Science at Collins

Visiting reference hours with your science liaison in Harned hall will begin on March 3, 2010. Over the last few semesters, most of the questions I’ve gotten have been leading up to or after midterms, so I’m adjusting hours to better match that pattern.

In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to email, phone (x3649), or drop by my office (Library 117)  if you have a question!

WolframAlpha is out and worth trying out today. It’s hard to tell whether its future will live up to its claims, but it’s certainly fascinating. (And certainly programmed with a sense of humor. Click the image at left).

It’s tricky to get used to, since it’s not a fancier Google. It won’t find references to concepts or ideas, or pull back articles or web sites, and it chokes up on excess verbiage.

What it will do is pull back data and perform some analyses. (You might be clued in quicker than me by the little orange = in the search box).

So, no, I can’t find out everything out there about Tacoma—but I can find out what the weather was like in 1980—or any year back to 1939. Or the per capita income.

Additionally, since WolframAlpha uses Mathematica technology, mathematical questions are a strong point. Enter a formula to see it plotted out and presented in alternative representations.

Note the link at the bottom for sources of information when a question involves data. It’s explicitly not a citation explaining the data’s provenance, but it helps guide the user toward more information.

WolframAlpha is clearly still in the early stages of development, but it’s very interesting to play around with and definitely worth keeping an eye on.

BioOne, a collection of searchable full-text biology journals we subscribe to, has released a new platform and announced new additions to the online collection.

Not only is the new platform more visually appealing and pleasant to browse, it also lets you make more efficient use of its resources.

Now you can:

• Quickly learn about a journal. Each journal or article page lists the journal’s publisher, impact factor and ISI ranking in the left column on any article or journal page:
• Find links in the right hand column of any article page that will let you easily export that article to RefWorks or sign up to track when the article is cited.
• Take advantage of linked references for articles to immediately see abstracts of interesting works cited (Look for the link at the end of the citation) . If the abstracts are worth following up, use the Journal Locator to find them at Collins, or ILLiad to request them.

By signing up for a personal account, you can save even more time:

• Collect your favorite journals or articles in one place.
• Save searches (a great time saver if you’re interrupted during a complex search).
• Request email alerts when a particular article is cited or to deliver new tables of contents for select journals.
• Sign up for RSS feeds for selected journals, so you can see tables of contents in your feed reader (look for this logo: , then click it to subscribe).

In addition to improving ease of use, BioOne has added new content for 2009: two new open access journals apropos to our marine and western environment have been added: Marine and Coastal Fisheries (American Fisheries Society) and Monographs of the Western North American Naturalist (Brigham Young University Press), while BioOne.1 has added Tree Ring Reseach (Tree-Ring Society).