Tag Archives: collections

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.

Cornell University Library Historical Math Monographs Collection

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Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity Library His­tor­i­cal Math Mono­graphs Collection

http://digital.library.cornell.edu/m/math/

“The Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity Library His­tor­i­cal Math Mono­graphs Col­lec­tion has a rather inter­est­ing his­tory. The col­lec­tion began when a num­ber of brit­tle and decay­ing math mono­graphs were dig­i­tally scanned using equip­ment devel­oped by Cor­nell and the Xerox Cor­po­ra­tion. This col­lec­tion brings together all of those doc­u­ments, includ­ing a selec­tion of other rel­e­vant papers and schol­arly works. All told, there are over 1,000 works here, and vis­i­tors can use the “Browse” sec­tion to look over the offer­ings by title or author. Addi­tion­ally, vis­i­tors can per­form detailed searches across the entire col­lec­tion. Vis­i­tors should also take a look at the “Selected Titles” on the home­page to get a sense of what lies within this rather com­pelling col­lec­tion. Finally, there is a “Help” sec­tion that pro­vides some hints on mak­ing the best use of the site.”

Source:  The Scout Report from the Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin, 27 Feb, 2009

Free Patent Databases

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In response to a ques­tion put to the Engi­neer­ing Divi­sion of the Spe­cial Libraries Asso­ci­a­tion, Mike White at Queen’s Uni­ver­sity in Ontario, writes:

“For teach­ing and research pur­poses, the pub­lic patent data­bases are excel­lent resources. The qual­ity and cur­rency of the data is as good as the com­mer­cial sites. The patent office data­bases are updated weekly and most of the inde­pen­dent data­bases (FreeP­atentsOn­line, Patent Lens, etc.) are cur­rent or no more than a week behind. My favorite is the EPO’s esp@cenet sys­tem. It’s user friendly, has tremen­dous con­tent (60 mil­lion patents from 72+ juris­dic­tions) and an excel­lent clas­si­fi­ca­tion search tool. I under­stand that they will be rolling out major enhance­ments to it some­time this fall. You might be inter­ested in a com­par­i­son of free patent data­bases I posted recently on my blog.”

PUL’s Patent Resources guide is link­able from the “Arti­cles and Data­bases” clus­ter, under “P” or “patent”.  (“Arti­cles and Data­bases”) is on the Library’s home­page.

Mike also notes that Thom­son Reuters is rumored to have a pow­er­ful new patent search­ing data­base com­ing — for pro­fes­sional patent searchers.