Research Infrastructure

Library and Information Center

Rowland Institute at Harvard
Library News & Notes
December 19, 2003

NOTES

HOLLIS, Harvard’s online catalog,will be undergoing an upgrade on December 27-28, limiting its availability. More details are available at: http://lib.harvard.edu/hollis_upgrade.html

Another reason to read Open Access News (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html) - some librarian was invited to join the roster of contributors.

Garrett will be out of the office in the afternoon on Mon. Dec. 22 and Tues. Dec. 23.

Internet Sites of the Week

Dodgeit
Sick of registering your e-mail address at numerous commercial sites and having it result in a mailbox filled with clutter? A web application enables one to create a bogus, send-only, e-mail address, which one can then monitor via rss. Intriguing.
http://dodgeit.com/
(Source: Boing Boing Blog via Library Stuff)

Google Print (Beta)
Google announced a new search function, analogous to but not nearly as extensive as Amazon’s Search Inside the Book, partnering with publishers and getting search access to their digital files. A faq is available at http://print.google.com/print/faq.html. ResourceShelf’s Gary Price offers more tips, for example, how to browse which books and publishers Google will search; see http://www.resourceshelf.com/archives/. Meanwhile, the Register, in an article, A Quantum Theory of Internet Value ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/34586.html) used the occasion to thumb its nose at Google and point out that no search engine is as organized or offers as much content as an actual library. While we don’t agree with all the sentiments in the article, the latter is one point to which we strongly assent.
(Sources: ResourceShelf, Bookslut, Open Access News, J’s Scratchpad)

IEEE Virtual Museum
The IEEE site boasts a half-dozen exhibits featuring stories on the beginnings of electricity, microwaves, recorded sound, women in technology, Thomas Edison, and the reciprocal relationship between technology and the second world war.
http://www.ieee-virtual-museum.org/
(Source: What’s New @ IEEE in Computing)

Nasal bioluminescence in reindeer
An evolutionary approach to an old story...
http://80-www.nature.com.ezp1.harvard.edu/

PubMedCentral
PubMedCentral, NIH’s online archive of scientific journals linked through PubMed, has embarked on an ambitious digitization project, in which several major journals of the American Society for Microbiology have been retrospectively converted and made freely available.
http://pubmedcentral.com/about/scanning.html
(Source: SPARC Open Access News Forum)

RSS for journals?
Yes. The Institute of Physics (IoP) has introduced RSS feeds for four of its journals, including Journal of Physics Condensed Matter and New Journal of Physics. (more info at: http://www.iop.org/EJ/help/-topic=rss/) Unfortunately, the feeds have not yet worked in NetNewsWire Lite, my desktop aggregator; however, they do work in my blog aggregator at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/rihlib/aggregator. Go figure.

Also, The International Union of Crystallography has created RSS feeds for its roster of journals. See http://journals.iucr.org/services/rss.html.

We will see more and more of this in the months to come, very likely with open access journals such as BioMedCentral and maybe with institutional repositories, such that RSS will lead us to open access content.

NEW BOOKS/VIDEOS
Received Dec. 13-19, 2003

Title
Author/Editor
(Publisher, Year)
To be Shelved at:
Requested by

Fluorescence Imaging Spectroscopy and Microscopy
Wang, Xue Feng and Brian Herman, editors
(Wiley, 1996)
QD 96 .F56 F57 1996
Requested by Amit Meller

Understanding Molecular Simulation, 2nd ed.
Frenkel, Dann and Berend Smit
(Academic, 2002)
QD 461 .F86 2002
Requested by Z. Dogic