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.