Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Library Intelligencer » This blog is to provide information to University of Melbourne Library staff

Library Intelligencer » This blog is to provide information to University of Melbourne Library staff 

"Used to know someone who did birds....HSM"

eBird

May 27, 2009 – 3:34 pm

http://ebird.org/content/ebird

What is eBird?
A real-time, online checklist program, eBird has revolutionized the way that the birding community reports and accesses information about birds. Launched in 2002 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society, eBird provides rich data sources for basic information on bird abundance and distribution at a variety of spatial and temporal scales.

eBird’s goal is to maximize the utility and accessibility of the vast numbers of bird observations made each year by recreational and professional bird watchers. It is amassing one of the largest and fastest growing biodiversity data resources in existence. For example, in 2006, participants reported more than 4.3 million bird observations across North America.

The observations of each participant join those of others in an international network of eBird users. eBird then shares these observations with a global community of educators, land managers, ornithologists, and conservation biologists. In time these data will become the foundation for a better understanding of bird distribution across the western hemisphere and beyond.

Library Intelligencer » This blog is to provide information to University of Melbourne Library staff

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MDPI.com: peer-reviewed, fully open access scholarly journals since 1996 « Life Sciences Info @ Imperial College London Library

MDPI.com: peer-reviewed, fully open access scholarly journals since 1996 « Life Sciences Info @ Imperial College London Library 

MDPI.com: peer-reviewed, fully open access scholarly journals since 1996

MDPI.com is a platform providing open access to peer-reviewed journals published by Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI). Access is available to material published from 1996 onwards and includes:

  • International Journal of Environmental Research & Public Health
  • International Journal of Molecular Sciences
  • Marine Drugs
  • Molecules
  • Nutrients
  • Remote Sensing (New as of March 2009)
  • Sustainability (New as of March 2009)
  • Toxins
  • Viruses

Visit www.mdpi.com to access these journals and more, and hook up to an RSS feed from the site too.

MDPI.com: peer-reviewed, fully open access scholarly journals since 1996 « Life Sciences Info @ Imperial College London Library

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Major research institute moves publications to open-access system | News | Breaking News | Feedstuffs

 Major research institute moves publications to open-access system | News | Breaking News | Feedstuffs

Major research institute moves publications to open-access system

(5/27/2009)

The spiraling cost of subscriptions to scientific journals is fueling a movement toward web-based open access for papers detailing new scientific findings. The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) formally launched an open-access (OA) system for its scientific publications on May 27.

"ICRISAT has declared the Green OA Mandate in the Institute, thereby making available a digital, web-accessible repository of pre-prints of the scientific and scholarly publications emerging from ICRISAT's research," according to a statement from the institute.

"According to the registry on global OA initiatives maintained by the University of Southampton in the U.K., ICRISAT is among the earliest agricultural research institutes to declare the green mandate," the statement noted. The University of Southampton maintains the database, which is called Roarmap.

ICRISAT noted that critical research information to researchers across the globe has been affected by the costs of the journals, and "even institutions in developed countries find it difficult to meet increasing journal subscription costs."

In recent years, the OA movement has sprung up in many developed countries, ICRISAT reported. "Champions of the OA movement believe that in spite of publisher-mandated copyright restrictions, authors of scientific and scholarly papers have the fullest freedom to share their findings with their peer community," the statement said.

ICRISAT, based in India, has research stations throughout the world in semi-arid tropical regions. It is one of the institutions of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.

The OA repository of ICRISAT can be accessed at http://openaccess.icrisat.org. Most of the institute's print publications can be accessed at http://books.icrisat.org.

Major research institute moves publications to open-access system | News | Breaking News | Feedstuffs

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Friday, May 22, 2009

Herbert York dies at 87; scientist and arms-control leader - Los Angeles Times

Herbert York dies at 87; scientist and arms-control leader - Los Angeles Times 

Herbert York dies at 87; scientist and arms-control leader

UC San Diego

Herbert York, who was a delegate to the anti-satellite arms control talks in 1978 and chief negotiator in the U.S.-Soviet talks on a ban on nuclear weapons testing, also was UC San Diego’s founding chancellor.

The founding chancellor of UC San Diego had served on the Manhattan Project but later worked to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

By Tony Perry
May 21, 2009

Herbert York, a leading physicist in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II who later became an arms-control advocate and founding chancellor of UC San Diego, has died. He was 87.
York died Tuesday at Thornton Hospital in San Diego, the university announced, after a long illness.

"Herb York made this campus and this world a better place," UC San Diego Chancellor Marye Anne Fox said in a statement.
Beginning with his work on the Manhattan Project, York held a series of high-level scientific, academic and governmental posts over the next six decades and served as an advisor to six presidents on matters of science research and arms control. He wrote and lectured extensively about the threat of nuclear war.
"There is no such thing as a good nuclear weapons system," York said in a 1983 interview with The Times. "There is no way to achieve, in the sound sense, national security through nuclear weapons."

In 1958, President Eisenhower appointed York as the first director of Defense Research and Engineering, overseeing missile and space research.
In 1961, UC President Clark Kerr persuaded him to become the founding chancellor of UC San Diego. York recruited students and faculty and supervised construction on the La Jolla campus.
But as the Cold War intensified and the threat of a nuclear exchange loomed, York returned repeatedly to the pursuit he had begun after World War II: stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.
York served as a delegate to the anti-satellite arms control talks in 1978 and then as chief negotiator in the U.S.-Soviet talks on a ban of nuclear weapons testing.
In private, York was known as a raconteur who loved telling jokes, even to the stone-faced negotiators for the Soviets during the long sessions in Geneva.
One of York's longtime colleagues at UC San Diego, physics professor Sheldon Schultz, told a Times reporter in 1983 that in the field of nuclear weapons research, "there are the Strangeloves, there are the dour, existential thinkers, there are the efficient, white-shirted Rand Corp. automatons, and then there are the human beings. Herb is a human being."
Herbert Frank York was born in Rochester, N.Y., on Nov. 24, 1921.
The son of a railroad baggage handler, York was a brilliant student of physics at the University of Rochester, where he received bachelor's and master's degrees in 1943.
He then joined the University of California Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley and was soon recruited to join the Manhattan Project. To York, like many of the other scientists, the project was the most intellectually challenging work imaginable, with a noble purpose.
"Not only did we complete the project, but we ended the war," York said.
After the war, York returned to Berkeley, earned a doctorate in 1949 and was appointed director of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory at age 28.
He served as UC San Diego chancellor from 1961 to 1964 and then from 1970 to 1972, although he was famously restive with academic bureaucracy and endless committee meetings.
He preferred teaching and, unlike many senior academics, retained a fondness for working with undergraduates.
He taught physics, served as chairman of the physics department and in 1983 founded the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, which conducts research on conflict resolution and promotes efforts to avoid war.
The failure of the Geneva negotiations remained a profound disappointment.
"The world situation just wouldn't support it," he said.
In his 1970 book, "The Race to Oblivion," York worried that nuclear technology seemed to have a momentum that made confrontation between the superpowers inevitable.
"We seem to be heading for a state of affairs," he wrote, "in which the determination of whether or not Doomsday has arrived will be made either by an automatic device . . . or by a pre-programmed president who, whether he knows it or not, will be carrying out orders written years before by some operations analyst."
York is survived by his wife of 61 years, Sybil; three children, Rachel York, Dr. Cynthia York and David Winters; and four grandchildren.
Arrangements for a memorial service at UC San Diego are pending.

Herbert York dies at 87; scientist and arms-control leader - Los Angeles Times

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Thursday, May 14, 2009

UpToDate Inc.

UpToDate Inc. 

UpToDate is an evidence based, peer reviewed information resource - available via the Web, desktop computer, and PDA.

With UpToDate, you can answer questions quickly, increase your clinical knowledge, and improve patient care. Independent studies confirm these benefits.

The UpToDate community includes our faculty of more than 4,000 leading physicians, peer reviewers, and editors and over 360,000 users. Our faculty writes topic reviews that include a synthesis of the literature, the latest evidence, and specific recommendations for patient care. Our users provide feedback to the editorial group. This community's combined efforts result in the most trusted, unbiased medical information available.

 

UpToDate Inc.

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ScienceBlogs

ScienceBlogs

scienceblogs.com

Science is driving our conversation unlike ever before.

From climate change to intelligent design, HIV/AIDS to stem cells, science education to space exploration, science is figuring prominently in our discussions of politics, religion, philosophy, business and the arts. New insights and discoveries in neuroscience, theoretical physics and genetics are revolutionizing our understanding of who are are, where we come from and where we're heading. Launched in January 2006, ScienceBlogs is a portal to this global dialogue, a digital science salon featuring the leading bloggers from a wide array of scientific disciplines. Today, ScienceBlogs is the largest online community dedicated to science.

We believe in providing our bloggers with the freedom to exercise their own editorial and creative instincts. We do not edit their work and we do not tell them what to write about.

We have selected our 60+ bloggers based on their originality, insight, talent, and dedication and how we think they would contribute to the discussion at ScienceBlogs. Our role, as we see it, is to create and continue to improve this forum for discussion, and to ensure that the rich dialogue that takes place at ScienceBlogs resonates outside the blogosphere.

ScienceBlogs is very much an experiment in science communication, and being first also means being first to encounter unforeseen obstacles. We are learning as we go (and as goes the blogosphere) and appreciate your understanding and patience.

ScienceBlogs was created by Seed Media Group. We believe that science literacy is a pre-condition for progress in the 21st century. At a time when public interest in science is high but public understanding of science remains weak, we have set out to create innovative media ventures to improve science literacy and to advance global science culture. To learn more about what we do and why we do it, please visit seedmediagroup.com.

ScienceBlogs

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Not Enough Time in the Library - Chronicle.com

"Research Literate -- so much better than information literacy -- IMHO -- HSM"

FIRST PERSON

Not Enough Time in the Library

Just because your students are computer-literate doesn't mean they are research-literate

By TODD GILMAN

As an academic librarian, I hear an awful lot of hype about using technology to enhance instruction in colleges and universities. While the very word "technology" — not to mention the jargon that crops up around it, like "interactive whiteboards" and "smart classrooms" — sounds exciting and impressive, what it boils down to is really just a set of tools. They're useful tools, but they don't offer content beyond what the users put into them.

Today we have hardware and software that facilitate communication, resource-sharing, and organization. We have computers attached to projection systems for lectures and demonstrations; social-networking and messaging sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter; virtual spaces like blogs and wikis in which to collaborate; course-management software like Blackboard/WebCT, Sakai, and Angel to supplement or even take the place of the physical classroom; and programs such as RefWorks, Endnote, and Zotero to keep track of and format bibliographies.

Oldsters tend to associate those tools with youngsters. Many faculty members, especially senior ones, believe they are less adept at using those tools than their students are. While that much may be true, the assumption that follows — that when it comes to technology, today's students need no faculty guidance — most certainly is not.

While college students may be computer-literate, they are not, as a rule, research-literate. And there's a huge difference between the two.

The fact that some professors do not recognize the distinction means they effectively assume that their students find themselves as much at home in the complex and daunting world of information as when they upload 25 photos from their iPhone to Facebook and text their friends to announce the latest "pics."

Academic librarians are eager to offer sessions for students on what we call "research education." But the mistaken assumption that students don't need it means that many professors don't ask us to meet with their students, or even respond to our enthusiastic offers to lead such sessions. Students don't need to be taught anything about working online, because they were practically born digital, right?

Research education is not tools education. Research education involves getting students to understand how information is organized physically in libraries, as well as electronically in library catalogs and in powerful, sometimes highly specialized commercial databases. It means teaching students to search effectively online to identify the most relevant and highest-quality books, articles, microform sets, databases, even free Web resources.

Students do not come to college armed with those skills, nor are they likely to be acquired without guidance. Yet students desperately need such skills if they hope to function effectively in our information-driven economy. As Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams opine in The Craft of Research: The "vast majority of students will have careers in which, if they do not do their own research, they will have to evaluate and depend on the research of others. We know of no way to prepare for that responsibility better than to do research of one's own."

Professors may need to be reminded that online searching requires a set of skills that are the strong suit of academic librarians — and that we are eager to impart those skills to students. Faculty members may also need to be reminded that developing those skills takes practice. Would professors assume that students possess the critical-thinking skills necessary to make sense of an early-17th-century document related to the Plymouth Bay Colony just because they grew up in Massachusetts?

Here, then, are some tips for faculty members on how to augment students' research skills.

Spend a class period on search strategies. Show students how to find their way around the library's electronic catalog (for books) and a few general databases such as Academic Search Premier, those in the WilsonWeb platform, and LexisNexis Academic (for articles). A librarian can conduct a session with your students on those sources and, more important, demonstrate effective search strategies to avoid frustration and wasted time. Make the session mandatory, hold it during class, and be sure to attend it, to show you mean business. Even better, teach the session with the librarian, or at least chime in to stress key points.

Take a tour. Introduce students to the physical spaces of the library, especially the reference desk, the reference collection and its contents, the periodical reading room, and the stacks — including how to read a call number. Believe it or not, many students' familiarity with their college or university library stops at the study spaces.

Reinforce the lesson with an assignment. Devise a for-credit assignment that echoes what you and the librarian have shown the students. It should emphasize key distinctions that they often forget, such as the need to search the online catalog for books but library databases for articles. You might also incorporate a component that challenges students to evaluate the quality of information they find, such as comparing the top results returned by a keyword search in Google with those returned in Academic Search Premier with the peer-reviewed box checked. Which results are more authoritative, and how can students tell?

Take it a step further. Perhaps you want to do more than require a single assignment, such as encouraging students to use library materials in support of arguments in their term papers. It would be good to assign them Chapter 3 (pp. 40 to 55) of the second edition of The Craft of Research (available for library purchase as an e-book, so students don't have to shell out extra). The chapter covers how to turn interest in a topic into a research question that's worth trying to answer. It should reduce the likelihood that students will set out to write a paper on "the history of rowing on U.S. college campuses" and move them instead toward an argument supported by convincing data about, say, "the role that athletics plays in U.S. college admissions."

In an ideal world, students should have multiple encounters with librarians, not just the standard 60-to-90-minute session that is most common now.

Faculty members in Yale's English department clearly recognize the growing importance of research education: They have just agreed to increase fivefold the number of undergraduates who will attend library sessions as an integral part of their introductory writing and literature courses (from 350 to roughly 1,900). Add to that our new "personal librarian" program, which pairs every Yale freshman with a Yale librarian, and you see the students themselves begin to be repositioned to value learning the craft of research. Let's hope this example encourages others to follow suit.

The more time students spend with us, the further they can go beyond the basics into larger conceptual issues. Once they have determined what makes a good research question in the first place, they can move on to ask themselves (and the librarian) what is needed to answer specific questions they want to explore, developing the confidence that comes from knowing they are looking in all the right places for answers, and actually finding what they seek.

Todd Gilman is the librarian for literature in English at Yale University's Sterling Memorial Library.

Not Enough Time in the Library - Chronicle.com

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Wednesday, May 6, 2009

The Paleontology Portal: Home

The Paleontology Portal: Home

This site is a resource for anyone interested in paleontology, from the professional in the lab to the interested amateur scouting for fossils to the student in any classroom. We have gathered many different resources into this single entry "portal" to paleontological information on the Internet. Take our site tour to find out more about what you will find here.

Images and links that you see as you browse through the site have been reviewed and selected for quality by one or more members of the Editorial Board, following the guidelines of the established editorial policy. Please use the "add to site" link at the top of the page to contribute images or links for consideration.

This site was produced by the University of California Museum of Paleontology, the Paleontological Society, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, and the United States Geological Survey. The site was funded by the National Science Foundation under award no. 0234594. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

 

The Paleontology Portal: Home

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