It's National Library Week-- Do you know where your librarian is?

Since 1958, the nation has designated a week in April as National Library Week. Since we're in the midst of it now, I thought I'd talk about one relatively new aspect of the UMass Libraries-- the Peripatetic Librarian.

As more library resources become available electronically, some people think they don't need librarians to get the information they need. Of course, that's not true. Nevertheless, some people avoid coming to the library for help. Librarians being who they are, then, ride out to the rescue.

At UMass, I'm aware of four outside-the-library places where you might find us waiting for your questions, or maybe just reminding you by our presence that you have a question.

• Mike Davis, Library Liaison to the Isenberg School of Management, holds office hours there in Room 212 every Tuesday from 10:30am to 12:30pm.

• Barbara Morgan, Liaison to Legal Studies, Political Science, STPEc, and Steve McGinty, Liaison to the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, as well as Sociology, SDPPS, TEC, Economics, Educational Policy, and Research & Administration (whew!) can be found just outside the Thompson Cafe each Wednesday and Thursday from 11:30am to 12:30pm.

• Maxine Schmidt (that'd be me), Liaison to Biology, Environmental Sciences, Geosciences, and Resource Economics-- in the Blue Wall every Wednesday from 10am to noon.

• Madeleine Charney, Liaison to the Stockbridge School of Agriculture and Landscape Architecture, is currently on maternity leave, but normally holds hours in Hills.

So stop by one of these outposts and say hi sometime, and look for more of us in more places outside the library. Of course, you're always welcome in the Good Ole Library too!

New Subject Guides

The UMass Library subject guides are getting a makeover! We are using an application called LibGuides that gives us a lot more flexibility with content and style. We can include rss feeds from blogs and news sources, embed videos and even a chat widget, so you can "chat" with us live when we're online. You can also comment on the guides and their contents. The guides we have up so far look really good, and we'd love your feedback. Check them out at http://umass.libguides.com
There are four ISEL-related ones at present. You can also find some at the appropriate pages on the new Research Database Locator

New Journal Ranking Source

BioMed Central's blog has a piece on "SCImago – a new source of journal metrics offering a wealth of free data on open access journals." The importance of a specific journal is of interest to anyone publishing their research - obviously, one would prefer to publish in a journal with the greatest impact. Thomson Scientific, as the first to create this metric using Citation Indexing with their Journal Citation Ranking (JCR), has long had the dominant role, but many have criticized their methodology, and been frustrated by their slowness to include new journals. Also, this service is costly.

A few companies have challenged Thomson Scientific's monopoly (Scopus and Google Scholar, for example) and now SCImago has joined the fray. It uses data from Scopus, and gives weights to the citations based on their sources - a citation from a lesser-read journal will have lower impact on the rating than one from Nature or Science.

Thanks, to Jim Craig for bringing this to our attention.

Two-sided printing available at ISEL

In response to numerous requests from our patrons, printing on both sides of the sheet is available from public workstations.

Two points:

Send the print job through as a two-sided print request - you cannot choose it after sending it the printer. This means you shouldn't just click on the printing icons that send the print job directly to the printer without bringing up a dialog box. In the printing dialog box, select Properties; this usually brings up Printing Shortcuts, where you can chose Two-Sided Printing.

The cost is the same as whether you use one or two sheets of paper to print two sides. The only benefit to you is that it uses less paper.

Any questions, please ask the library staff.

Wireless access vastly improved at ISEL

Recently, new nodes for wireless network access were installed and activated by OIT. We now have much better signal strength on all four floors, though perhaps the best signal is on the first, second, and third floors. There are no actual nodes in the basement, but you can get signal there from the 1st floor nodes.

Come and check it out!

RefWorks using science databases

Learn how to use RefWorks focusing on science databases such as Agricola, PubMed and Web of Science.

Using RefWorks with Science Databases - Integrated Sciences and Engineering Library

Tuesday, April 15, 2008, 11:15 am-12:15 pm
Wednesday, April 16, 2008, 4:00-5:00 pm

The workshops will cover the basics: how to access RefWorks, search catalogs, import references from library databases, retrieve and manage citations, and create bibliographies according to various citation styles (e.g. MLA or APA). They will also cover more in-depth applications: how to manipulate your database, use Write-N-Cite to add parenthetical references to your work, use RefShare to share folders with other researchers, and other questions you may have.

To register email refworks@library.umass.edu

DIGITAL QUADRANGLE SERIES COLLOQUIUM

A press release from the UMass Amherst Libraries:

DIGITAL QUADRANGLE SERIES COLLOQUIUM

“Engaging the Web for Scholarship, Pedagogy, and Publication”


Amherst, MA – UMass Amherst will host “Engaging the Web for Scholarship, Pedagogy, and Publication” on March 28, 2008, from 9:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. in Campus Center Room 163C at UMass Amherst. Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan, associate professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia, will give the keynote talk “The Googlization of Everything.” The program will also include a faculty panel presentation of Scholarworks implementations, remarks on the Carnegie Classification on Community Engagement, and a facilitated luncheon that will result in action plans for keeping author rights and publishing in an online environment, addressing concerns about Intellectual Property (IP), and adopting ScholarWorks. Dr. Vaidhyanthan’s talk and faculty presentations are open to the public. The roundtable lunch portion of the program is open to UMass Amherst faculty and staff only.

A cultural historian and media scholar, Siva Vaidhyanathan is the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001); and The Anarchist in the Library: How Peer-to-Peer Networks are Transforming Politics, Culture, and Information (Basic Books, 2003). He is co-editor of Rewiring the “Nation”: The Place of Technology in American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). After five years as a professional journalist, Vaidhyanathan earned a PhD in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Vaidhyanathan has taught at the University of Texas, Wesleyan University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and New York University. He is currently associate professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia and writing his next book, The Googlization of Everything, a critical examination of Google's disruptive effect on culture, commerce, and community, on a public website produced by the Institute.

Scholarworks@UMassAmherst (http://www.scholarworks.umass.edu) is one way the campus supports the open communication of the scholarship at UMass Amherst. Over the past several years, UMass Amherst has made a significant investment in ScholarWorks to enable the shift to a digital culture. Using this digital technology and the web has its benefits but its use also raises many questions including, "Have I been losing the rights to my own work?" "How can I keep my author rights?" and, "If my work isn't online, is it invisible?"

ScholarWorks provides the infrastructure and support for creating access and dissemination vehicles and providing the long-term preservation of research and scholarly products. Critical for this transformation are faculty awareness of author and IP rights, alternative digital publishing platforms, and knowledge of how to use ScholarWorks. The final portion of this program, a facilitated roundtable discussion for UMass Amherst faculty and staff, will be devoted to this awareness. Participants will leave with actionable plans for their use of ScholarWorks.

This third annual Digital Quadrangle Series Colloquium is sponsored by the UMass Amherst Libraries, Office for Research, Center for Teaching, the Graduate School, and new this year, the Office of Outreach.

For more information, contact Marilyn Billings, 545-6891, mbillings@library.umass.edu, or Marla Michel, 577-0092, marla@research.umass.edu, or visit http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dq/. Faculty RSVP is requested to Marilyn Billings by Wednesday, March 19, 2008.

Indigenous maps safeguard territories - an article from an environmental research newswire.

Indigenous people know their own territory best, and if they can create a map which includes all the places that are important to them, it is a powerful tool when working with corporations.

This article comes from a useful environmental newswire, Environmental Research Web.

Near Arctic, Seed Vault Is a Fort Knox of Food

An article from the New York Times this Leap Year day, discussing the establishment of a formal network of seed banks.

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

A vault buried under the permafrost in Norway has begun to receive millions of seeds, an effort to save the genetic legacy of vanishing plants.

Ten Worst Jobs in Science 2007 - from Popular Science magazine

Popular Science's annual bottom-10 list, in which they salute the men and women who do what no salary can adequately reward.

National Science Debate

A group of scientists, educators, government officials, business leaders and other prominent people in the US have called for Science Debate 2008. The goal is to get the presidential candidates to talk about their views on science and technology policy, environmental issues, and medicine and health issues. You can read about the beginnings of the effort here. There are lists of supporters, both individual and institutional, on the website, and you can add your name to the list as well.

Spring Semester RefWorks Workshops

If you don't use a citation manager, you're working waaay too hard. It's a very easy and convenient way to store and format all of your references-- books, journal articles, websites, etc. The Library has made RefWorks is available to everyone at UMass, for the entire time you're here. It's a web-based citation manager, so you can access your bibliographies from your room or your office, or Baltimore or Barcelona. Formatting options for the most commonly used styles in academia are included. There's even a Write-n-Cite feature, which allows you to insert a placeholder for a reference into your paper as you're writing, and formats the in-text references as well as your bibliography.

Here's the schedule for this semester:

Tues 2/12, 9:30-10:30
Tues 3/11, 11:30-12:30
Thurs 3/27, 2:30-3:30
Wed 4/9, 2:30-3:30
All workshops will be held in the Calipari Room on the Main Floor of Du Bois Library. You can get more info here.

If none of these times work for you, you can also register for the RefWorks webinars (taught by the RefWorks folks, not UMass librarians). Go to the RefWorks website and, down on the bottom right, choose the topic that suits you.

Journal Science Returns to JSTOR

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and JSTOR have reached an agreement reinstating the journal Science in the online journal archive. The journal’s decision to withdraw its affiliation last summer was met with much criticism by librarians and others in the field.

New Public Access Law

For the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency. This week President Bush signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764) which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research.

Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed articles into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. Full text articles will be publicly available and searchable in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.

It is hoped that open access will make scientific results more readily available and ultimately facilitate the advancement of scientific knowledge. "This policy will directly improve the sharing of scientific findings, the pace of medical advances, and the rate of return on benefits to the taxpayer,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).

More information can be found at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/

Questioning the validity of journal impact factors

In a recent editorial in the Journal of Cell Biology the executive editors of The Journal of Cell Biology and The Journal of Experimental Medicine joined with the executive director of the Rockefeller University Press to test the validity of data associated with journal impact factors. For those unfamiliar with the calculation it is a measure of the number of cites to recent articles compared to the number of recent articles for a given period. In other words, the impact factor for a given year measures the average number of times a paper published in the previous two years was cited during the year in question.

For example, the journal impact factor for the journal Nature is reported to be 26.681 calculated from the following data:

Cites in 2006 to articles published in:
2005 = 25820
2004 = 26022
Sum = 51842

Number of articles published in:
2005 = 1065
2004 = 878
Sum = 1943

Calculation = Cites to recent articles / Number of recent articles = 51842 / 1943 = 26.681

The authors of the editorial tried to replicate the journal impact factors from data supported by Thomson Scientific (owners of the Web of Science) and were unable to report the same results. This puts into question the data supplied by Thomson Scientific and the overall validity of journal impact factors. One wonders if journal impact factors should be given the importance that they are within the scientific community given the fact that they might be calculated from suspect data.

Short and Snappy Author Rights Colloquy

For Science Faculty and Graduate Students who are publishing or preparing to publish their research, an important upcoming event:

Short and Snappy Author Rights Colloquy
Thursday, November 29
12:00 - 1:30 p.m.
Gunness Student Center Conference Room, Marcus Hall

Learn why keeping the copyright to your published work can give you more freedom to use and expose your own research.

Lunch will be provided!

To register, email rreznikz@library.umass.edu

SPIE Digital Library just added to the UMass Amherst collection

SPIE, for those who may not know, is an international society advancing an interdisciplinary approach to the science and application of light. The name originated from the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers, but like many groups these days, the society changed its name and it's focus has evolved and grown, but the acronym remains.

Their Digital Library is now available to UMass Amherst patrons through the library's website - through the catalog or the databases.

From SPIE's website:

The SPIE Digital Library is the most extensive resource available on optics and photonics, providing unprecedented access to more than 230,000 technical papers from SPIE Journals and Conference Proceedings from 1990 to the present. More than 17,000 new research papers are added annually.

Contents of the SPIE Digital Library

Proceedings of SPIE: Starting at Volume 1200 (1990)*

Optical Engineering: Starting at Volume 29 (1990)

Journal of Electronic Imaging: Starting at Volume 1 (1992)

Journal of Biomedical Optics: Starting at Volume 1 (1996)

Journal of Micro/Nanolithography, MEMS, and MOEMS: Starting at Volume 1 (2002)

Journal of Applied Remote Sensing: Starting at Volume 1 (2007)

Journal of Nanophotonics: Starting at Volume 1 (2007)

* Some Proceedings volumes are not available in the SPIE Digital Library as SPIE does not have electronic rights to this material. Click here for a listing of those volumes.

Aerial photos in the Library's Map Collection

The Library has acquired an extensive collection of aerial photographs-- approximately 24,000 in all-- of the Massachusetts landscape, used for almost 50 years to map land use and land use change in the Commonwealth. Initiated by Forestry Professor Emeritus William P. "Mac" MacConnell ’43, Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to be completely mapped in this fashion. The project became the foundation for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's National Wetlands Inventory. The collection can be used in the Library's Map Collection on the 2nd floor of Du Bois.
For a couple of years while I was in grad school at UMass, I worked with the MacConnell maps, digitizing land use change. I was fascinated with the process and the photos. My supervisors then, Kate Jones (now at the Franklin Regional Council of Governments GIS) and David Goodwin (now at the Massachusetts Dept. of Conservation and Recreation's Forestry Management Program), told me about their long histories analyzing the photos with stereoscopes (also on display in the Map Collection). They related the history of The Raccoon Wars, which began with a prank that involved painting the black eyepieces of the stereoscopes with black ink, so that the user would finish her or his work with dark rings around the eyes. Ever since, I've been waiting to use that tactic.

UMass Amherst - $9.2 million in NSF grants

As blogged on the www.masslive.com site (click on the title to go to the article).

Some of you will have personal knowledge about this, but as an onlooker, I was impressed with the range of these projects that got funded by the NSF. It is, I know, a competitive process.

Congratulations to those individuals and groups who have collectively shown that UMass Amherst is an institution doing interesting work (and we beat MIT - woohoo!). Here is the list of awardees as published in the Springfield Republican blog:

RESEARCH AWARDS
The following are the grants awarded by the National Science Foundation, and the person directing each of the funded projects.

Awarded to the University of Massachusetts:

$200,000 - A data collection project, Prashant Shenoy
$300,067 - A project in nanotechnology, Sigfrid Yngvesson
$316,365 - Research involving emulsified products (two or more liquids blended together, such as ice cream or mayonnaise), Michael Henson
$350,001 - A project in wireless networks, Donald Towsley
$404,132 - A project relating to the search of vast archives of data or information, W. Bruce Croft
$442,000 - Research in Internet running on light, Tilman Wolf
$513,600 - Biofuels research, George Huber
$597,503 - A project involving the teaching of science, Morton Sternheim
$600,000 - Research into the transfer of data on the Internet, Arunkumar Venkataramani
$979,098 - Research into the teaching of science, John Clement
$1.5 million - Renewable energy research, Sankaran Thayumanavan
$3 million - A project in cellular engineering training, Susan C. Roberts
To Smith College:
$125,240 - Computer science research, Ruth Haas
$315,760 - Research in biogeochemistry, Elizabeth Jamieson

Cells lead astray

The New York Times has an article in today's Science section about lead, and its historical uses. It's not hard to see why people were so enthusiastic about lead in ancient times-- it's easy to find and recover, it has a low melting point, and it's malleable. Lead also gets cozy with sulfur, which is why there are so many health problems associated with it. Some of these problems were known by Hippocrates in 400 BC, but lead was so useful that people weren't ready to do without it. The most significant problems are experienced by young children, whose brain development is affected by lead molecules which disrupt some proteins by seeking out sulfur. Other animals are also affected by ingesting lead.
In my previous career in public health, I became a Certified Lead Inspector for housing. In New England, with its older housing stock, lead paint is a persistent issue. While Europe banned the residential use of lead paint in the 1920s, the US didn't until the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a regulation in 1978 prohibiting its use in residential settings. At first, I thought that flaking lead paint was the big problem, since kids often eat the flakes (Apparently, lead lends a sweet taste to substances, which is why the Romans used it to treat wine.), but it is also present in house dust as a result of friction on window sashes and door jambs. Lead from gasoline contributed to the environmental load as well.
Here are some UMass Library databases you can search for more information on lead in the environment and it's effects on humans and other animals. Remember that you may have to use your OIT login information if you want to connect from off-campus.
CAB Abstracts
Engineering Village
Environment Index
Food Science and Technology Abstracts
Kirk Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology
LexisNexis Environmental
PubMed: UMass Amherst subscription
Web of Science
Zoological Record
If you're interested in the biochemistry of lead, try Beilstein.