Videos in honor of Open Access Day

Diane Graves, Librarian from Open Access Videos on Vimeo. Open Access Day was October 14. Openaccessday.org posted several videos testifying to the benefits of open access for scholarship: http://vimeo.com/oaday08 These are a project of Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition: sparc.org/ , Public Library of Science: plos.org/ and Students for Free Culture: freeculture.org/

Science Info Without Borders- Worldwidescience.org

Carol Tenopir presents an in-depth review of the web portal, Worldwidescience.org, which provides free federated search access to science databases from government agencies worldwide, soon to include China!

"Founded in 2007 through an agreement between the British Library and OSTI, WorldWideScience.org is modeled after Science.gov, a portal to 100 million pages of science bulletins from 13 U.S. government agencies. Both are built using Deep Web Technologies, a Santa Fe, NM–based company that calls its product Explorit Research Accelerator."

WorldWideScience.org includes government-sponsored science content from more than 50 member countries and 40 international portals, as well as everything covered by Science.gov. With the addition of China as a member in August, the portal, Warnick says, “will soon reach a billion pages.”

Read the complete review here: http://tinyurl.com/4zpy5w

Engineers develop coating that detects bridge cracks using nanotechnology~

For bridge freaks like me, I think this is pretty cool. I'm not sure about the price though ($1/inch2), although if it prevents structural failure, it's probably worth it at any price: Michigan's Ann Arbor News (original article only available for fee) (9/3, Hamon) reports that Jerry Lynch, a University of Michigan professor of engineering, has led a research team in the development of structural coating that will "detect cracks in bridges before the damage is visible." According to the Ann Arbor News, Lynch and his colleagues created the coating with "carbon nanotubes that use electrical currents to find damage like strain and corrosion." Nicholas Kotov, a UM engineering professor and "key developer of the technology," explained that a "carbon nanotube is microscopic and shaped like a long, hollow strand of spaghetti." Moreover, it is "one of the strongest materials available and, when mixed with the polymers, lends strength to the coating." When electricity flows through the skin, "it produces a two-dimensional image via a central computing device," and "electrical resistance shown in the image will indicate structural damage." Kotov said that the "coating costs about $1 per square inch and is engineered to last decades." He added, "Presumably the carbon nanotube coating won't corrode over the lifetime of the bridge."

UW Researcher named 2008 MacArthur Fellow

David Montgomery, 46, professor of geomorphology, University of Washington. He is making fundamental contributions to our understanding of the geophysical forces that determine landscape evolution and of how our use of soils and rivers has shaped civilizations past and present. Complete list of MacArthur fellows for 2008: http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/09/4703n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Information is Power - Even When it’s Wrong

Posted on the ACRL blog: Check out this example proving the importance of information literacy: a sloppy mistake in handling information led to a plunge in a company’s stock prices: http://acrlog.org/2008/09/11/information-is-power-even-when-its-wrong/ More on the story: Tribune Co., Google Explain Revival of Outdated United Bankruptcy Story http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=150236

Professional Engineering Publishing Launches Engineering Conferences Online

Professional Engineering Publishing, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (www.imeche.org), has launched Engineering Conferences Online (ECO), a new online publishing service for conference organizers. ECO (http://eco.pepublishing.com) provides conference organizers with a new way of disseminating important engineering research that would normally be very difficult or impossible to locate in traditional book or CD formats. Papers in ECO will usually be available free of charge on an open access basis and will be fully referenced using DOIs.

Poof! Scientists closer to invisibility cloak

Scientists at UC Berkeley are getting closer to developing materials that could render people and objects invisible. http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gnrH1I5OMi2psDdZ2cWrmQlVfyXgD92FPIOG0

DOE Data Explorer - read more on the OSTI Blog

http://www.osti.gov/ostiblog/home/entry/discover_the_data_behind_doe From the entry:"If you’re ready to discover data, then OSTI’s newest product is ready for you! The DOE Data Explorer (DDE) is a unique tool that identifies collections of DOE-sponsored numeric files, figures and data plots, multimedia and images, computer simulations, specialized databases, and interactive data maps. Browse, run a quick search, or advanced search, then click a link to results. You’ll be amazed at the data you can freely see and use, the highly specialized interfaces developed by the owners of the data that will help you delve deeper into their collections, and the software toolkits that allow you to manipulate, compare, visualize, download, and re-use the data." Data is gathered from collections at national laboratories, data centers, scientific user facilities, colleges and universities ...and across all of the science areas with DOE involvement.

iBreadcrumbs.com - for the birds?

Check out the latest Firefox tool bar add-in, a way for researchers to annotate and share information online. You can access your own annotations from any computer, you know the drill. Here's the full article from the Chronicle, June 4, 2008: http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3059&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

New wiki for Engineering Library

Here's what some other Engineering Librarians are doing, just announced today: A Research Portal and Guide to Engineering Resources for the Ohio University Community. Visit it here: http://www.library.ohiou.edu/subjects/engrwiki/index.php/Main_Page So far it has 143 pages.

Information R/evolution

Just in case anyone gets the same question as I got today, here's a note about the books in the display case (someone was potentially interested in checking one out and may return to do so). The key is in the refdesk drawer, and the books need to be checked in again as they are checked out to a library account at the moment, but once that is done they can be checked out to the person as usual.

"Question Shop" (otherwise known as a reference desk)

"What they don’t mention is that the fellow in the picture is named Marcus Googlethorpe." (I'm not sure about that...) http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/02/10/question-shop-gives-answer-to-any-telephoned-query/

Holistic Engineering Program?

Potential employers are finding out that engineers don't know how to manage systems that need knowledge in environmental areas. OSU has a solution: New program combines ecology with engineering "This lack of experience puts a burden on employers, including farmers, engineering consultants and government agencies, who must then teach engineers how to bridge the gap between environmental and engineered solutions themselves. "They need students who understand traditional engineering and how it intersects with biological and ecological systems," said Bolte. For this reason, OSU has launched a new undergraduate program that combines ecology with engineering. "By the time they leave, we expect them to be fluent in both," he said. About 10 students will complete their first semester of the ecological engineering curriculum this spring, and the program is expected to grow to about 120 students within five years... For several years, the university has offered a graduate program in biological and ecological engineering - evolved from its agricultural engineering program - but the students who enroll are generally interested in pursuing careers in research, he said. The undergraduate program, on the other hand, will produce engineers ready for work out in the field..."

Need information? Contact Your Academic Librarian Today

Gap Persists Between Faculty Salaries at Public and Private Institutions

The gap isn't anything new, the author explains, but it just isn't getting much better. Note the continued disparity between men and women faculty too- isn't this the 21st century??! (At least the institution's presidents are paid well...) Read the full article from the Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i32/32a01901.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

College of Engineering Open House

2008 Annual Engineering Open House

Friday April 25, 2008: 9:00am - 3:00pm and Saturday April 26, 2008: 10:00am - 2:00pm

As always the Engineering Library will participate in the Open House with a poster display taking the place of the invention poster. We will also be showing a Building Big video continuously.

Please get ready to answer questions about the bathroom locations....

Mourning the Passing of a Household Icon

Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias discusses what most of us probably already know, that the 'old-fashioned' encyclopedias of yore are being replaced by "the online hearth", Wikipedia and the like. In the 1970's, I remember using our huge brown simulated leather-bound Encyclopedia Britannica and the current edition (blue covers) of the World Book Encyclopedia to begin researching my various school 'reports': Mexico, the La Brea tar pits, the human body; they all started with these wonderful sources of, what seemed like an infinite amount of information. Now my 11 year old son starts all his research with Wikipedia and probably ends it there too, to my dismay. I always ask him what books he used, but his response is that it's too hard to find books in his school library. If I had more time, I'd be taking him more often to the public library to search the catalog (which he does know how to do!). This article mentions a Wikipedia alternative, (only however for topics in the natural sciences) that I have never heard of before. The Encyclopedia of Life was started by a Harvard biologist who has been joined by a team of international scientists: "It sounds surreal, and yet scientists are writing the Book of All Species. Or to be more precise, they are building a Web site called the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org). On Thursday its authors, an international team of scientists, will introduce the first 30,000 pages, and within a decade, they predict, they will have the other 1.77 million." (http://tinyurl.com/2rwlef) The researchers want to make the site useful to scientists and non-scientists, so they are creating a sliding button that readers can move to decide how much detail they want about the topic. The EOL is certainly a very interesting concept but obviously an extremely ambitious project. I kind of miss our old Britannica set. They are still available for purchase, although they are being marketed quite differently. Britannica wants people to think of the many volumes as a "luxury experience. You want to be able to produce a lot of joy, a paper joy.” I just don't get that same sense of "joy" from Wikipedia.

New resources help engineers

By Roddy MacLeod, Librarian at Herriot-Watt University Library in Edinburgh, Scotland. Updates regarding new journal titles, developments in publisher's access and technology offerings. Originally published in February/March issue of Research Information. http://www.researchinformation.info/features/feature.php?feature_id=161

The Librarian Song - Check out his facial expressions!