Registration is open at http://lib.tkk.fi/ifla/IFLA_Science_Portals/registration.html and the cost is 40 Euros.
This one-day program will address the ways in which national governments and organizations are dealing with the issues and challenges in disseminating scientific information created in the public sphere to meet the needs of the global community. The various portals that have been implemented and the policies that have been put in place will support the roles of the science and technology librarians around the world. The portals affect their ability to provide efficient and comprehensive access to important sources of scientific information.
Keynote speakers include: Dr. Howard Alper, Chair, Canada Science, Technology and Innovation Council Mr. Thomas Lah, Chief Biologist for Information, United States Geological Survey Biological Informatics Office and Co-Chair, Science.gov Alliance. Wrap-Up: Mr. Richard Akerman, Technology Architect, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI).
The program is sponsored by the IFLA Science and Technology Libraries Section (STS) and the Government Information & Official Publications Section (GIOPS).
If you have any questions, please contact Julia Gelfand (jgelfand @ uci.edu), Applied Sciences & Engineering Librarian, UC Irvine
CAS Offering Web Access to SciFinder]]>Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society, announced that it now offers web access to its SciFinder research tool. The web version is designed for situations where web access is preferred and is a convenient option to the powerful client version that is used in corporate, academic, and government organizations around the world.
This new platform is especially designed for the web and does not simply duplicate the look and feel of the current SciFinder product. The newest SciFinder experience will be offered to an expanding set of commercial, government, and academic users as the product launch proceeds throughout the year.
Scientists use SciFinder to explore research topics, browse scientific journals, and stay up-to-date on the latest scientific developments. More information about the newest version of SciFinder can be found at www.cas.org/products/scifindr/sfweb. View a demo at www.cas.org/products/scifindr/sfweb/sfwebflash.html.
Of interest is the Forums section, which has a number of Discussions found under banners such as Business and Professional, Students, Consumer, and School. The only way for these discussion forums, and for the site itself to become active and robust is to spread the word, so please do so if you can - get the word out to your chemical engineering students and faculty members. I've already posted a entry under Schools about how good it would be to see Chemical Prices included as a separate discussion topic in the forum itself, as the lack of access to current chemical prices remains a serious sore point with us in chemical engineering academia. Nonetheless, I'm happy to see ICIS Connect is now available for everyone's use. Please register and see if we can contribute to making it a useful site for our students and researchers.
]]>"Roddy MacLeod gives an overview of the latest engineering research information in 2007 and looks at what 2008 promises to offer in this discipline"Not much I can add to that summary. Thanks for the good work, Roddy!
I searched WOS (au=Hughes EW and py=1939-1945) and found 3 articles but not the 1941 article in question.
I then did an 'All Databases' search (WoS+INSPEC). This found the same 3 articles but again not the missing 1941 article.
I then searched INSPEC alone and, in addition to these 3 articles, there were two more, both from June 1941.
It seemed odd that the two additional articles in INSPEC were not retrieved in a 'All Databases' search that supposedly included INSPEC.
Thinking it might be a problem with the new WoK version (WoK4), I contacted the ISI helpdesk [ts.support.americas@thomson.com], and here is their (edited) reply:
1. The two additional articles in INSPEC are from a JACS issue that was left out of the Century of Science backfile.
2. The reason why these articles were not retrieved in an 'All Databases' search relates to a special author search set-up in Inspec to handle author names, which include periods between initials ... unlike WoS.
In Inspec, the system automatically bumps the initials together for searching. This [automatic bumping] does not transfer to 'All Databases' searches, so that 'All Databases' author searches will not retrieve INSPEC articles, if you search with 'bumped' author initials.
The moral of this tale is that you should search with both forms of an author's initials (e.g. Hughes EW or Hughes E.W.) in an 'All Databases' search, that includes INSPEC.
- Dana Roth
P.S. the missing 1941 article has been cited over 1000 times and was the subject of one of Gene Garfield's 'Citation Classics' ...
Actually all the articles from JACS Jan.-June 1941 are missing. My contact at ISI claims they are working on adding them but more complaints (hint,hint) might help get them moving faster.
]]>Improvements made since June focused on increasing the precision and consistency of keyword and author searches, increasing the system’s speed in returning results, and tweaking the language and layout. In the language and layout category, changes were being made right to the last. A generally favorable review of Scitopia by Yale University science librarian, Joseph Murphy, dated Aug. 16 and published in the October issue of The Charleston Advisor (www.charlestonco.com), had some complaints that have already been corrected. Dana Roth, chemistry librarian at the California Institute of Technology, was kind enough to do some tire-kicking of the latest Scitopia. Noting Murphy’s concerns, he found, “ The Search button is now easy to find. They have changed the Limit To pull-down menu to a complete listing of the societies, which allows selecting as many or few publishers as you want to search.”At the moment, I'm looking for Joe's article to which Barbara refers, but can't find it. (Working on that ...)]]>The primary improvement made as the system went through its beta phase involved establishing a standardized XML gateway for all partners that could handle search queries effectively by working through the search syntax problems when dealing with the different metadata structures and procedures at all the partner databases. Eric Pepper, SPIE director of publications, explained how the XML standard “adapts the query structure to the source structure before transmitting the request. The database recognizes the syntax of the query and can return it in the syntax the database expects.”
One point in the article that hit home with me was Cindi's assertion that it's time for technology to move from being the responsibility of a few to become a focus of everyone working in a library. She notes:
"It's critical to connect staff to the systems that their customers use," she says, "so that those who listen to user suggestions and experience user frustrations are empowered to improve these technological tools either directly or through collaboration with our vendors." Many library vendors have begun implementing technologies that enable user feedback and content portability; libraries must apply these same principles to their services in order to evolve.Congratulations on this article, Cindi! :-)]]>
In September 2006, ICIS Chemical Business Americas began maintaining and updating a significantly reduced price list of ~80 or so chemicals in each issue, while maintaining the 28 August 2006 list on its ICIS Students site. The bad news to report, however, is the following. On 16 July, ICIS Chemical Business Americas merged with ICIS Chemical Business (Europe, Middle East, Asia) to create one global magazine, ICIS Chemical Business. Details on this were provided here. As of the 16 July 2007 issue of the new ICIS Chemical Business, the section covering those ~80 chemical prices is no more. Two sections in the new magazine will cover some pricing information: Chemical Market Trends and Key Chemical Prices, which lists about 10-15 prices only.
ICIS Pricing is a service to which one can subscribe to get detailed reports, prices and analyses of key chemicals, including: Benzene, Toluene, Xylenes, Para-xylene, Ortho-xylene, Styrene, Naphtha, Methanol, MTBE, Ethylene, Propylene. A list of the markets on which ICIS reports indicates coverage is primarily in petrochemicals. ICIS Pricing also provides chemical price reports for "major chemical markets including olefins, aromatics, plastics, solvents and intermediates". The ICIS Pricing service is of no use to our students, of course, because it requires separate subscription funding for each report.
There is some good news: ICIS has updated some of the prices on the static page of prices from 28 August 2006 to reflect the second quarter of 2007, which will be of help to our students seeking current pricing information, and for this we are grateful to Sue Royse for her diligence. In e-mail conversation with Sue, I also learned that the NYC office of ICIS is looking into which of the ~80 chemical prices previously covered through to the 09 July 2007 issue it might be able to update on a regular basis.
The bottom line for all chemical engineering and other engineering students on campuses throughout the world, working on their capstone design projects, is that they can no longer use ICIS Chemical Business as a source for current chemical prices, at least not for the time being. This is very frustrating, but is the reality we as instructors and engineering librarians now face. There are few remaining options, one of which is to use the prices from the Sigma-Aldrich mega-site, which continues to list prices for thousands of chemicals, albeit in very small amounts. Students would need to extrapolate the price to get a figure that could be used in designing a chemical plant or process.
If you feel feedback is warranted on these recent changes, please e-mail the ICIS editor, Joseph Chang, at joseph.chang@icis.com, or ICIS Global Editorial Director Penny Wilson, at penny.wilson@icis.com. While I am very disappointed in this change in direction, I do know that both Joseph and Penny would welcome your comments and feedback. I have spoken and exhanged e-mails with both of them in the past, and they are very aware of the concerns I have raised over the past two years and have been gracious in their reception of my comments and concerns. The ICIS Students site, still being developed by Penny, emerged as a result of our conversations.
The video below, from the ICIS Pricing page, explains ICIS pricing methodology.
For the moment, Scitopia.org is focused on technology: physics, mathematics, computing science, and engineering. Scitopia.org hopes to expand and include more technical societies to broaden and increase its coverage.
The product still needs work. The author search does not work beyond the search of an author's last name only. As well, there is no facility to export results to one or more bibliographic management programs such as EndNote or RefWorks. There is also no facility for a "My Scitopia"-type feature, which would allow for the storage of search results, or regular running of stored searches as RSS feeds. However, the product offers an index to the digitized publications of many of the world's major scitech associations and institutions, and will only get bigger and better. The representatives from the societies present at the launch indicated clearly that they are open to and welcome any and all feedback to improve the product and make it better for its users. To be fair, the problem with the author search is a tough one, as it is difficult to gather together name authority structures from 15 societies and index them accordingly, but they do plan to work towards a solution.
Scitopia looks good, and I look forward to using it soon. The societies involved to date are:
Acoustical Society of America
American Geophysical Union
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
American Institute of Physics
American Physical Society
American Society of Civil Engineers
American Society of Mechanical Engineers
American Vacuum Society
The Electrochemical Society
The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
Institute of Physics Publishing
Optical Society of America
Society of Automotive Engineers
Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics
SPIE