Science at Collins

Maps have moved!

All of our map cases, from USGS quads to national and international maps, have moved to the lower level of the library.

They are now in the same room as the microform and microform readers.

Now, if you’re looking for a map, you’ll need to head down the main stairs, make a left into the microform room, and look straight ahead to the small black case (general maps) and to your left (quads and state maps).

Check out publications from the American Museum of Natural History. Starting with material published in the 19th century and carrying on in some cases to the present, you can find zoological systematics, paleontology, geology, evolution, and anthropology material in full text PDFs.
The series include:

• American Museum Novitates
• Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History
• Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History
• James Arthur Lecture on the Evolution of the Human Brain
• Manuscripts in the AMNH Library
• Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History

Browse by series, or search by publication number or keyword at the AMNH Scientific Publications Library.

This would be especially great for finding classics of descriptive geology, material for STS students interested in American scientific history, or biology students. Find it linked here, and on the STS, Geology, and Biology Research Gateway pages.

The Department of Energy’s Information Bridge Search engine is a great way to get into the government-published energy literature. And now, you can quickly assess whether retrieved items are of interest by automatically generating word clouds in your search results. Just hover your mouse over the item’s title or PDF file, and a cloud of the most commonly used words in the text will pop up:

Not quite as precise as an abstract, perhaps, but definitely a quicker way to suss out the material than by opening each PDF manually to find the one you want.

Look in the left hand bar of Information Bridge searches, as well, to find subject clusters and authors to narrow down your search:

Or try it yourself:

• Hawthorne, F. C., ed. 2006. Landmark papers : Structure topology. London: Mineralogical Society of Great Britain & Ireland.
• London, David. 2008. Pegmatites. Ottawa, Ontario: Mineralogical Association of Canada.
• Ogg, James G., Gabi Ogg, and F. M. Gradstein, eds. 2008. The concise geologic time scale. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Rice, Stephen P., André G. Roy, and Bruce L. Rhoads, eds. 2008. River confluences, tributaries, and the fluvial network. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
• Tolstikhin, I. N., and Jan Kramers, eds. 2008. The evolution of matter : From the big bang to the present day earth. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Vernon, R. H., and G. L. Clarke, eds. 2008. Principles of metamorphic petrology. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Not a typo—to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, Google Earth now includes a moon exploration tool!

If you’re already using Google Earth 5.0,  you should be set to go. If not, just update to 5.0 and you’ll have the moon at your fingertips. Open up the program, and you’ll see a planet icon in the top menu. Click it and select your planet.

Take a tour of the moon, review historical data and maps, or discover information every robotic spacecraft that’s landed on the moon. Get all the details at the official Google Earth & Google Maps blog.

Scanning the geology shelves last week, I ran into a book I’d never have imagined existed: Herbert C. Hoover’s (yes, that Hoover’s) notes, as contributed to the Geologic Atlas of the United States’s Pyramid Peak folio.

The notes were reissued in facsimile in 1979, and reproduce the handwritten records Hoover took in the summer of of 1894 as part of his summer job as an assistant to the USGS. Paid at $60 per month, he worked with the USGS to support himself at Standford. Ultimately, these notes and the work of the rest of the team, headed by Dr. Waldemar Lindgren, were synthesized into the Gelogical Atlas of the United States, Folio 31, Pyramid Peak Folio.

Among other gems, the preface gives insight into Hoover’s reconciliation of creation and evolution. Noting the inconveniences of the horse—lack of a camel’s water tank and a coat of scaly armor, as well as an inconveniently low number of legs causing a bumpy gait—Hoover suggested that the animal was a ‘mistake of creation’ as all the features he desired “were known to creation prior to the geologic period when the horse was evolved”.

For more information, check out the notes yourself. For even more primary source information on Hoover the geologist, check out his 1909 book on The Principles of mining, or his 1912 translation of Agricola’s De re metallica.

• Albrecht, Jochen. 2007. Key concepts & techniques in GIS. Los Angeles, Calif.: Sage Publications.Anderson, Jason S., and Hans-Dieter Sues, eds. 2007. Major transitions in vertebrate evolution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Benton, M. J., and D. A. T. Harper, eds. 2009. Introduction to paleobiology and the fossil record. Oxford, UK ; Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
• De Jong, Carmen, David Collins, and Roberto Ranzi, eds. 2005. Climate and hydrology in mountain areas. Chichester, West Sussex, England ; Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.
• Evans, Bernard W., and Mineralogical Society, eds. 2007. Metamorphic petrology. 1st ed. Twickenham, UK: Mineralogical Society of Great Britain & Ireland.
• Gaines, Susan M., G. Eglinton, and J. Rullkötter, eds. 2009.  Echoes of life : What fossil molecules reveal about earth history. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
• Hoefs, Jochen. 2009. Stable isotope geochemistry. 6th ed. Berlin: Springer.
• Committee on Hydrology, Ecology,and Fishes of the Klamath River, National Research Council. 2008. Hydrology, ecology, and fishes of the Klamath river basin. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press.
• Nudds, John R., and Paul Selden, eds. 2008. Fossil ecosystems of North America : A guide to the sites and their extraordinary biotas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Nur, A. M., and Dawn Burgess, eds. 2008. Apocalypse : Earthquakes, archaeology, and the wrath of God. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
• Schneiderman, Jill S., and Warren D. Allmon, eds. 2009. For the rock record : Geologists on intelligent design. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Singer, S. Fred, and Dennis T. Avery, eds. 2007. Unstoppable global warming : Every 1,500 years. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
• Soennichsen, John. 2008. Bretz’s flood : The remarkable story of a rebel geologist and the world’s greatest flood. Seattle, WA Berkeley, Calif.: Sasquatch Books ; Distributed by PGW/Perseus.
• Turney, Chris. 2008. Ice, mud and blood : Lessons from climates past. London ; New York: Macmillan.
• Yang, Xin-She. 2008. Mathematical modelling for earth sciences. Edinburgh: Dunedin.

• Fagan, Brian. 2008. The great warming : Climate change and the rise and fall of civilizations. 1st U.S. ed. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
• Jacobson, Michael C., ed. 2000. Earth system science : From biogeochemical cycles to global change. San Diego Calif. : Academic Press.
• Spellman, Frank R. 2008. The science of water : Concepts and applications. 2nd ed. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
• Starr, Steven Producer, Irena Director Salina, Caitlin Dixon Film editor., Christophe Composer Julien, Group Entertainment, and Oscilloscope Pictures, eds. 2008. Flow : For love of water. Anamorphic widescreen format (1:78:1) ed. New York, N.Y.: Oscilloscope Pictures.

 
Carnegie Mellon has digitized The American Journal of Science from 1819 to 1895, making it openly available to users.

The American Journal of Science continues to be published as a geology and earth science journal, though it began more broadly as The American Journal of Science and Arts in 1818. Despite the change in subject matter, it is the oldest continuously published science journal in the US.

While Collins Library holds volumes from 1883 to the present, the earlier content may be of use to students of history, geology, and STS. Click into the Carnegie Mellon AJS site to browse and search the collections. If you decide to search, I’d recommend searching in another Collins database (like GeoRef, which covers much of the journal) to find the citation, and then browsing in. The AJS archive relies on optical character recognition, which makes searching a little less consistent.

Just a taste of what you might find…

I searched GeoRef for AJS articles by Othniel Charles Marsh , then tried Edward Drinker Cope.  Direct access to one of the most dramatic feuds in paleontology!

Click the titles of these new arrivals to be taken to the catalog record to find call numbers and availability.

• Davidson, Jane P. 2008. A history of paleontology illustration. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Macdougall, Doug. 2008. Nature’s clocks : How scientists measure the age of almost everything. Berkeley: University of California Press.