying to tease out where the next big thing will come from.
  
  

A couple from the Grauniad...

...that I've been meaning to post for quite some time: (via Locusmag)

• Scientists vote Blade Runner best sci-fi film of all time
  
• The war of the words: The world's best scientists nominate their favourite authors
  
• Fantastic answers to universal questions

SciTechies on the Greatest Canadian list

See the CBC Story here. Father of medicare Tommy Douglas is certainly a worthy winner in this somewhat controversial exercise. I just thought I'd mention the scitech types who also made the top ten: Frederick Banting, Alexander Graham Bell and David Suzuki. See some of the news coverage here and the rest of the top 100 here. My choice? Well, never mind. The only comment I'd like to make is that I think it's too bad that the only hockey player in the top 10 had to be Gretzky. He is arguably the best hockey player of all time, but I think you can also make a case that the most important hockey player in Canadian history is Maurice Richard.

Bad Astronomy

From the same issue of Sci Fi Weekly, here's a review of a site about Bad Astronomy, mostly in the movies and on TV. It's pretty amusing -- the biggest offender is Armageddon, a flick I personally haven't seen. And probably never will.

Movie Review: The Librarian

Sounds like an interesting movie, so check out the review here. The movie stars Noah Wiley of ER fame.

Movie Review: The Librarian

Sounds like an interesting movie, so check out the review here. The movie stars Noah Wiley of ER fame.

Jay Bhatt on Google Scholar

Jay Bhatt, Information Services Librarian (Engineering) of Drexel University's Hagerty Library recently posted a long meditation on Google Scholar on the eldnet-l listserv. Jay makes a lot of very valid points about the limitation of Google Scholar, ones we should all pay close attention to when trying to steer our patrons to other resources that are, at least for the time being, more relevant to their needs. The only sneaking suspicions I have are that the deficiencies Jay mentions are only temporary....

Jay has kindly allowed me to quote his email here. I've decided to include it in it's entirety. Without further ado:

There are five areas that the present version of Google Scholar does not cover:

1. It does not index online electronic books and handbooks such as those from engnetbase, neurosciencenetbase, environetbase, infosecuritynetbase, materialsnetbase, and knovel, etc. It becomes even more important to educate our students especially those working on Freshman and Senior Design Projects, to use electronic books and the books available in print when they need to develop sufficient background in their project areas before using Google Scholar. We want them not to carried away by Google Scholar so much that they ignore other important resources. Especially for design projects, scholarly interature is just a component of their research; not the only component.

2. Conference papers indexed in Ei village (engineering village) appears toe not yet available in Google Scholar. I did a search for 'Biomaterials' limiting to only conference articles in Engineering Village2. I found 507 articles in Engineering Village. I tried a few in Google Scholar but could not find.

3. We may not be able to download citations to Refworks to create your bibliography. Students will need to add them manually if they want to add them in Refworks.This will be time consuming.

4. Advanced features such as searching within just Abstract rather than Full Text may not be available. Limiting search using advanced features avilable tends to increase relevancy of articles.

5. Google Scholar does not provide what is being covered, what journals are indexed, what other databases are covered, so just relying on Google Scholar may not be helpful.

6. Searching online codes (MAD CAD) is not available in Google Scholar. MAD CAD is very heavily used by our Senior Design students. http://www.madcad.com

"Subscription based MAD-CAD contains the building codes and knowledge based solutions and guidelines to meet the codes. MAD-CAD provides access to a comprehensive cross-referenced collection of building, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, fire, maintenance codes from BOCA, SBCCI, ICBO, ICC, and NFPA; and state and local codes. This comprehensive set of codes in conjunction with the search engine and organizational tools provide an intelligent and efficient system for architectural, engineering and educational solutions.".

7. Computer Science/IST - Books24x7, Safari, Lecture Notes in Computer Science - are important not yet available in Google Scholar. As the name implies ('Scholar'), they will not be available in future, too.

8. One can not browse among diferent volumes/issues of a particular journal.

No doubt Google Scholar appears to be a great product, but we need to consider
these limitations and promote them during our classes so that students will try to use other resources and simply not carried away by Google Scholar. I do like Google Scholar but I wanted to bring these issues. Lastly, there is a human component that Google Scholar can not provide.

Recently, I had our meeting with Freshman engineering faculty members to discuss planning for our Freshman engineering library sessions during the winter term.. I am including some important points that we discussed from the instructional perspectives.

They liked our ideas of the multidisciplinary subject headings to address searching for biomedical engineering related information in several databases. Based on our discussion during the meeting, we are going to develop a one page hand out on examples of citations from variety of sources (one from handbook, one from a library book found using the catalog (print), one from encyclopdedia, one from website, one from journal article, and one from conference proceedings). This page will be used as a reference for students as they develop their bibliography.

Discussion on Refworks was extremely well received. Infact, they all loved it. One faculty member suggested that we point out during the class that last year some students received poor grades because they did not co-ordinate well with their team members. Collaborating using Refworks in building a 'Group Bibliography' with each member of the team contributing, will be one way to improve co-ordination and
co-operation among others. This suggestion was applauded by all faculty members present including us.

They are going to ask their students to follow the sample reference page and write their bibliography in that style. Either APA or MLA style will be used but students can use IEEE/ASCE style in Refworks. No decision has been made as yet if they are going to require students to use one style.

Interestingly, they all knew about Google Scholar; we argued and tried to convince them that it is NOT the only tool and that students need to look at other resources, ebooks, handbooks, library books, and conference papers for a complete search. They all agreed wholeheartedly. Importance of building codes and specific material properties also came up (google scholar will not find them). They all agreed that we spend a few minutes in our talk to highlight our library resources, and in what situations Google Scholar is good, when it can be used, and when library subscribed other resources should be used. We will add one slide in our Powerpoint to address them. Importance of library consultations by students with librarians was again stressed by many faculty members. Two instructors are using webCT; we will plan to link our tutorial in those two faculty member's sections. This will be app. 8 sections out of the 27 sections.

Science Library Pad

A very new scitech librarian blog, this one's called Science Library Pad. It's by yet another Canuck, this one at CISTI in Ottawa. As yet the blogger is nameless. The first post is from November 20. Welcome. UPDATE: As noted in the comments, I should have read the About page for SPL. SPL is by Richard Akerman.

Ask and you shall receive

It seems Art Rhyno has already thought about some of the proxy issues I brought up: here and here. Thanks Lisa.

Google Scholar

It had to happen. I've touched on it before in postings on the way Google was sucking up metadata from various publishers. I expected it. Google, as we all know by now, has entered the bibliographic database industry with a new beta test product. Google Scholar it's called and it's pretty interesting. A few sample searches indicate that most of the content there is links to actual journal content rather than the random signal/noise ratio usually associated with search engines. I urge everyone to read their About file very carefully. I think that they understand scholarly content, are serious about making sure that their product is mostly about high quality scholarly resources. They obviously want as many publishers as possible to contribute. This is potentially THE significant development in the academic library/scholarly publishing field of the last year or so. Winners & losers:

• Loser: the A&I industry. Big time. Google Scholar is free, their products are definately not. Can they add enough value to the data they have to make it worth our (ie. libraries) while to subscribe to their services? No one's cancelling all those indexes this year, or even next, but what about five years from now? The key here is adding value. Google's product will be one-size-fits-all, always a bit overwhelming. Also, it will be probably be limiting itself to stuff online-only. Will Google get the metadata for journal backruns that aren't online and refer users to their local academic library?
• Winner: students. Big time. Students want to use simple interfaces, easy searches with highly relevant results. If Google can deliver that with this product like with their regular search engine, this will be a hugely popular tool amongst students.
• Loser: non-OA journals. More and more, if a journal's content is not online for free, it will not exist for the new generation of scholars. Why use journal A behind some weird pay-money-or-else screen when journal B has their articles right here. I know that you can get to A via your friendly neighbourhood proxy server/academic library, but really, at 3 am with the paper due tomorrow and the student doesn't even know where the library is on campus, that's not going to happen. Also, anyone not afiliated with a subscribing institution will automatically choose B. It's only a matter of time before Google puts a "Free full text only" check box on the screen. Open Access will mean survival for journals in the Google world. Not this year, not next year, but maybe in five or ten.
• Winner: academic libraries & librarians. Yes. We're winners. Think of what this could do for our budgets! Finally we can demo tools in the classroom that the students will think are relevant! No more blank stares & sneers! But seriously, the advantages of basically using one interface are huge in terms of teaching students how to get the most out of their search experience. Google will continue to be overwhelming for many and confusing to some, so we will still have the role of helping students navigate. Oh yeah, we'll actually be able to spend more time on concepts like critical thinking, scholarly communication and all those information literacy standards we talk about but rarely have time to actually teach.
• Loser: vendors of federated searching products. One search is here. This is it. The real challenge, of course, will be figuring out how to get link resolver products like SFX to work with Google Academic. Also, for us Ontario universities, all our content is on a central server. How do we get our students using Google Scholar to find the content on our platform rather than automatically going to the publisher's site. An interesting challenge.
• Winner: the general public all over the world. Obviously, this will bring together a lot of information and make it accessible to everyone. As more and more stuff becomes OA, more and more scholarly content will become easily accessible to everyone. This is a good thing.

I'm sure I'll be posting more on this as time goes by. Let's start a thread here with your comments -- what we really think about this. It's good to be back.

Top 10s in the ACM

Also interesting in a weird sort of way is the following Top 10 items downloaded from the DL in September 2004 lists from the same issue of the CACM as my last post. Weird because the list of top 10 refereed articles are quite uninteresting to me. None of them were even from Sept 2004, which is kinda odd, when you think about it. Also, the month rank and year rank are out of whack, leading me to believe that the results are highly influenced by random course offerings at large schools. Some topics I expected: mobile communications, curricular issues but the list didn't really strike me in an "Aha" kind of way I would have expected.

On the other hand, the list of top courses & ebooks downloaded was quite interesting, something I know is relevant for my own collection development: Java, UML, c/C++/C#, Data Modeling, Project Management and SQL. It solidifies in my mind the enduring (for now) interest among CS types for this type of information and why we can't keep the books on the shelves. What I'd like to see? How about something really good on Matlab, numerical analysis and scientific computing.

The third top ten was the list of most downloaded articles from the ACM's magazines. Again, not much from 2004, some of the year rankings and month rankings out of whack, but still very interesting. Business aspects, professional development concerns, wireless, data modeling but also a bunch of survey type articles that people are obviously using to get up to speed on certain topics.

Thanks for the info, ACM. Could we do this more often?

The Blogosphere in the CACM

Marking my return after a long hiatus, I'd like to refer everyone to the lastest issue of the communications of the AMC, v47i12. I can't emphasize enough how interesting this issue is. The relevant bits of the TOC:

• Structure and evolution of blogspace by
  Ravi Kumar, Jasmine Novak, Prabhakar Raghavan, Andrew Tomkins
  
• Why we blog by Bonnie A. Nardi, Diane J. Schiano, Michelle Gumbrecht, Luke Swartz
  
• How blogging software reshapes the online community by Rebecca Blood
  
• Democracy and filtering by Cass R. Sunstein

Job posting for Steacie Science & Engineering Library, York University

Please note here the details of a 28 month posting at my library. Good luck.

SciAm Science & Technology Web Awards 2004

Every year the editors at Scientific American give their best-of-the-web awards. Here they are for this year; 50 different sites in the areas/fields of anthopology & paleontology, astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth & environment, engineering & technology, great minds, health & medicine, physics and science for kids. I particularly liked the Rube Goldberg and the IEEE Virtual Museum sites in the eng & tech area. By the way, I hate it when math & computing get short shrift in these things. Math and computer science are distinct from both the physical & life sciences and from engineering and technology. With this kind of subject classification scheme, they just get left out.

2004 Ig Nobel Prize winners

There're here! My fave this year is medicine to Steven Stack and James Gundlach for "The Effect of Country Music on Suicide." in Social Forces, vol. 71, no. 1, September 1992, pp. 211-8. There's a bizarely strong Canadian connection this year, with two prizes going to canuckleheads (via Bob Michaelson on SLAPAM-L):

• "PHYSICS: Ramesh Balasubramaniam of the University of Ottawa, and Michael Turvey of the University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratory, for exploring and explaining the dynamics of hula-hooping.
  
• "BIOLOGY: Ben Wilson of the University of British Columbia, Lawrence Dill of Simon Fraser University [Canada], Robert Batty of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, Magnus Whalberg of the University of Aarhus [Denmark], and Hakan Westerberg of Sweden's National Board of Fisheries, for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting."

And speaking of Ginsparg...

Here's a bit of a quote from the Data Science Journal article I mentioned above:

Successive generations of students have increasingly adopted the attitude that “if it isn’t online, then it may as well not exist.” Something qualitative frequently happens at critical threshholds, known colloquially as “tipping points.” People formerly accustomed to regular library usage first move to a mix of library and online desktop usage, but eventually enough of what they need is online that they abandon library usage altogether, forcibly ignoring those materials available only in paper as no longer worth the effort for so small a percentage of potential research materials. Moreover, recent generations of undergraduates have increasingly come to visualize campus libraries as much as a place to buy expresso and connect laptops to a wireless network as a place to find archival resources, and they do not acquire a conventional library habit in the first place.

It's called "Scholarly information architecture, 1989-2015." I guess his alma mater isn't trying to solicit him for the library building fund.

Recent highlights from Open Access News

Some recent posts related to math & physics literature:

• Open overlay journals in mathematics points to the Greg Kuperberg article Scholarly mathematical communication at a crossroads from arXiv.
• SCI may undercount eprint citations points to the E. R. Prakasan, and V. L. Kalyane article Citation analysis of LANL High-Energy Physics E-Prints through Science Citation Index (1991-2002) on E-LIS. Not surprisingly, they find that ISI's products aren't very good at disciplines that don't rely on traditional journals for all their scholarly communication.
• Musings on the evolution and future of arXiv points to an article in a recent Lecture Notes in Physics 650, 313-336 (2004) where the man himself, Paul Ginsparg speculates about the past, present and future of arXiv. The article is titled: "Scholarly Information Network." Ginsparg touches on some of the same themes here in arXiv and here in Data Science Journal.

Beer Has Same Benefits As Red Wine

Personally, I can't imagine any better news than this. Or, to quote Ian Gillespie of the London Free Press, "I love scientists. I really do." via Google News.

A bunch of sf writers thinking about the future

From Locus Online, John Shirley's seminar Global to Local.

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics

The Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics site is a real pleasure to peruse. All those action movies, they've got it wrong. My fave: you know when the bad guy/hero uses a cigarette to light a puddle of gasoline? Doesn't work. The tip of the cigarette just isn't hot enough to ignite the fumes -- of course it's the fumes not the liquid that burns. The liquid gas actually puts the cigarette out! via Now Magazine.

The walrus was paul

Beloit College's famous Mindset List for 2007 is out. Thanks Brent.

Annals of the History of Computing, IEEE

The latest IEEE Annals of the History of Computing is up and has three extensive articles on the history of the IBM Beoblingen Laboratory. I can't read those article without thinking about the darker side of IBM's involvement in Germany in the middle of the last century. For more information on this controversial (and by no means settled) bit of history, try the IBM and the Holocaust home page. On an unrelated note, there's also a think piece in the issue entitled "The Circulation of Knowledge, Institutional Ecologies, and the History of Computing" by Atsushe Akera. A little postmodern-y for my tastes, but still interesting.

Cooking For Engineers

From Blogger's Blogs of Note list, I couldn't resist highlighting Cooking For Engineers. He has these weird/beautiful/brilliant flowchart/circuit diagram thingies to map out the recipees. Not to be missed! All cook books should be written by engineers!

Checkmate XML

The Checkmate XML article by John Simpson from the O'Reilly XML.com site is sort of from the "Who knew?" file. Who knew that somebody out there was working on XML applications for the chess world?

Here and there

A couple of interesting bits:

• A great academic integrity/plagiarism tutorial from Acadia University here. You can even choose to be a science student when you do the tutorial! This has to be one of the best I've seen. via IL Weblog.
  
• From ISI, a report on the effect of journal self-citation on the impact factors reported in the Journal Citation Reports product. Interestingly, it seems that the practice of journal articles citing other articles in the same journal isn't generally prevalent enough to have an effect on the validity of impact factors. Not surprising that ISI would "discover" this. via ISI Newsletter.

NSF Materials Digital Library

An article from the most recent JoDI, MatDL: Integrating Digital Libraries into Scientific Practice by Bartolo et al., describes in pretty good detail the NSF's MatDL materials digital library. via The ResourceShelf.

IT Professional

The latest IT Professional has a couple of interesting articles:

• CIOs: The Only Competent University Administrators by S. Reisman has a very interesting and controversial premise. Since the people who end up as university presidents usually have an academic background rather than a professional/managerial background, they usually seriously suck at management. The one exception to that in the university setting is often the head of computing, who probably has a professional or managerial background and thus knows how to run a organization properly. Not sure if I agree with this article (on bad days I do, but the rest of the time I'm not sure), but it sure gets the neurons firing.
  
• Java's Future: Challenge and Opportunity by Nan Chen & Kai-Kuang Ma
  
• Improving Web Access for Visually Impaired Users by Liu et al.
  
• CE2IT: Continuous Ethics Enhancement for IT Professionals by Agresti is quite good. It also includes a bunch of ethics resources from Aristotle to journals and a couple of professional codes of ethics. Only CS people could come up with a concept like "real time ethics."

Quiet

I realize I've been quiet here lately. That'll likely continue for the next week or two. I've not forgotten my mission, with some commentary bubbling up related to the latest ISTL, C&I and others.

Intellectual Honesty in the Electronic Age

Intellectual Honesty in the Electronic Age is an interesting article by John Iliff and Judy Xiao. Basically, their idea is that there are many reasons that students cheat but that it's still better to try and prevent it than focus on catching and punishing offenders. At he same time, one of the reasons they cite for students plagiarizing is lack of deterrence. This paper is not remarkably original, but it does function as a good overview. via The ResourceShelf.

Cites & Insights

Walt Crawford has created an updates blog & rss feed for his zine. Crawford is one of the most reasoned and sensible commentators on library & information issues out there and I make it a point of reading every issue. As such, I would highly recommend putting C&I on everyone's must read list. The most recent issue has some very sensible commentary about the recent report on the deline of fiction reading in the states. Crawford's response: get a grip, lots of people are still reading lots of books on lots of subjects. Also sensible is his follow up on ebooks from the previous issue, in this case including feedback from various people about their experiences with ebooks. I sent in some fairly extensive information about York's experience with Safari, which he is kind enough to include in the section.

ChessBase: The science of chess

According to a recent news article in Nature, what separates grandmasters and other good players from the rest of us is their scientific attitude towards their individual moves. These players try to disprove the accuracy of each move before playing it, rather than the more optimistic attitude of us weaker players. This sounds like Dan Heisman's idea of real chess vs. hope chess. Here's an eprint of the actual paper by Michelle Cowly and Ruth Byrne, "Chess master's hypothesis testing." via ChessBase

The Expos

My first (and probably only) baseball posting is this depressing little story about the team-that-might-have-been, the 1994 Montreal Expos. They were the best in baseball before the strike ended the season, cancelled the World Series and signaled the decline of baseball in Montreal.

Open Source and NASA's Mars Rover

And speaking of Open Source, here's an article from one of O'Reilly's sites by Ann Barcomb about Open Source and NASA's Mars Rover. It's not often I get to make a posting combining my various areas of interest!

Previously, in the IEEE

A bunch of recent articles in various IEEE magazines:

• A tale of three disciplines and a revolution by Poore, J.H. in Computer, v37i1.
• The end of science revisited by Horgan, J. in Computer, v37i1.
• IT employment prospects in 2004: a mixed bag by Niederman, F. in Computer, v37i1.
• How is open source affecting software development? by Spinellis, D.; Szyperski, C. in IEEE Software, v21i1. And several other notable articles on software development using open source software in what seems to be an excellent theme issue. (It's sometimes difficult to tell theme issues from the online TOCs)
• Teaching computer science through game design by Overmars, M. in Computer, v37i4.

10 Thoughts about Innovations

This brief article by Jim Jindrick is from IEEE-USA Today's Engineer. One of my faves is "Innovation is rooted in value." While these 10 ideas are aimed at engineers, they are really applicable to any organization. Aren't we librarians concerned with delivering new and *innovative* services to our users? The themes that run through this article are ones we should pay attention to: value, evolution, creativity, imagination.

Web portals of every sort

The Toronto Star's reliable tech reporter Rachel Ross had an article Monday on Google alternatives here. She highlights product-of-the-evil-empire Scirus for us science types.

Remembering September 11th

One of my absolute favourite magazines, The New York Review of Science Fiction, put out a wonderful September 11th commemorative issue. It is now available online here. Kathryn Cramer's post about the issue is here.

MathForge has a feed

Just couldn't resist one more post -- the Mathforge feed is here.

On vacation

I'll be away visiting Kingston & Montreal until August 3rd.  I hope to be out of email/blog/whatever reach until then.   Reading trashy Harry Turtledove & Tom Clancy novels.

Sometimes I wonder why I actually buy stuff

Eric Weisssteins' ScienceWorld (or World of Science) is a pretty darn good general resource in math, physics, astronomy, chemistry and scientific biography. All the leaf level entries have citation in the literature, the coverage seems pretty complete, the entries are concise and to the point. Thank god we used to have a literature we could use to build tools sites like this. via The Scout Report.

The Spam Letters

Haven't read it, haven't seen it, but The Spam Letters by Jonathan Land looks to be a hoot. Not sure I could justify getting it for the library, though...  UPDATE: Of course, there's a website The Spam Letters.  It give a good feel for the kind of stuff that is no doubt in the book.

Using weblogs as educational tools

Althought mainly geared for the K-12 set, Will Richardson's presentation from the Building Learning Communities conference has a solid conceptual approach to blogs as educational tools. I like that he didn't get too bogged down in concrete examples, especially since it gave the presentation a universal feel, rather than just being tools for teens. Richardson's site is a valuable resource about using blogs in education.

JoDI: Better (scientific) communication through hypertext

The latest JoDI: Journal of Digital Information (v5i1) presents a utopian ideal of sorts for scientific (and other kinds) communication: hypertext. If everything is linked it's obviously much richer in connections and hopefully easier to understand. I'm not sure I understand (or agree with what I do understand) a lot of what's in these various papers, but they sure are stimulating -- kind of science fiction about science writing in a weird way.   It's interesting that a good number of the authors are from science or computer science departments.

• The Future of Mathematical Text: A Proposal for a New Internet Hypertext for Mathematics by Robert Mayans
• Integrating Reading and Writing of Documents by P. J. Brown and Heather Brown
• Writing the Web by Angelo di Iorio and Fabio Vitali
• Unified Hyperstructures for Bioinformatics: Escaping the Application Prison by Adam Moore and Tim Brailsford
• The Next Big Thing: From Hypermedia to Datuments by Peter Murray-Rust and Henry S. Rzepa
• A Cosmology for a Different Computer Universe: Data Model, Mechanisms, Virtual Machine and Visualization Infrastructure by Theodor Holm Nelson

Weblogg-ed - Using Weblogs and RSS in Education

Via the Information Literacy Weblog, a newish blog on Using Weblogs and RSS in Education. Lots of good stuff.

Huge new discussion paper on peer review

Peer review and the acceptance of new scientific ideas over at Sense About Science is a long piece about every aspect of peer review. The publisher's annoucement hits a few of the high points.via Open Access News.

Communications of the ACM: Volume 47, Issue 7

A couple of articles well worth reading in the latest CACM:

• The field of programmers myth by Peter J. Denning is in particular worth noting. The basic premise is that the public has it all wrong: CS isn't about programming, it's about problem solving. If that misunderstanding could be corrected, a lot of the problems with recruitment and public perception could be solved, as well as the fears about off-shoring.
• Has the Internet become indispensable? by Hoffman, Novak & Venkatesh is equally indispensable reading. Their answer is that, yes, it is indeed indispensable to a significant segment of the population.

ARL Stats for 2003

Here's the interactive stats application for 2003. York, of course, is 113 of 114 in student/librarian ratio at 588 students per librarian. The highest ranked Canadian school is UofT at 45th place, ratio of 240-1. Lots of other stats to have fun with including reference queries, presentation participants and a host of budgetary & collection-related categories.

Feed of newly published technical books

Via ResearchBuzz, San Diego Technical Books Inc. has a bunch of feeds of their newly received books. The also have feeds of announced-but-not-yet-published books. It would be interesting to know how many libraries have feeds of new acquisitions. It's certainly something we're thinking about at York as a longer term project. We spend so much money on books, yet we spend all our time promoting eresources -- shouldn't we spend some effort on books too? Maybe that's why circ stats are going down in a lot of places...if we don't think books are important, why should our patrons?

FreePint Newsletter 163 -- Usability

I've always been a big FreePint fan (although I guess some of my favourite pints aren't free: here and here). The most recent issue has a good overview article on usability: Usability -- Ignore it at your peril by Sarah Agarwal. I like her simple, plain-spoken definition: "it's basically about spending time with the intended users of a website or application to make sure it does what they need it to, in a way they find reasonably easy."

Junior new World Computer Chess Champion

An article here from the New Scientist on the latest victory for the Chessbase crew. It's interesting because it talks a little about how different chess engines end up with different "personalities."

Physics

A nice Physics Blog from the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Be nice if it had a feed.

So, what exactly is software engineering anyway?

An illuminating article from the latest IEEE Software, "How Higher-Education Systems Influence Software Engineering Degree Programs" by Dieste, Juristo and Moreno. The premise is that there are different kinds of software engineering programs that try and teach the same kinds of things: computing, science/math & engineering. The institutional culture of a particular country and reflect the way the software engineering programs end up being organized and, therefore, the mix of those three elements in a particular program.

Who knew?

Courtesy of BoingBoing, it seems that Laurie Anderson is NASA's artist-in-residence. The MSNBC story is here. I found a few bits on the NASA site here.

History of Programming Languages poster from O'Reilly

This great poster is available in pdf. It's a great chronology of programming languages. The poster is based on work done by Éric Lévénez here, including files to print his version of the poster on different size paper. Lévénez has also extensive links on his page for other resources in the history of programming languages.

Concept Inventories for engineering

The Foundation Coalition is a great source of engineering educational information. Over the last few years they have created a bunch of what they call concept inventories: mini exams to test students' knowledge of core concepts in a particular area. This site gives a list of the current inventories. Of course, the exams aren't directly available online (duh): you have to ask one of the developers to send it to you. Here's a quick list of the inventories that are available or under development: Waves, Thermodynamics, Stength of Materials, Signals and Systems, Electromagnetics, Circuits, Fluid Mechanics, Materials, Chemistry, Dynamics, Heat Transfer, Computer Engineering and Electronics. And they even include references to articles about the creation of various of the inventories. via FC Newsletter.

Astronomical image format now accessible to all

FITS format liberation is a press release from EurekaAlert about how the European Space Agency & NASA have released a Photoshop plugin that will allow anyone to make use of the FITS file format to create their own colour images. More information here.

So, what do these search engine companies do?

If you're interested in how the wizards do their work, check out Behind the Scenes at Yahoo Labs parts 1, 2 and 3. There's lots here on the Philosophy of Search (if I can call it that) as well as what's coming from Yahoo in the future. In the articles, Gary Price interviews Dr. Gary Flake who is Principal Scientist & Head of Yahoo Research Labs.

Copyleft & Creative Commons

A pretty good overview called Freeing enterprise in today's Toronto Star. It's by Raju Mudhar.

How free software won

How Free Became Open and Everything Else Under the Sun is an article in the lastest M/C Journal. It's by Biella Coleman and Mako Hill. via BoingBoing.

Cheminfostream

From SciencePORT.org, Cheminfostream is a blog highlighting chemistry information, modeling and informatics.

From Wired News: An Arsenal to Combat Spyware

Article about free and commercial products to help you rid yourself of the scourge of spyware here.

From STLQ: Thoughts on Mastering the Chemical Literature

Randy quotes a post from Dana Roth on the CHEMINF-L here. The source is an interview with Nicholas J. Turro called "How to skate on the edge of the paradigm and keep from falling off." My favourite quote in the original article: "Three months in the lab can save a couple of hours in the library." Of course, these wise words really apply to all disciplines, not just chemistry.

Cites & Insights: July 2004

Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights is always a great source of information and stimulating commentary. This time around I would like to note his stinging commentary on the whole ebook phenomenon. He certainly deflates a lot of the techno-utopian BS about ebooks from a few years ago that still seems to hanging around. Cory Doctorow in particular comes in for a bit of a reality-check, probably not-altogether-deserved, but amusing nonetheless.

Open Access Overview

Peter Suber has put up this Open Access Overview on his Open Access site. I can't imagine that there is anyone out there, no matter how knowledgable about OA they might be, that couldn't learn something from Peter's overview. Definately recommended, especially for passing around to skeptics at your institution.

Lunar Physics Blog

Check out this brand new Lunar Physics Lab blog by Karen Cramer Shea. It has an interesting discussion of why we might want to do some science on the moon as well as tons of links to Lunar Physics sites. via Kathryn Cramer.

Future of Sci-Tech E-Books

William A. Woishnis, co-founder of the Knovel ebooks publisher, gave a very interesting (and very droll) presentation on the Future of Sci-Tech E-Books at the recent SLA conference. The emphasis was on the value that the online format can add to technical information, through graphics and interactivity, and how ebooks can be integrated into the engineering process.

D-Lib Magazine

An extremely interesting issue of D-Lib Magazine (v10i6) this time around. Highlights:

• Search Engine Technology and Digital Libraries: Libraries Need to Discover the Academic Internet by Norbert Lossau.
  
• The Use of Consortially Purchased Electronic Journals by the CBUC (2000-2003) by Cristóbal Urbano et al.
  
• Should Commercial Publishers Be Included in The Model for Open Access through Author Payment? by Donald W. King
  
• Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals by Stevan Harnad and Tim Brody.
  
• Featured collection: Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Mathematics and Science Education (ENC)

STS Proposed standard for IL in the Sciences

An extensive proposal for information literacy standards by The ALA SciTech Section. I posted this a while back, but I'm not sure if the online document has changed since then. In any case, this serves as a reminder to us all to submit our comments on the proposals. via Virginia Baldwin on ELD-ILIT.

Open Access and Scholarly Societies

Will learned societies signal the change? by Vanessa Spedding in the most recent Research Information talks about the uncertain and ambiguous role scholarly societies play in the whole open access movement. They need the money from subscriptions desperately, but on the other hand, what they are really about should spreading the word, not making a buck. Very interesting, a good stimulus for a Monday morning. via Open Access News.

ELD Conference Program, Salt Lake City, 2004

This page has the conference program and selected PPTs for the presentations at the captioned conference. Topics include collection development, engineering ethics and library instruction for engineers. I went to the conference in Montreal a couple of years ago, and I have to say it was well worth it. I hope to go again next year in Portland; since SLA is in Toronto, I will be a lot easier to make two conferences in the same year. ELD is the Engineering Library Division of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE).

FreePint Newsletter 161

RSS: Less hype, more action by Roddy MacLeod in the latest FreePint is well worth taking a look at. He covers the basics as well as touching on a lot of more interesting topics such as the recently popular topic is journal TOCs using RSS.