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/