Monthly Archives: July 2009

Geological resources from the Scout Report

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Today’s Scout Report from the University of Wisconsin highlights a couple of websites/resources of interest:

The Perkins Geology Museum at the University of Vermont
http://www.uvm.edu/perkins/index.html  — The "Perkins Digital Archive" contains >1000 images of minerals, fossils and rocks. Their collection of  > 24,000 photos documenting Vermont’s "Landscape Change Program" dates from 1690.  These collections are searchable.
 
The Barren Lands

The area west of Hudson Bay in northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan was thoroughly documented and explored by Canadian geologist, J.B. Tyrrell in 1893 and 1894.  There are >5000 images in this collection at the University of Toronto.

Scitopia now with streamlined links to RefWorks

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"Federated search services provider Deep Web Technologies, US, has announced that its federated search product, Explorit Research Accelerator, now includes seamless integration with RefWorks, a web-based solution for citations management."

source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter, July 30, 2009

Scitopia was developed by 21 top technological and scientific societies.  It is a freely available database mainly in physics and engineering.  Component societies are listed on a webpage off www.scitopia.org.  It lists papers going back as early as 1665, some of which are digitized.

Full text is offered on a pay-per-view basis, so currently it is better to search Princeton’s subscription databases which have links to our full-text subscription resources.  INSPEC  and Compendex  cover even more resources than Scitopia.  IEEE  — Xplore & IEL — are other overlapping subscription databases we have, and they are completely full-text.

SCITABLE — online science reference library (Nature)

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"Scitable is a free, high quality online science reference library brought to you by Nature Publishing Group (NPG).

Scitable currently covers the field of genetics, and will be expanding across other sciences over the next year.  Scitable’s content is commissioned and edited by editors at NPG, and peer-reviewed by the scientific community, so it is reliable, exhaustively researched, and carefully developed.

As journalists around the world of science have been writing recently, Scitable is the definitive online source for credible and comprehensive scientific information for non-scientists. "

Source:  email from Nature Publishing Group, July 28, 2009.

International Chemical Identifier (InChI)

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InChIs, are machine-readable, alpha-numeric character strings first developed by International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC),  Now the InChI Trust is carrying on the work to develop and expand the algorithms for open source accessibility of even more chemical structures.

From Today’s Knowledgespeak Newsletter:

"The InChI algorithm turns chemical structures into machine-readable strings of information. InChIs are unique to the compound they describe and can encode absolute stereochemistry. A simple analogy is that InChI is the bar-code for chemistry and chemical structures. The InChI format and algorithm are non-proprietary and the software is open source, with ongoing development done by the community."

"Since its launch in 2005, widespread take-up of InChI standards by public databases and journals has been observed. Today, there are more than 100 million InChIs in scientific literature and products. Numerous databases, journals and chemical structure drawing programs have incorporated the InChI algorithm. These include the NIST WebBook and mass spectral databases, the NIH/NCBI PubChem database, the NIH/NCI database, the EBI chemistry database, ChemSpider and Symyx Draw."

“Climate engineering gets a green light”

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The American Meteorological Society "is about to endorse research into geoengineering as part of a three-pronged approach to coping withclimate change, alongside national policies to reduce emissions.

New Scientist has seen the final draft of the American Meteorological Society‘s carefully worded position paper on geoengineering. The AMS is the first major scientific body to officially endorse research into geoengineering."

 So begins the article in this week’s New Scientist

 Source:  New Scientist [newsletter@email.newscientist.com]  22 July, 2009 

For similar stories, visit the Climate Change Topic Guide

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Science — the “Moon Issue” — January 30, 1970

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In commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the "moon walk", AAAS and Science has made this issue available to everyone.  Princeton University has had access via JSTOR for some time:  http://www.jstor.org/stable/i299517

At the AAAS link, you’ll see the link to the special "Moon issue"

 

 

 

Technical Report Archive and Image Library (TRAIL)

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"The Technical Report Archive and Image Library (TRAIL) project was established by the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) to digitize and preserve federal technical reports, particularly those produced before 1976. We define federal technical reports as material that is primarily of a scientific or technical nature issued by agencies of the federal government. The digitized reports will be freely available in a searchable electronic archive. It is our belief that unfettered access to this material will facilitate scientific progress. For more information, visit: http://trail.gwla.org/"

From
Mike Culbertson 
Engineering Librarian
Colorado State University Libraries
(Email received through American Libraries Assoc., Sci-Tech Section)

P.S.  What reports should be digitized?  Reply to : http://trailproject.blogspot.com/