Reference & Collections Blog

Cochrane changes

"From the Canadian Cochrane Network and Centre to Cochrane Canada

Simplifying the Future

We are pleased to announce a name change to the current Canadian Cochrane Network and Centre. Effective immediately the former CCNC will now be known as Cochrane Canada.

This change is being implemented to simplify Cochrane communication efforts in Canada. Cochrane Canada encompasses the work of Cochrane across the country including: the Canadian Cochrane Centre (CCC), Review Groups, Fields, Regional sites (formerly known as Network sites) and their representatives, partner organization representatives (formerly affiliates), review authors, consumers – anyone working to further the goals of Cochrane in Canada.

The work and mandate of those within Cochrane Canada remain the same; the terminology changes were made out of communications concerns. Many have expressed difficulty with the title ‘Canadian Cochrane Network and Centre’. This is likely because ‘Network’ does not have an obvious defined meaning in this instance. Removing ‘Network’ allows our audience to focus on the important element – Cochrane. Cochrane Canada is easily explained as anyone who is a part of Cochrane in Canada. Similarly, the term ‘Network sites’ was not indicative of its true meaning, and therefore we believe ‘Regional sites’ is a better representation.

These changes fall under the effort of the Strategic Plan to raise the profile of Cochrane – in Canada. We hope to raise our profile and become more recognizable by simplifying the language to help Canadians identify us.
We have begun working the new language into communications materials and written reports, including the recent funding opportunity. You will see the new terminology more often as we begin to replace older products.

As a result of these changes, we will now use the web address ccc.cochrane.org to visit our website. However, the former address, ccnc.cochranre.org, remains functioning to accommodate the changeover.

Other changes of note include the Health Equity Field becoming the Campbell & Cochrane Equity Methods Group. We will also officially welcome the Upper Gastrointestinal and Pancreatic Diseases Review Group into Cochrane Canada in 2010.

Thank you for all your hard work and dedicated support. It is because of the members of Cochrane Canada that we have succeeded in our past endeavours. We look forward to continuing to work with you over the next five years and beyond.

Sincerely,

Jeremy Grimshaw
Director, Canadian Cochrane Centre
Cochrane Canada"

PubMedCentral Canada now up and running

PubMedCentral Canada is now up and available for searching, at:
http://pubmedcentralcanada.ca/

Canadian H1N1 Information

The best Canadian source of H1N1 information, I think, is available at http://hlwiki.slais.ubc.ca/index.php/H1N1_%28Human_Swine_Flu%29_in_Canada_-_Information_Sources.

PubMed Central Canada (PMC Canada)

PubMed Central repository will open new pathway to Canadian health research

July 06, 2009, Ottawa, Ontario
http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/news/nrc/2009/07/06/pubmed-cisti.html

Accelerating the development of discoveries and innovations and facilitating their adoption through free and open access to research findings. This is the aim of an important new initiative that will provide researchers and knowledge users free access to a vast digital archive of published health research at their desktop and connect them to an emerging international network of digital archives anchored in the United States.
The National Research Council's Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) have announced a three-way partnership to establish PubMed Central Canada (PMC Canada). PMC Canada will be a national digital repository of peer-reviewed health and life sciences literature, including research resulting from CIHR funding. This searchable Web-based repository will be permanent, stable and freely accessible.

"PMC Canada is a powerful tool that will help researchers build upon one another's work and speed up the discovery and innovation process to address important health challenges," says Dr. Ian Graham, Vice-President of Knowledge Translation at CIHR. "It will provide quick and easy access to a much broader audience, increasing the value and application of CIHR-funded research."

PMC Canada supports CIHR's recently announced Policy on Access to Research Outputs, under which grant recipients are required to ensure that their peer reviewed publications are freely accessible online within six months of publication. PMC Canada will include a manuscript submission system to enable CIHR-funded researchers to deposit articles that are accepted for publication by peer reviewed journals.

PMC Canada builds on the successful PubMed Central (PMC) archive developed by the US National Library of Medicine and will join UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) as a member of the broader PMC International network. This network enables national versions of PMC to share content, and will make much of PubMed Central and UKPMC content accessible through PMC Canada. The network uses software developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), the division of NLM that created and administers PMC.
"We are pleased that Canada is joining the PMC International family, further strengthening this effort to share life sciences literature across the world,"
says NLM Director Donald A.B. Lindberg, M.D. "International collaboration and data sharing has proven to be a strong driver of scientific advance, with projects such as the GenBank international DNA sequence database propelling new discoveries at a rapid pace. The addition of Canada as a PMCI member should similarly aid the progress of science, while also enhancing public access to the results of research that affects health and health care."

CIHR will supply the funds for PMC Canada and NRC-CISTI will contribute its technological expertise to build the infrastructure and manage the repository.

"NRC is proud to be a partner in an initiative that will create a permanent archive for Canadian health research and increase access for all Canadians,"
says Dr. Pierre Coulombe, President, NRC. "This initiative is an important step forward in NRC-CISTI's efforts to collaborate with others to provide Canadians with seamless and permanent access to scientific, technical and health information."

The initial release of PMC Canada, to be available in fall 2009, will include a basic bilingual interface, a manuscript submission system for CIHR researchers and a bilingual help desk. An advisory committee of Canadian health researchers and other stakeholders will guide PMC Canada's future development.

UBC's Digital Tattoo Project

UBC Librarian Sheryl Adam is one of the creators of a new project called Digital Tattoo. The interactive website provides a practical guide for protecting privacy online. The Globe & Mail published an article about the project on Dec.24/08. Both the website and the article are worth checking out.

Mini Workshops

Mini-workshops explored in this article- I love this idea!

http://www.teachinglibrarian.org/weblog/2008/08/mini-workshops.html

Medpedia

Announced yesterday - "The Medpedia Project is an extraordinary global effort to collect, organize and make understandable, the world’s best information about health, medicine and the body and make it freely available on the website Medpedia.com. Physicians, health organizations, medical schools, hospitals, health professionals, and dedicated individuals are coming together to build the most comprehensive medical resource in the world that will benefit millions of people every year.

In association with Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, Berkeley School of Public Health, University of Michigan Medical School and other leading global health organizations, the Medpedia community seeks to create the most comprehensive and collaborative medical resource in the world. Medpedia will serve as a catalog, database, and learning tool about health, medicine and the body for doctors, scientists, policymakers, students and citizens that will improve medical literacy worldwide."

http://www.medpedia.com/index.php/Main_Page

Chair in e-librarianship

YorkU creates a new (endowed) Chair in E-Librarianship.

Read more at http://www.yorku.ca/alumni/alumnimatters/june-08/am_june-08_e-librarianship.php

Interesting visual search engine

I just came across an interesting search engine called: Search me. It searches the whole net, not just images, but delivers the results in a novel way. Try entering a variety of different topics in the search box then scroll through the results like video or photo clips. Have fun!

ArticleFirst & WorldCat link

You all probably knew this already, but I just discovered this morning that if you are looking at a serial record in WorldCat, there is a link to Browse Journal (available issues ArticleFirst). For the title I was trying to find indexing for, Article First was NOT listed as an indexing/abstracting source in online Ulrich's. I was most interested to see this link, as I never noticed it before. I must truly be a library geek.

Globe & Mail report card

Check out UVic's "marks" at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/education

Safari Books - GRE and more

Safari Tech online books has more than just computer books.. 3 exam prep guides available now full text online. I note we have 2 books on order for the GRE and GMAT test and nothing in Main for LSAT. Law has a few older LSAT books.

eg

GRE Exam Prep
by Steven W. Dulan - Advantage Education
Publisher: Pearson Education
Pub Date: November 16, 2006
Print ISBN-10: 0-7897-3594-6
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-7897-3594-2
Pages: 368
Start Reading

Table of Contents
• Index

Overview

The GRE® Exam Prep 2007 Edition provides comprehensive coverage of the topics and test formats that you must master for the GRE exam. The book takes each topic and provides numerous examples, explanations, strategies, and tips for preparing and scoring high on this valuable graduate school entrance exam. In addition to in-depth tutorial and test preparatory coverage of all GRE topic areas, the book has expanded topical review coverage on the Quantitative section of the GRE exam, for many students find they don't understand this topic very well. The GRE® Exam Prep 2007 Edition also offers specific strategies for answering various question types, psychology of testing, and understanding scores. Four full practice exams with detailed answers on all topics areas plus a web-delivered exam with more questions and detailed answers give you many opportunities to hone your skills for the exam. All 2006 changes are included as well as tips on preparing mentally for test day.

LSAT® Exam Prep
by
Publisher: Exam Cram
Pub Date: October 25, 2006
Print ISBN-10: 0-7897-3595-4
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-7897-3595-9
Pages: 528

GMAT® Exam Prep
by Steven W. Dulan; Faculty of Advantage Education
Publisher: Exam Cram
Pub Date: September 20, 2006
Print ISBN-10: 0-7897-3593-8
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-7897-3593-5
Pages: 432
Start Reading

Table of Contents
• Index

Overview

The GMAT Exam Prep provides a comprehensive text for studying for the GMAT test. This book takes each topic and provides numerous examples, explanations, strategies, and tips for both understanding the content of knowledge that the test covers, as well as in helping in preparing the student to score higher on the test. In addition to coverage of all topic areas, the book has an expanded topical review coverage on the Quantitative section, due to the fact that many students find they don't understand this topic very well. The book also offers specific strategies for answering various question types, reviews the psychology of testing, and provides a guide for understanding scores. Finally the book has four full practice exams with detailed answers to all questions covering all topics areas.

National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs

Published since 1877, Biographical Memoirs are brief biographies of deceased National Academy of Sciences members, written by those who knew them or their work. These biographies provide a personal and scholarly view of the lives and work of America's most distinguished scientists and a biographical history of science in the United States.

"NAS Makes 150 Years of Scientific History Available Online @ http://www.nasonline.org/site/PageServer?pagename=MEMOIRS_A
Over the next several months, the Academy will publish its entire collection of Biographical Memoirs online. Although memoirs published since 1995 have been freely available online, over 900 memoirs published prior to 1995 were available previously only through archives and libraries. Among the additional 500 memoirs published recently online are those of famed naturalist Louis Agassiz; Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; Thomas Edison; Alexander Graham Bell; noted anthropologist Margaret Mead; and psychologist and philosopher John Dewey. More memoirs will be published regularly until the entire collection is available online."

Peeps! and other videos etc. I mentioned at the retreat

Here are links to some of the easy socialnetworkingsite projects that I mentioned yesterday - I love the use of Peeps, but I've seen similar projects using barbies, sock monkeys, people in gorilla suits, and more.

Classic Peeps library tour

Peeps does family history

Peeps learn to use microfilm

Otis library tour

Adventures of Super Librarian (ad for public library)

Calgary Public Library's award winning ad

Marshall Library reference video

UWO libraries ad answers the age old question, What do library staff do during the summer? (Stars an old friend...)

U of T robarts Library (caution, it's LOUD)

CIHR publications now open access!

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has just issued this announcement:
Open access to health research publications: CIHR unveils new policy http://www.irsc.gc.ca/e/34851.html

Les Institutes de recherche et santé du Canada à publié pour diffusion immédiate:
Libre accès aux publications sur les recherches en santé : Les IRSC lancent une nouvelle politique http://www.irsc.gc.ca/f/34851.html

Policy details in brief:

"grant recipients must make every effort to ensure that their peer- reviewed research articles are freely available as soon as possible after publication...by depositing the article in an archive, such as PubMed Central or an institutional repository, and/or by publishing results in an open access journal. A growing number of journals already meet these requirements and CIHR-funded researchers are encouraged to consider publishing in these journals...grant recipients are now required to deposit bioinformatics, atomic, and molecular coordinate data, as already required by most journals, into the appropriate public database immediately upon publication of research results.. Researchers are encouraged to make use of the SHERPA RoMEO Publisher Copyright Policies and Self-Archiving service to determine whether publishers policies are compliant with the policy, and the policy clarifies that article processing fees for open access publishing are an eligible expense under the Use of Grant Funds".

Notable quotes from the Press Release:
Timely and unrestricted access to research findings is a defining feature of science, and is essential for advancing knowledge and accelerating our understanding of human health and disease," stated Dr. Alan Bernstein, President of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. "With the development of the internet it is now feasible to disseminate globally and easily the results of research that we fund.
As a publicly-funded organization, we have a responsibility to ensure that new advances in health research are available to those who need it and can use it - researchers world-wide, the public and policy makers.

This open access policy will serve as a model for other funding agencies, said Dr. James E. Till of the Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto [Chair of the Task Force that developed this policy]. The policy will leverage taxpayers' investment by accelerating research and by fostering its broader application.

My comments on the CIHR policy as yet another example of Canadian Leadership in the Open Access Movement:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2007/09/canadian-institutes-of-
health-research.html

The library community in Canada can be proud of our participation, through strong pro-open access-submissions, in the consultation leading to this policy.

Librarian pop anthem

New song celebrates the 'modern librarian' - without stereotypes!

This indy pop band is having a contest - if you can identify the four books referenced in the song (and they give you the call numbers to do it) you can be in their video - they're looking for real life hipster librarians.

Addy is a real librarian, related to someone in the band.

ADDY WILL KNOW -

I couldn’t think of that book that I read

The one where the characters all wind up dead

Or maybe it was only just one guy

Who bit the dust in the ending

Wanted to take in a film about birds

It’s a good thing to know some of the words

That they’ll be using in the film

And what they really mean

but when I looked in reference

I couldn’t find the section

I thought that I could find it on my own

Addy will know (4x)

I needed an article on global war

The chance of us screwing this up even more

I wanted to know who the general was

That made us drop the H-Bomb

There was guy who was whack in the head

Never made any money and when he was dead

A hundred umbrellas were found inside

Who was this guy

Addy will know (4x)

But when I tried to find him,

In the music section

I got lost and had to double back

[bridge]

Addy will know (8x)

I couldn’t think of that book that I read

The one where the characters all wind up dead

Royal Society Digital Journal Archive 1665- free trial access

Royal Society Digital Journal Archive - free online access

The Royal Society Digital Journal Archive, dating back to 1665 and containing in excess of 60,000 articles, will be free online from 1 September to 30 November 2007. During this three month period, librarians and academics will be able to access and download any article from arguably the most comprehensive publishing resource in science.

http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/index.cfm?page=1373

New climate maps on Atlas of Canada

The Atlas of Canada recently released a series of climate maps showing precipitation and temperature. View them at: http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/maps/environment/climate

Choose the largest map size for best view, and use the zoom-in tool to compare places relatively close together. The maps clearly show the sometimes-subtle climate differences between Victoria and Vancouver.

eGranary - How cool is this?

from a list I subscribe to...
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 12:28:10 -1000
From: Liz Bryson
Subject: good project - the egranary digital library : FWD [Piala] FW: [PLGNET-L:10956]
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

good project - the egranary digital library

Hi folks.

I've worked a little bit with the problems of delivering both internet
services and info to less developed countries - the infrastructure problems
are obvious, and legion.

Via my alumni mag, which apparently is NOT online -- I found this great
project, started by an education alum at the University of Iowa:
http://www.widernet.org/digitalLibrary/index.htm

the "egranary".

It's an 'internet in a box', essentially an intranet for 3rd world
universities who do not have broadband. It's run by volunteers and
librarians.

The eGranary Digital Library provides millions of digital educational
resources to institutions lacking adequate Internet access. Through a
process of garnering permissions, copying Web sites, and delivering them to
intranet Web servers INSIDE our partner institutions in developing
countries, we deliver millions of multimedia documents that can be instantly
accessed by patrons over their local area networks at no cost...There are
over 5,000,000 documents in the eGranary Digital Library, all of them
searchable using our powerful, built-in search engine.

The digital library project represents hundreds of hours by volunteer
librarians and includes the collective contributions of hundreds of authors
and publishers. These individuals have generously given of their time and
resources to create greater learning opportunities for tens of thousands of
scholars in Africa.

the website's kind of clunky, but like most midwestern ideas, it's a pretty
clear and simple idea

Why the eGranary Digital Library?
Many of the developing country universities, schools, clinics and
hospitals with whom we work have no Internet connection. Those that are
connected to the Internet have such limited bandwidth that they cannot offer
free Web browsing to the majority of their staff and students. Bandwidth in
Africa can cost up to 100 times what it costs in the U.S., so for some
organizations a slim Internet connection can consume the equivalent of
one-half their operating budget.

Even for those individuals who have the wherewithal to pay for Web
browsing, the experience can be frustratingly slow -- it can take hours to
download a single audio file.

How Does the eGranary Help?
The eGranary Digital Library addresses these issues by moving a
large assortment of educational Web documents onto the subscriber's local
area network (LAN) so that the documents can be made available to everyone
within the institution freely and instantly.

We "store the seeds of knowledge" inside the institution where they
can be accessed even when the Internet connection is broken.

In a sense, we say, "If you can't come to the Web, we'll bring the Web
to you!"

Here's how we do it..

1. Identify Web sites with rich educational content
Since the advent of the World Wide Web, millions of individuals and
organizations have digitized their information to share the general public
over the Internet. Capitalizing on this phenomenon, we look for Web sites
with pertinent digitized academic information (often guided by requests of
our African partners) and add these to our "wish list."

2. Secure the author's or publisher's permission to copy their
materials
We contact authors and publishers via email and simply ask, "can we
replicate your materials for educational institutions in developing
countries with inadequate Internet connectivity?" Depending on the subject
area, we receive from 50% to 90% positive responses. (So far, librarians
lead the pack. Medical resources are harder to come by.)

3. Copy the permitted materials to a hard drive at the University of
Iowa's WiderNet Project
Using HTTrack, a Web site "scraping" software, we make a duplicate
of the permitted materials on our server. We do not change the content,
although we remove links to annoying advertisement servers and "hit"
monitors. Sometimes we copy an entire Web site, sometimes just the portions
that contain the most useful information.

4. Make copies of the collection and distribute to subscriber
universities
Using large hard disks, we deliver copies of the eGranary Digital
Library to subscribers. Most subscribers already have servers and local
area networks in place, so they simply add the eGranary hard drive to their
existing server. We work with other universities to set up their first
servers, sometimes using donated computers and software.

5. Update and redistribute hard drives as time and travel schedules
permit
We return to update our copy of each Web site on an occasional
basis. Then, taking advantage of traveler's schedules, we deliver updated
hard disks to our subscribers two or three times a year. (The hard drive is
only as big as a paperback book, so it's easy to slip into one's personal
luggage...)
We've also developed a way to use various technologies, like satellite
digital radio, to update the collection on an ongoing basis.

If you're interested - check out the website, I'm going to ask how I can
help - and I have a friend going to Ghana in 5 days, interested in seeing
about local connections.

Mary

Mary Beaty, Brooklyn
(viz.., Univ. of Iowa BEd. Univ. of Toronto MLS, if there are any other
alumni out there.)

**************************************************
To send an email to PAMnet:
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To view PAMnet Archives:
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Ms Dewey

Meet the competition, Microsoft has created a search engine called, Ms Dewey. It's entertaining... http://www.msdewey.com/

Wikipedia banned

Today's NY Times has an article on how the History Department at
Middlebury College has banned the use of wikipedia as a citable source.
Here's the link, login may be required.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/education/21wikipedia.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

-- Lon Mendelsohn
==============================================
Prof. Loren D. Mendelsohn
Chief, Science/Engineering Library
City College of New York
New York, New York 10031
Voice: (212) 650-8244 FAX: (212) 650-7626
E-mail: LMEND at CCNY.CUNY.EDU

Interesting "text similarity" biomedical search engine

" eTBLAST is a unique search engine for searching biomedical literature. Our service is very different from PubMed. While PubMed searches for "keywords", our search engine lets you input an entire paragraph and returns MEDLINE abstracts that are similar to it. This is something like PubMed's "Related Articles" feature, only better because it runs on your unique set of interests. For example, input the abstract of an unpublished paper or a grant proposal into our engine, and with the touch of a button you'll be able to find every abstract in MEDLINE dealing with your topic. No more guessing whether your set of keywords has found all the right papers. No more sorting through hundreds of papers you don't care about to find the handful you were looking for--our search engine does it for you.

When most people use PubMed to search MEDLINE they pick one or two keywords to describe their topic, then browse through a long list of results. When they find a paper that looks interesting they click on its "Related Articles", in hopes of finding more papers like that one. If they find another relevant paper, they explore it's related articles--and so on. This process of culling long lists of documents by hand makes literature searching tedious and time consuming. We make it easier for you by providing better results the first time, and then allowing you to automatically combine the papers you care about for a second round. Our "Iterate" feature allows you to checkmark the abstracts you found interesting in the first round and combine them all to create a new query. It's like rolling several Related Articles lists into one."

Go to http://invention.swmed.edu/etblast/index.shtml for more information.

web 2.0 and web ethics

Amazing short film to explain Web 2.0 - it's brilliant.

http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/archives/2007/02/07/think_library_20_as_you_watch_this.html

Watch to the end to see some of the ramifications of web 2.0 detailed in a thought provoking sort of way.

ALSO: this short article on the ethics of search engines was fascinating:
http://ethics.sandiego/edu/lmh/op-ed/google/googleethics.asp

Discussion around this article also made me wonder whether we opted in to the new Voyager upgrade that retains circ records - anybody know?

New Engineering Village Release

New Engineering Village Release

Overview of the new features and functionalities available with our February 14th product release.
The new and enhanced functionalities include:

1. Tags & Groups: a new feature enabling you to collaborate with colleagues and peers using tagged records and creating groups.

2. An improved and highly enhanced eBooks search featuring faceted results, hits highlights,and the ability to search REFEREX Engineering with other databases on Engineering Village.

3. A new, interactive help file featuring search capabilities, index and printing options in different formats.

Remember that we access COMPENDEX, INSPEC and GEOBASE via Engineering Village.

Publish, not Perish: online tutorial

I came across a great online tutorial from the U Colorado libraries on publishing in scholarly journals geared to Grad students. Check it out at http://www.publishnotperish.org/.

IEL update

Information on upgrade to the Xplore website.

We are writing to inform you that the IEEE Xplore Digital Library will
receive a major upgrade within a few weeks.

As a result of this upgrade, the display of standards in the IEEE Xplore
digital library will be significantly enhanced with:

* An improved navigation to help you find standards faster

* Clearer distinction between active, archived and superseded standards

* Availability of standards email alerts to keep you up-to-date on
standards revisions

* The option to search standards by status (i.e. active, draft, archived)

* Links to standards interpretations, errata and other related documents

* The inclusion of the 2007 National Electrical Safety Code (NESC) which
will be full-text accessible to IEL subscribers

* And the ability to search and browse over 500 draft standards in IEEE
Xplore (to access the full-text of draft standards, the purchase of an
add-on drafts package will be required)

Subscribers to the IEEE/IET Electronic Library (IEL) will benefit from all
of these enhancements but all IEEE subscribers will benefit from the
advanced browse and email alert features.

New Thomas!

The Library of Congress has released a new beta version of THOMAS, its Web site that provides access to federal legislation and related documents (http://thomas.loc.gov/beta). Users can search all of THOMAS from one search box, and there are new capabilities for sorting results and refining searches. The old THOMAS version is still available (http://thomas.loc.gov ). The library said it plans to provide access to the beta for several months as it gauges the response. RSS feeds are not yet available for the new THOMAS. The library plans to add this feature in the future. Note that, in some cases, there could be a delay of up to 1 day for the latest legislative data to be integrated into the new THOMAS search feature.

This is a list of the types of information on THOMAS and their associated coverage.

* Full text of bills and resolutions: 1989-present (101st Congress forward)
* Summary information about bills and resolutions: 1973-present (93rd Congress forward)
* Congressional record: 1989-present (101st Congress forward)
* Committee reports: 1995-present (104th Congress forward)
* Presidential nominations: 1987-present (100th Congress forward)
* Treaties: 1967-present (90th Congress forward)

Sharp's Google Search engine for

A message from David Sharp – please try his new Google Search engine for
Canadian Government documents. I will post the link on the appropriate Research Guide.

Caron

________________________________________
From: Government Information in Canada [mailto:GOVINFO@YORKU.CA] On Behalf Of David_Sharp
Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 8:27 AM
To: GOVINFO@YORKU.CA
Subject: Canadian Government documents web search engine

Hello,

A few weeks back on the AGIIG listserve, David Oldenkamp from Indiana University kindly shared information on his international documents web search engine with us. His work inspired me to try and make a similar one for Canadian documents. If you would like to take a look at what I came up with, you can find it at: http://www.library.carleton.ca/madgic/

For now, it searches on the federal level, including select crown corporations, the provincial and territorial level; as well, it searches 80 municipal sites from across Canada. (The 80 municipalities were chosen from a list of Statistic Canada’s Census Metropolitan Areas, Census Agglomerations, and Census Subdivisions for Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Apologies if I overlooked anyone.)

I would be happy to receive any feedback or suggestions for improvement, especially if you know of sites that I might have overlooked. I will also be happy to supply the code if you are interested in putting the search box on one of your pages.

All the best,

David

David Sharp
Government Publications Librarian,
Electronic Resources and Provincial Documents
Maps, Data and Government Information Centre
Carleton University Library
1125 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5B6
(613) 520-2600 ext 8198
david_sharp@carleton.ca

Greetings!

For some time now, I've been dreaming of creating an IGO web search
engine (somewhat along the lines of Google's US Government Search
http://www.google.com/ig/usgov) . Recently, I've learned of a
smattering of tools that allow you to "create your own search engine,"
so I began a little experiment to see if I could use one of these tools
to make my dream a reality. I started with two services (Swiki and
Pss!), and I just added the newly-announced "Google Custom Search
Engine" (http://www.google.com/coop/) to the mix.

This has the possibility to be a really amazing search tool for all
IGO-types because you can specify the exact URLs that you want your
search engine to search. Now you can do a search for: HIV AIDS Africa
and only get IGO results from the many many IGOs working in that area.

Please take a look at my experiment and let me know what you think!

http://www.libraries.iub.edu/index.php?pageId=4173

If you want to include the IGO Search (Google) to your webpage, then
feel free to copy and paste this code into your webpage:

Cheers!

David M. Oldenkamp
International Studies Librarian
Herman B Wells Library W-121 | 1320 E. 10th Street | Indiana
University | Bloomington, IN 47405

comparison of Web of Science, Scopus & Google Scholar

from PAMNET:
Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2006 14:30:46 -0800
From: Dana Roth
Subject: WoS, Scopus, Google Scholar / Chemical Catalog databases / Chemical Reaction Databases
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

2006 International Conference for Science & Business Information.
http://www.infonortics.com/chemical/ch06/06chempro-post.html

==============

This is a collection of 42 slides ...

Battle of the giants: a comparison of Web of Science, Scopus & Google Scholar

Gary Horrocks, Kings College, London
gary.horrocks@kcl.ac.uk

http://www.infonortics.com/chemical/ch06/slides/horrocks.pdf

Interesting Chat entry

Check out http://www.librarian.net/stax/1837 for a lively discussion of how some virtual librarians handle reference questions...

Text similarity - an alternative way to search Medline

" eTBLAST is a unique search engine for searching biomedical literature. Our service is very different from PubMed. While PubMed searches for "keywords", our search engine lets you input an entire paragraph and returns MEDLINE abstracts that are similar to it. This is something like PubMed's "Related Articles" feature, only better because it runs on your unique set of interests. For example, input the abstract of an unpublished paper or a grant proposal into our engine, and with the touch of a button you'll be able to find every abstract in MEDLINE dealing with your topic. No more guessing whether your set of keywords has found all the right papers. No more sorting through hundreds of papers you don't care about to find the handful you were looking for--our search engine does it for you.

When most people use PubMed to search MEDLINE they pick one or two keywords to describe their topic, then browse through a long list of results. When they find a paper that looks interesting they click on its "Related Articles", in hopes of finding more papers like that one. If they find another relevant paper, they explore it's related articles--and so on. This process of culling long lists of documents by hand makes literature searching tedious and time consuming. We make it easier for you by providing better results the first time, and then allowing you to automatically combine the papers you care about for a second round. Our "Iterate" feature allows you to checkmark the abstracts you found interesting in the first round and combine them all to create a new query. It's like rolling several Related Articles lists into one.

* We sort our results by relevance, while PubMed sorts by date.
* We save you the time and effort of creating a complicated query.
* We let you iterate your search over several good papers to narrow your focus.
* We provide you the full MEDLINE abstract in our results, and a link to the PubMed page.
* We can send your results straight to your email so you never lose a reference or forget where you found it.
* This absolutely free service is provided by the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. No registration necessary!

Instructions:

1. Follow the eTBLAST Search link at the top of this page.
2. Type, paste, or upload a paragraph of plain text. (Longer paragraphs get better quality results but take longer to run.)
3. If you would like a copy of your search results emailed to you, you may enter your email address. (Your address will be kept confidential.)
4. Hit the Search button. You will be shown a confirmation page, and that page will contain a link to your results page. Our Medline search generally runs in 2 minutes or less.

NEW! Our etBLAST code has been written up in Science, May 14, 2004 issue. Under NetWatch, see the topic, "TOOLS: Just the Right Words".
Read the Article in PDF format." (from http://invention.swmed.edu/etblast/index.shtml)

Chicago Manual of Style online

The Chicago Manual of Style is now online, fully searchable etc. etc.

As this is the style that the History Dept requires, might we consider an institutional subscription?

http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html

for subscription information

Royal Society Journals Available Free - till December

"Over 340 years of landmark science available for first time...The complete archive of the Royal Society journals, including some of the most significant scientific papers ever published since 1665, is to be made freely available electronically for the first time today (14th September 2006) for a two month period at www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk.

The archive contains seminal research papers including accounts of Michael Faraday's groundbreaking series of electrical experiments, Isaac Newton's invention of the reflecting telescope, and the first research paper published by Stephen Hawking.

The Society's online collection, which until now only extended back to 1997, contains every paper published in the Royal Society journals from the first ever peer-reviewed scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions in 1665, to the most recent addition, Interface.

Professor Martin Taylor, Vice President of the Royal Society and Chair of the Publishing Board, said: "The Royal Society archive is a unique source of information for practicing scientists, science historians and indeed anyone with an in interest history. The rich, varied and sometimes entertaining archive documents the earliest accounts of the seventeenth century's new experimental philosophy', through which an understanding of the natural world was acquired by experiment and observation. This provided the foundation of the modern scientific method."

The archive provides a record of some key scientific discoveries in the last 340 years, including Halley's description of his comet' in 1705, details of the double helix of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1954 and Edmond Stone's breakthrough in 1763 that willow bark cured fevers, leading to the discovery of salicylic acid and later the development of aspirin.

Some of the more obscure papers explore rudimentary prototypes of modern day technology. Trials proposed by Robert Boyle in 1665 hypothesize on the possibilities of blood transfusions, pondering "Whether a fierce dog stocked with the blood of a cowardly dog may not become more tame?". A forerunner for ventilators was also discussed in a paper by Robert Hooke in 1667 entitled "An account of an experiment made by Mr. Hook [sic], of preserving animals alive by blowing through their lungs with bellows".

The archive also contains more amusing experiments and observations such as the use of electrical conductors to cure muscle stiffness and a bizarre description of a "Very Odd Monstrous Calf" which illustrate the inquisitive nature of science's early pioneers.

Professor Taylor added: "In addition to being a valuable scientific resource, the journal archives are also a rich historical record documenting a time which is hard to imagine given the knowledge we have today."

The electronic archive contains papers documenting the discovery of new planets, the first descriptions of organisms through a microscope, and the first account of photography. Early journal papers contain fascinating descriptions of how Captain James Cook preserved the health of his crew aboard the HMS Endeavour and the astonishment of 18th century Society by the performance of a eight year-old Mozart.

The archive will be freely available online until December 2006 and, following this period, will be available as part of Royal Society journal subscription packages or alternatively on a-pay per-view basis."

Washington State Historic Newspapers Online

Check out this amazing resource: Washington's Historic Newspapers

Selected issues of five pioneer-era newspapers from washington state have been digitized and indexed - a great new primary source!

There's a link to this from the US newspapers guide... Enjoy!

US Newspaper guide now online

The US Newspapers guide is now posted with the rest of the research guides - as usual, it has a list of newspapers held at Uvic, with dates - this includes print, electronic and microforms formats.

These are now the go-to places for finding out about newspapers in our library - the print guides, published by microforms c. 1985, are out of date, I'm finding, and don't list the dates of our holdings or print indexes... so I hope you'll use mine! Also, they only list micro...

As always, the best thing to do when students as for newspapers is to ask them what date range, and what geographical location.... all else falls from the answers to those two questions.

Library Instruction Wiki

FYI - there's a "library instruction wiki" that seems worthwhile at http://instructionwiki.org/Main_Page. Check it out and contribute to it!

Evaluating Virtual Ref

http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/synchronicity/
Seeking Synchronicity: Evaluating Virtual Reference Services from User, Non-User, and Librarian Perspectives
This international study, conducted jointly by OCLC and the Rutgers School of Communication, Information and Library Studies, will

investigate factors influencing the selection and use of chat-based VRS
study user and staff perceptions of satisfaction
investigate why non-users of these services do not choose VRS
seek to develop research-based recommendations for VRS staff to increase satisfaction.
The methodology involves a combination of data collection and analytical techniques, including quantitative and qualitative approaches.

Results will be widely disseminated as the study progresses, since preliminary indications suggest that findings will be immediately relevant and useful to the LIS community.

Worldcat on the Web

Worldcat on the Web

Released August 2006 in beta form

"Where Open WorldCat inserts "Find in a Library" results within regular search engine results, WorldCat.org provides a permanent destination page and search box that lets a broader range of people discover the riches of library-held materials cataloged in the WorldCat database."

"Double Professionalism from Dean Guistini"

Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2006 15:45:06 -0700 From: Dean Giustini Subject: Double professionalism, and librarianship Hi colleagues, I'd be very interested in hearing your views. Dean Giustini UBC biomedical library ************************************************************** http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/googlescholar/archives/029306.html The New "Double Professionalism" of Academic Librarians Academic librarians are major players in the emerging knowledge economy. Increasingly, we are being asked to have a command of disparate wings of the knowledge continuum: open access, new modes of communication and publishing, digital resource discovery (and efficient organization), description and analysis of digital documents - and, information retrieval. And that's just the start! Our mastery of information trends in academe coincides with a pressure to teach; and, to be information literacy experts. I repeat the mantra to all SLAIS students: it's important you strive to be teachers. Good ones. Why is Dr. Mary Sue Stephenson such an effective teacher? Can you be an effective reference librarian, but not know how to teach? In my career, I've listened to dreadful presentations, lectures and search workshops (and even given a few). Between our work in delivering information and managing people, there is instruction. With the dumbing down (the "googlization") of reference services in our libraries, there's been a concomitant demand for teaching; librarians need to learn how to be good at it. By deepening our understanding of pedagogies, studying how user groups learn and are motivated to learn, especially in online environments, we can make a start. As a health librarian, I feel I am insufficiently informed about my teaching, and I need more training. In fact, health librarianship needs to engage in more critical dialogue around teaching. Being a librarian will one day be synonymous with being a teacher - but, for now, this is our new double professionalism. For now, we need to be both.

TransCat Plus

New website link for TransCat Plus added to the Government Publications (Canada) Research guide:

TransCat Plus is the shared online catalogue of the Canadian Transportation Libraries Network. The Catalogue includes the combined holdings of the following agencies and organizations:

Transport Canada
Transportation Development Centre
Canadian Transportation Agency
Transportation Safety Board of Canada
Transportation Association of Canada

Project Muse and JSTOR promotion

I've just gone into Project Muse and ordered a huge lot of promotional materials, of a subject specific nature, to use in my outreach/promotion activities - they offer postcards detailing resources and search tips for individual subjects.

My faculty members love getting stuff like this, so I take advantage of any free stuff when I can.

JStor, it seems, has withdrawn their subject specific resources in favour of handouts by collection, which is too bad - they used to have great things by subject. There is a page on Jstor where you can look at UVic's subscription details - which collections we have access to - I've found this very useful.

Prime Minister's News Releases

As we have seen before, when a new prime minister (or even premier) is elected, one of the first things to disappear from a government's website are the former minister's news releases.

Fortunately, there is an online arcvhie. To read the news releases from the Martin and Cretien government, go to the "Former Prime Minister's Archive"

Caron

downloadable Google poster

Google has released, in its Librarian Center, a teaching tool, "a downloadable poster with tips and tricks to help you and your patrons get better Google search results." Check it out at http://www.google.com/librariancenter/librarian_download.html.

New NLM Database

"The National Library of Medicine has released a new database, LactMed,
on drugs and breastfeeding (see note below). It is part of TOXNET
(http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov) and can be searched together with all the
TOXNET database or separately
(http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/sis/htmlgen?LACT).

LactMed: A New Database on Drugs and Lactation from the National Library
of Medicine

LactMed, a free online database with information on drugs and lactation,
is one of the newest additions to the National Library of Medicine's
(NLM) TOXNET system, a Web-based collection of resources covering
toxicology, chemical safety, and environmental health. Geared to the
healthcare practitioner and nursing mother, LactMed contains over 450
drug records. It includes information such as maternal levels in breast
milk, infant levels in blood, potential effects in breastfeeding infants
and on lactation itself, the American Academy of Pediatrics category
indicating the level of compatibility of the drug with breastfeeding,
and alternate drugs to consider. References are included, as is
nomenclature information, such as the drug's Chemical Abstract Service's
(CAS) Registry number and its broad drug class.

LactMed was developed by pharmacist who is an expert in this subject
area. Three other recognized authorities serve as the database's
scientific review panel. Ancillary resources, such as a glossary of
terms related to drugs and lactation, and breastfeeding links are also
offered. LactMed can be searched together with TOXNET's other databases
in a multi-database environment, to obtain other relevant information
about drugs. As a work in progress, LactMed will continue to expand
with additional drugs and be enhanced with other substances, such as
industrial chemicals and radiation."

Microsoft Academic Search

Here's an interesting post from Dean Giusitini's Google Scholar blog at Ubc. Dean attended a Microsoft meeting about their new "Academic Search" in his role as Google Scholar blogger:

"Critiquing Microsoft Live "Academic Search":

I've had e-mails from readers asking me about Microsoft Academic Search, and I can at least tell you a little bit along the lines of what's reported in PC World. (A few things are confidential until Tuesday, but not because I signed an NDA).

First, the overall concept of Microsoft Academic Search is similar to Google Scholar in that "it allows users to search across the Web for articles in academic journals, databases like PubMed and OA repositories" - and eventually it will point to print books and/ or articles available in local libraries. (To give you an overall feel, see the non-academic Microsoft Windows Live Search. Check out the cool image search, live feeds and "macros", the arrow to the right of feeds).

But Academic Search has some unique features, and is a worthy competitor for Google scholar. Time will tell whether users find it easily navigable. Here's a quick list of pros and cons (what struck me during my trip to Microsoft):

Positives:
1. Personalization - create macros to customize display (think your own portal);
2. Split screen format - search results are displayed on split screens with brief cites on a left pane; on the right pane, one full abstract is viewable at a time;
3. "Smart" scrolling - endless scrolling means no jump to next page (a negative?);
4. Slider - a slider application at top allows manipulating # of citations to review;
5. Citation importing feature - results imported in two steps into Endnote etc. (but rumours are Microsoft will have its own citation software for use within Windows);
6. Index coverage - unlike Scholar, Microsoft will be upfront about what's in MAS, including open access content. (Rumours are MAS will index Elsevier, unlike GS).
7. Document ordering via the British Library - (like Scholar).

Negatives:

1. No citation/cited by searching - no "cited by" feature is a disappointment, especially in the absence of any subject access, metathesauri, controlled vocabularies; (Microsoft does not rule out citation searching for later, however).
2. No advanced search page (yet);
3. No subject channel search (think, Google scholar advanced)
4. No field search (yet);
5. No visible/ viewable history of search queries.
6. Canadian content - to be assessed

You know how I like lists! More later on my thoughts about what "Academic Search" might mean for the future of scholarly research, and what happens to commercial databases like Dialog, EBSCO, OVID and meta-search tools like the Trip Database, or SumSearch.

Finally, I'll talk about where portals might fit into this search environment now that Microsoft is going macros/ and offering personalizable search (ie. medical, health, science, "what have you").

Gosh - what's next for scholarly research out on the open web? Do you think Yahoo or Ask.com will come up with academic search tools - Yahoo Research Search? Scholar Ask?

If you were a top exec at OVID, CSA or EBCSO, wouldn't you be a little worried about this trend? Perhaps a day will come when search will be open access; and, libraries won't get fleeced by search tool subscriptions or SU charges.
Posted by Dean at April 9, 2006 09:48 AM"

Google Scholar vs Metasearch article

FYI - interesting article. http://library.cern.ch/HEPLW/12/papers/1/

How Things are Made

This is a terrific web site that might come in handy for some of those assignments:

How Products Are Made explains and details the manufacturing process of a wide variety of products, from daily household items to complicated electronic equipment and heavy machinery. The site provides step by step descriptions of the assembly and the manufacturing process (complemented with illustrations and diagrams) Each product also has related information such as the background, how the item works, who invented the product, raw materials that were used, product applications, by-products that are generated, possible future developments, quality control procedures, etc.

Opendoar: Directory of Open Access Repositories

"University of Nottingham, UK and University of Lund, Sweden have developed a new service to help open access to research information.

OpenDOAR - the Directory of Open Access Repositories - is pleased to announce the release of its primary listing of open access archives, available from www.opendoar.org.

This classifies archives holding research papers, conference papers, theses
and other academic materials that are available as "open access". This means that anyone with an internet connection has access to this information without paying any charges. Open access to information has grown rapidly as researchers and scholars increasingly put their work on the web for free in
these repositories. Some of these archives hold material on a single subject:
others are based in universities and hold information from across many different subjects. Leading universities in the UK, Sweden, Germany, France and across Europe, Australia, India, the USA and world-wide have built an expanding international network of archives. Repositories have been built by research funders, like the US National Institutes for Health or the UK-based Wellcome Trust. There are now large numbers of archives of different sizes, composition and scope and new repositories are regularly established. Keeping track of these repositories and the range of information that they hold is a challenge.

Although most open access repositories have been designed to allow information about themselves to be gathered automatically, discrepancies can creep into the system. Therefore, each of the OpenDOAR repositories have been visited by project staff to check the information that is gathered. This indepth approach gives a quality-controlled list of repository features. In addition, while reviewing these archives, project staff are building a picture of the world-wide development of open access repositories, noting new features and directions. This information is being analysed to create the next version of the listing, with further information and categories being noted for each repository. In the meantime, the newly released list will continue to grow as new repositories are added.

The aim is to create a bridge between repository administrators and the service providers which "harvest" repositories. A typical service provider would be a
search engine, indexing the material that is held. General search often brings back too many "junk" results. Information from OpenDOAR will enable the search service to provide a more focussed search by selecting repositories that are of direct interest to the user - for example, all Australian repositories, or all repositories that hold conference papers on chemistry.

Bill Hubbard, the joint OpenDOAR manager said: "We are very pleased to launch the initial list of OpenDOAR. The range and number of repositories we are seeing coming on-stream is inspiring. We are working to classify these and produce information for search-providers, funding agencies and others, which will benefit scholars and researchers around the world. We would like to thank all of the contributors that have sent in information and suggestions."

OpenDOAR is a joint collaboration between the University of Nottingham in the UK and Lund University in Sweden. Both institutions are active in open access initiatives. Lund operates the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.DOAJ.org), which is known throughout the world. Staff at Lund University Libraries have created the initial OpenDOAR technical set-up and carried out repository review and classification.

Nottingham leads SHERPA, a partnership that has helped establish archives in 20 leading UK research universities. SHERPA also runs the SHERPA/RoMEO database, which is used worldwide as a reference for publisher's copyright policies. OpenDOAR builds on open access work done by other researchers and projects to record and list repositories. Among others, thanks go to the Public Knowledge Project, and the open access work at the universities of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Southampton.

OpenDOAR is jointly funded by four agencies, led by the international Open Society Institute (OSI). The UK higher education funding committee, JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) has provided support, along with funding from the UK-based Consortium of Research Libraries (CURL) and from SPARCEurope - an alliance of European research libraries, library organisations, and research institutions. "

New Metasearch tool: Kosmix

A colleague of mine, Dean Giustini of UBC's Biomedical Branch Library says: "Now this is a meta-search tool: http://www.kosmix.com/

All the advocating I've been doing for Google scholar? Forget it. We now have Kosmix.

Kosmix brands itself the ultimate health search - and even though in beta, I think it has enormous potential for our users. What's cool is Kosmix has $7.5 million in backing and founders - two guys named Anand and Venky - who know Google's Sergey and Larry from their days together at Stanford.

Unlike other consumer health or physician-oriented portals/vortals, Kosmix wants to index the entire web and has developed its own page-rank to list results by clustered categories (hey, can you say quasi-classification?), which is novel (MEDLINEplus does this too). Librarians will appreciate the breakdown for clinical trials, blogs, basic and expert information in the Kosmix results display.

Even in beta, this is an excellent addition to the search engine wars. Move over Google~!"

PubMed to be retooled

The National Library of Medicine is retooling its PubMed search engine....according to an article in today's Bio-IT World: http://www.bio-itworld.com/newsitems/2006/january/01-30-06-news-pubmed.

Google Librarian Newsletter launched!

The first issue of the Google Librarian Newsletter has been launched at www.google.com/librariannewsletter/1205 and focusses on how Google ranks results. Check it out!

great Current Awareness Research Guide

Hi,
Dean Giustini, one of UBC's medical librarians, has put together a great 'research guide' on Current Awareness technology alerts. See it at http://toby.library.ubc.ca/subjects/subjpage2.cfm?id=623.

Google's "Librarian Center"

"Google has launched a Librarian Center at http://www.google.com/services/librarian_center.html. From the page:

Librarians and Google share a mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. We support librarians like yourself who work each day to further that mission. This page is a first step toward improving and expanding that support.

You can sign up for quarterly e-mails for librarians about what Google's up to (but at the rate they put new stuff out, you're better off checking the blogosphere)."

Reference Questions in the Library of the Future

Here is an interesting article on reference from the Chronical of Higher Education. The September issue was devoted to library issues.

Bill

Reference Questions in the Library of the Future by W. Lee Hisle
http://chronicle.com/temp/email.php?id=bnkp88ystt3or0g6mofpjqqnlhy307ew

Google Print

If you are interested in GooglePrint you might want to look at the September issue of dLib.


http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september05/lavoie/09lavoie.html

FindArticles.com

FindArticles.com is a potentially useful source for finding the full text of articles, as I discovered yesterday. A student found an article in ERIC that we don't have, placed a request to get it from UofA, then came to the desk when her request was cancelled because the citation was apparently incomplete. I tried everything I could think of to figure out the correct citation, but no luck. The student started to figure out the kinds of things I was trying, and went away to do some searching on her own. She came back shortly after to tell me that she had found the full text of the article on this website called 'findarticles.com' and maybe I would like to know about it for future reference...

Score:
Resourceful student: 1, Determined librarian: 0 (but A for effort!)

E-LIS e-print archive for library & information science

Maybe others have already heard about this, but it's new for me: "Established in 2003, E-LIS is an international open access archive related to librarianship, information science and technology, and related disciplines."

For more information, see E-LIS : an International Open Archive Towards Building Open Digital Libraries, an article in the most recent issue of the High Energy Physics Libraries Webzine. Or go directly to E-LIS.

Canary database - Animals as Sentinels of Human Environmental Health Hazards

The Canary Database contains studies in the biomedical literature that explore the use of wildlife, domestic, and companion animals as "sentinels" for the effects of chemical, biological, and physical hazards in the environment that may be a risk to human health.

The Canary Database allows you to locate and visualize patterns in sentinel studies according to:
Exposures
Disease outcomes (animal)
Species (and types)
Study methodologies
Authors
Journals
Locations

You can browse the database by year, journal, or by methodology.

The Canary db was produced at Yale with funding support from NLM. Available at http://canarydatabase.org/

Create Gorgeous Graphs - Free!

Try the National Center for Education Statistics' "Create A Graph" at http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/Graphing/. Enter the kind of graph/chart you want, the data, fonts, colors, and save it in many different formats (PDF, SVG, PNG, JPG, EMF, or EPS). This is free, puts out better-looking graphs and charts than Word or Excel, and is easier to use. Need I say more?

New Wiki - Library Success: a best practices Wiki

A new wiki that may be of interest: http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
>From the creator, Meredith Farkas:
"This wiki was created to be a one-stop-shop for great ideas for librarians. All over the country, librarians are developing successful programs and doing innovative things with technology that no one outside of their library knows about. There are lots of great blogs out there sharing information about the profession, but there is no one place where all of this information is collected and organized.

If you've done something at your library that you consider a success, please write about it in the wiki or provide a link to outside coverage. If you have materials that would be helpful to other librarians, add them to the wiki. And if you know of a librarian or a library that is doing something great, feel free to include information about it or links to it.
Basically, if you know of anything that might be useful to other librarians (including useful websites), this is the place to put it. I hope this wiki will be a venue where people can share ideas with one another and where librarians can learn to replicate the successes of other libraries."

PubMed Changes

Author links have been added to the Abstract and Citation views of PubMed search results. If you place your cursor over a name in the author field of the Abstract or Citation display formats, you will see the mouseover instruction, "Click to search for citations by this author." See the Technical Bulletin article at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/mj05/mj05_auth_search.html
for additional information about this feature.

CHLA presentations now up on website

For those who are interested, most of the presentations from the annual Canadian Health Libraries Association conference are now available on the CHLA/ABSC 2005 Conference web site.
Please visit http://www.chla-absc.ca/2005/schedule.html to view them. All presentations have been converted to Acrobat PDF format in order to reduce their size.

UBC has a Google Scholar Blog

UBC now has a Google Scholar Blog that you may want to subscribe to. Go to http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/googlescholar/ for this blog.

Google Scholar now linked off Google home page

Google Scholar is now linked off the google.ca homepage.

A Search Engine for Acronyms

Check out this new search engine for acronyms, Acronyma .

Google Print

Check out Google Print and read

About Google Print.

One of the ways it could be used is for finding citations to an author that appear in books. Previously this was next to impossible.

historical census info

Next time you get a question concerning Historical Census Data, go beyond Historical Statistics of Canada and go in depth with these fabulous products:

Canadian historical census project (includes questions, methodologies, discussion of census taking in Canada from the earliest. Produced by a lot of people, including UVic's History Dept.

Canadian Families Project - Census data and more from 1901, 1911 with a Victoria and Island focus - very detailed. Produced by Dr. Sager and UVic's History Department.

"it is important for librarians to roll [Scholar] out to our clients and teach them about what else the library has."

Read the entire article Google in the Academic Library by Carolyn Tenopir.

Yahoo launches creative commons search

http://search.yahoo.com/cc

BoingBoing says: Yahoo has launched a Creative Commons search engine that lets you do things like search for freely reusable photos of the Empire State Building, or stories licensed for noncommerical reuse, etc. I confess that I use Google for most of my search needs, but this is both brilliant and obvious -- how is it that stodgy old Yahoo beat the tar out of Google on this one?

Libraries Doing Cool Things with iPods

It seems that IPODS are starting to take off in libraries. Read about

1)Audio Reserves To Go Program Launched
2)GOT IPOD? CHECKOUT AN IPOD @ THE LIBRARY!
3)iPod on Reserve checkout with library instruction, lectures
Since the librarians only work 8-5 M-F and the library is open additional hours, we decided to record some audio instructions for using a couple of our more popular (and complex) tools. and more...

Use of IPODS in libraries

For all you IPOD owners out there, this article from Wired magazine might be of interest. It is entitled:

Library Shuffles Its Collection

"For the past three weeks, the library ran a pilot program using the portable MP3 devices to store audio books downloaded from the Apple iTunes Music Store..."

Pew/Internet report on Search Engine Users

The Pew/Internet & American Life Project has released an interesting report on Search Engine Users. To read it go to http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Searchengine_users.pdf

something for you visual types to play with

This site allows you to put any starting URL in to a google-type search, and it'll visually map all the links from that site, and you can take it as far as you want to - personally, it hurts my brain, but I know many of you enjoy visual mapping sorts of things - enjoy!
I couldn't resist playing with this a little bit, despite myself.

http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html

The boingboing* editor says: "If we put a sophisticated interface with some dials and levers, it could really be a neat tool for exploring relationships in the blogosphere. I could imagine some cool slices that might parse this wildly growing ecosystem in interesting ways. "

*I get all my neatnewness from a BoingBoing RSS feed, at: http://www.boingboing.net

Google Scholar Enhancements

Google Scholar Enhancements
The search capabilities of Google Scholar have been enhanced. Users may now limit searches by publication title, date range, title words, and author. Up to 100 results can be viewed for each search. (From SLA newsletter)

Librarians truly are the "ultimate search engine"

"Librarians truly are the "ultimate search engine," an incredibly knowledgeable human resource far more responsive and interactive than virtual commercial ones"

Read the Boston Globe article entitled: Don't close the book on libraries