Grad Student Workshop: Tools for Staying Current

You may have noticed that we are starting to put together a series of workshops on topics of interest to science graduate students. There is one more of these workshops this semester and there are still seats available!

Next week Thursday, I will be presenting “Taking Control: Tools for Staying Current on Your Research Topic”. I will talk about using online tools to stay current in your area of study. We will explore ways to receive alerts about new publications and use RSS feeds to keep tabs on what’s going on in your field. The session will be hands on, so you’ll leave the workshop with a Google Reader account set up and ready to keep you updated. The workshop is on 12 November from 11:00 am to noon. Sign up here today to reserve your seat!

PubMed Interface Changes Implemented TODAY!

PubMed (Medline) has a completely redesigned interface that went live today. Many of the enhancements are not major changes, but the look and feel is quite different and may be confusing to some regular users. The articles at the links below provide explanations of the changes.

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so09/so09_pm_redesign.html

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so09/so09_pm_now_redesign.html

ScienceDirect Unavailable Saturday, 20 June 2009

ScienceDirect will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance for approximately 16 hours from 8:00 EDT Saturday, June 20 to 12:00 AM EDT Sunday, June 21. (I think that’s 2:00 am to 6:00 pm HST.)

UHM Library receives NEH award of $140,920

The University of Hawai’I at Manoa Library has received an award of $140,920 to support the continuation of the “Hawai’i Digital Newspaper Project” for 2009-2010.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded $200,000 to begin digitization of  the Hawaii newspapers that were microfilmed in 2008. The Newspaper Digitization Project, a part of the National Digital Newspaper Program [NDNP] developed by NEH and the Library of Congress, will digitize approximately 100,000 English-language newspaper pages between the years of 1880 and 1922 during the two-year grant period.   Ultimately, over a period of approximately 20 years, NDNP will create a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all the states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922. This searchable database will be permanently maintained at the Library of Congress (LC) and be freely accessible via the Internet.

Newspapers digitized as part of the grant award will be included in the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America database.  Chronicling America is a Website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).  To view the site and search for a newspaper, go to: <http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/>.

UH Manoa Library’s Hawai’i Digital Newspaper Project is currently working on ten Hawaiian newspapers published between 1880-1918:

• The Independent, Editor Daniel Logan, (May 1, 1895 – June 15, 1895)
• The Daily Herald, Editor Daniel Logan (Sept. 1, 1886 – July 30, 1887)
• The Independent, Editor E. Norrie, (June 24, 1895 – Oct. 31, 1905)
• The Hawaiian Gazette, published 1865 – Nov. 29, 1918
• The Honolulu Republican, Editor E.S. Gill, (June 14, 1900 – Jan. 25, 1902)
• Honolulu Times
• Austin’s Hawaiian Weekly
• The Democrat
• Daily Honolulu Press
• Saturday Press

For more information on the Hawai’i Digital Newspaper Project, go to

http://sites.google.com/a/hawaii.edu/ndnp-hawaii/Home

Scholarly Communication – Special Event!

Publishing and the Dissemination of Scholarship: Is the Process Broken?

The growth of knowledge depends on timely, widespread dissemination of scholarship. For the last 300 to 400 years, the results of scholarly efforts have been shared through journals and monographs. That system may have outlived its usefulness. Worse yet, the current system of dissemination of scholarship may actually be creating barriers to research. As the numbers of journals and scholarly books have grown, it has become increasingly incumbent on academic libraries to be the primary sources for, and thus the main purchasers of these scholarly products. The web now offers alternative channels for publishing research results and analyses. More important, the web has the capability to allow more timely, more widespread, more accessible, and less expensive dissemination of scholarship. These changes will not, can not be imposed from the top; they are being brought about by the actions of individual faculty members, making themselves aware of trends in scholarly communication and incorporating those changes in their publication habits.

Please join us for a discussion about new strategies in scholarly communication that will greatly increase public access to research, and sharing and collaboration among knowledge workers.

Presenters are: Kelly Aune (UHM Faculty, Department of Speech), Ross Christensen (UHM Librarian, Humanities), Beth Tillinghast (UHM Librarian, Project Manager for ScholarSpace), and Sara Rutter (UHM Librarian, Science)

April 29, 2009
Noon-2 pm
Campus Center Executive Room
Light refreshments will be served

Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy – Open Access for 2008-2009

From AIP -

The American Institute of Physics is pleased to announce its newest journal: the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy (JRSE). To complement this online-only journal, AIP has developed a website with components that go beyond the standard journal webpage.

JRSE is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal covering all areas of renewable and sustainable energy-related fields that apply to the physical science and engineering communities. As an electronic-only, Web-based journal with rapid publication time, JRSE is responsive to the many new developments expected in this field. The interdisciplinary approach of the publication ensures that the editors draw from researchers worldwide in a diverse range of fields. Topics covered include:
•    Bioenergy – bioreactions and bioengineering
•    Geothermal energy – geysers, heat pumps, and novel devices
•    Marine and hydroelectric energy – waves, tides, and dams
•    Nuclear energy – fission and fusion
•    Solar energy – photovoltaics and solar thermal converters
•    Wind energy – turbines and electrical systems and controls
•    Energy conversion – solid oxide and proton exchange membrane fuel cells and novel devices
•    Energy efficient buildings – photovoltaics, solar thermal converters, and passive solar approaches
•    Energy storage – hydrogen and batteries
•    Power distribution – conventional and superconducting transmission, fluctuating loads, and controls
•    Renewable energy resource assessment
•    Transportation – hydrogen, batteries, fuel cells, bioenergy, and vehicles

Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy (JRSE) will be Open Access for 2008-2009. [http://jrse.aip.org/]

Scitopia – searching physical science & engineering literature and patents

A free federated search portal, Scitopia allows you to search the publications of more than 20 science and engineering societies through one site. You can also search the US Patent and Trademark Office, European Patent Office,  Japan Patent Office, and the Department of Energy Information Bridge site in the same search.

Scitopia participants include Acoustical Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Audio Engineering Society, AVS, ECS, IEEE, the Institute of Physics, the IUCR Crystallography Journals Online, the Optical Society of America, the Professional Engineering Publishing, the Royal Society, the Society for Industrial & Applied Mathematics, the Society of Automotive Engineers, SPIE, and the Society for Information Display.

The UH Manoa Library subscribes to many of the Scitopia journals, but you will not be able to link directly to journal full text from Scitopia unless you are in the Library. Our students, faculty, and staff who access Scitopia from outside the Library should search the Library’s electronic resources at http://micro189.lib3.hawaii.edu/ezproxy/ to access the journals to which the Library subscribes. The US government documents and many of the patent documents are freely available directly through Scitopia.

The Plant Genome – new open access journal

The Crop Science Society of America (CSSA) has started a new international, open access, electronic only journal called The Plant Genome. This journal will be published three times a year and will publish original research investigating all aspects of plant genomics. In order to support this open access journal, CSSA is using the model where authors are charged for publication. The first issue is available and the table of contents contains several sections: Research Highlights, Review & Interpretation, and Original Research. Interestingly, the editorial, Welcome to The Plant Genome, discusses the idea of using wikis, discussion boards, and blogs to develop resources and facilitate discussion. The combination of an open access journal and these other communication vehicles has a lot of potential for collaboration and generation of new ideas.

Coral Reef Ecosystem Report

The State of Coral Reef Ecosystems of the United States and Pacific Freely Associated States: 2008 was released to the public on July 7, 2008 at the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. This NOAA report attempts to provide a comprehensive picture of the status of shallow-water coral reef ecosystems in the United States and Pacific Freely Associated States.

The URL below has links to download pdfs of the entire report as well as of individual chapters. The chapters covering Hawaii and other Pacific areas are:
• Hawaii
• Northwest Hawaiian Islands
• American Samoa
• Pacific Remote Island Areas
• Marshall Islands
• Federated States of Micronesia
• Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands
• Guam
• Palau

More than 270 researchers contributed to the 569-page report and each section team was asked to include information on: 1) the types and distribution of the reefs in the area; 2) the key threats for the location; 3) existing monitoring programs; 4) data generated by current monitoring programs regarding water quality, benthic habitats, and associated biological communities; 5) current conservation and management actions; and 6) the overall status of the coral reefs in the location and recommendations for future research and management.

This is the third in a series of assessments of the current status of 15 U.S. coral reef ecosystems in the Pacific, Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico; links to the 2002 and 2005 reports are also available at this URL.

Report available at
http://ccma.nos.noaa.gov/ecosystems/coralreef/coral2008/welcome.html

Journal of Extension

From their Web site:

You now have two ways to subscribe to the Journal of Extension (JOE)–a new option, subscribing to the RSS feed, and subscribing to the e-mail list.

RSS Subscription

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a format for content distribution. The JOE RSS feed includes the title, author listing, abstract, and link to the complete article for each article in the current JOE issue. The feed is updated when a new issue is released (six times per year).

E-Mail Subscription

By adding your e-mail address to our subscriber’s list, you will receive e-mail notification of each new issue of JOE as it becomes available. The subscribers’ list is used only to send new issue announcements once every two months.

Visit <http://www.joe.org/subscribe.html> to arrange to keep up with JOE the way you want to.