Category Archives: Web resources

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/

American Institute of Physics to secure all journals in dark archive

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Melville, NY, June 12, 2009 – "The American Institute of Physics (AIP) announced today that online versions of all its journals will soon reside in the dark archive, CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), a joint venture by libraries and publishers committed to ensuring long-term access to scholarly publications in digital format. CLOCKSS will make AIP content freely available in the event that AIP is no longer able to provide access." 

"CLOCKSS creates a secure, multi-site archive of web-published content that can be tapped into to provide ongoing access to researchers worldwide, free of charge."

"The American Institute of Physics is a federation of 10 physical science societies representing more than 135,000 scientists, engineers, and educators and is one of the world’s largest publishers of scientific information in physics. Offering full-solution publishing services for physics scientific societies and for similar organizations in science and engineering, AIP pursues innovation in electronic publishing of scholarly journals. AIP publishes its own

12 journals (many of which have the highest impact factors in their category); two magazines, including its flagship publication Physics Today; and the AIP Conference Proceedings. Its online publishing platform Scitation hosts nearly two million articles from more than 185 scholarly journals, and other publications of 28 learned society publishers."

From BShriver@AIP.org

Digital Library at Penn State using CiteSeerX

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"Digital library developed by Penn State researchers hits 1 million articles mark – 10 Jun 2009

Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) has announced that a new digital library and search engine created by its researchers now holds more than 1 million journal articles and other scholarly works that can be easily accessed by anyone.

CiteSeerX (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu), based in Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), is designed to enhance the dissemination of scientific literature by making papers and other documents easier to locate online. The library provides resources such as algorithms, data, metadata, services, techniques and software that are transferable to other digital libraries – supplying users with more than just an index of search results. The newest version, released in early 2009, added the capability to search tables.

The search engine was developed by C. Lee Giles, David Reese professor of information sciences and technology and Isaac G. Councill, a Penn State Ph.D. recipient. It is based on open source software, which means it can be adapted as needed, by anyone, to fit users’ requirements.

The search engine also includes a feature called MyCiteSeerX, a customisable personal space where the individual user can do tagging, make corrections, create his or her own collections and monitor paper updates.

Other tools currently being developed include Our CiteSeerX, an environment where collaborating teams can work and share information within the library, and a feature that will allow users to receive alerts about new papers of personal interest.

CiteSeerX was funded by the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, NASA and the College of IST.

Click here"

 

Source:  Knowledgespeak Newsletter

Cornell Lab of Ornithology — Macaulay Library

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    "The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is the  world’s largest natural sound and video archive of animal behavior. Its mission is to collect and preserve recordings of each species behavior and natural history and to make them available for research, education, conservation, zoos and aquaria, wildlife managers, publishers, the arts, and both public and commercial media. Since 1930, recordists of all backgrounds have contributed their recordings, which now number to several hundred thousand in total. A large percentage of the recordings can be searched and played online."

The library uses a free browser plugin called RavenViewer, which ‘enables you to see and visually analyze the sound as you play it.’   There is a search box, or one can browse taxonomically or by common names.

Source:  [ResourceShelf] Newsletter No.411

Science & Engineering Statistics at NSF.gov

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National Science Foundation: Science and Engineering Statistics

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/

"Scholars, journalists and members of the general public will have a field day with the National Science Foundation’s Science and Engineering Statistics website. Visitors will note that the data contained within the site includes publications, working papers, data spreadsheets, and analyses divided into broad areas that include "Education", "Federal Government", "Industry", "International", and "Social Dimensions". Users can delve deeper into these broad areas and come up with related publications, policy briefs, and so on. Near the bottom of the page, visitors can look over the "New Releases" area for new reports on federal science and engineering support to universities, research expenditures, and the ethnicity and gender makeup of federal scientists and engineers. Finally, visitors can also sign up to receive their RSS feed."

Source:  University of Wisconsin’s Scout Report

Instructional Podcasts from Chemical Abstracts Service

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Logging in to SciFinder Scholar today, I discovered that CAS has made some interesting and elegant instructional podcasts.  Examples include: ethanol, nanoparticle drug delivery, DNA to RNA transcription, nanotechnology for energy, and lessons from Katrina.  The videos last from 4 – 6 minutes.

Connexions — an Open Education Resource

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If you want to customize some lecture notes, create a textbook  or collect some special readings for your class, Connexions might help.  It is rather like Open Courseware, but it is a wiki textbook product, and developed in modules.  Prof. Peter M. Grant from the University of Edinburgh gave a presentation about it at the Friend Center yesterday.  It was developed at Rice University but now is independently run in Houston, TX, being funded by Heulett.  It’s content is continually growing…recently consisting of 500 collections, courses, or books, and 10,500 modules or chapters of 4-8 pages.  It operates under a Creative  Commons license.  147 countries are involved.  The most prevalent language is Spanish, but there is also English, Thai, Japanese and Chinese.  All subjects are present, even though it was first developed as a Communications and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) resource.  Introduction to Music Theory is a popular text available at Connexions.  However, ~65% covers science and technology.  Anyone can contribute, become an author, and most contributions are peer reviewed at some point.  "Lenses" for quality control and review are centered at IEEE, Rice and IMS, and other institutions and individuals depending on the subjects.  One very cool application is LabVIEW which displays active analytics, for example, the graphical output readings resulting from different input filtering devices in electronics.   (More about LabVIEW. ) XML is used to store content, and texts are easily uploaded from Microsoft Word or LaTeX. 

Information about the presentation and Prof. Grant which was sponsored by: The Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education.

Common Chemistry — a web-based, free resource from Chemical Abstracts Service

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 CAS launches free web-based resource for non-chemists – 15 May 2009

 Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society, has launched a new, free, web-based resource called Common Chemistry. This resource is helpful to non-chemists and others who might know either a chemical name or a CAS Registry Number of a common everyday chemical and want to pair both pieces of information.

Common Chemistry contains nearly 7,800 chemicals of widespread and general interest, as well as all 118 elements from the periodic table. With the exception of some of the elements, all other substances in this collection were deemed of widespread interest by having been cited 1,000 or more times in the CAS databases.

While not intended to be a comprehensive CAS Registry Number (CAS RN) lookup service, Common Chemistry does provide access to information on chemicals of general interest. The CAS Registry Number is recognised throughout the world as the most commonly used, unique identifier of chemical substances. The full CAS REGISTRYSM database contains more than 46 million organic and inorganic substances. Research discovery and patent tools such as SciFinder and STN allow users to search the entire database.

Click here

Source:  Knowledgespeak Newsletter &  CAS.

Note:  Princeton University Library subscribes to the complete CAS Chemical Abstracts and Registry database — available as SciFinder Scholar.

 

NIH Open Access Policy — SPARC enews

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The Open Access Policy proposed by the National Institutes of Health has been made permanent.

To read more about the policy see the entry 

Here is the 1st paragraph:

"Washington, D.C. – March 12, 2009 – President Obama yesterday signed into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a provision making the National Institutes’ of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy permanent. The NIH Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access requires eligible NIH-funded researchers to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central (PMC). Full texts of the articles are made publicly available and searchable online in PMC no later than 12 months after publication in a journal."

Source: the SPARC enews which comes out monthly from The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition.