Swain Library News

In August 2007, the University of California recently released a survey of UC faculty on their attitudes and practices regarding scholarly communication. The survey results suggested that while faculty express a need for change in current scholarly communications systems, they have been slow in changing their personal strategies and have chosen traditional publishing behaviors. The survey results also reveal faculty attitudes and behaviors towards tenure and review processes, copyright, university policies related to scholarly communication, and more. More information and download the entire report.

Source: The Charleston Report — September/October 2007, page 3.

Includes over 7 million authors and over 17 million publications from nearly 900 repositories.

ScientificCommons.org aims to provide the most comprehensive and freely available access to scientific knowledge on the internet.

The major aim of the project is to develop the world’s largest communication medium for scientific knowledge products which is freely accessible to the public. A key challenge of the project is to support the rapidly growing number of movements and archives who admit the free distribution and access to scientific knowledge. These are the valuable sources for the ScientificCommons.org project. The ScientificCommons.org project makes it possible to access the largely distributed sources with their vast amount of scientific publications via just one common interface. ScientificCommons.org identifies authors from all archives and makes their social and professional relationships transparent and visible to anyone across disciplinary, institutional and technological boundaries.

Core functions and aims of the project for now and the future are to provide the identification of repositories, the indexing of full-text documents, the extraction of author relationships and personalization services.

“Librarians at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor threw themselves a party on Friday to celebrate a milestone in their ambitious effort to scan every single book in the collection. They scanned the one millionth book, leaving just 6.5 million to go.”

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education: Wired Campus (February 4, 2008)

See the University of Michigan Library News for more details.

While the aim of the JISC Academic Database Assessment Tool is to help libraries to make informed decisions about future subscriptions to bibliographic and full text databases, you might find info about “what’s under the hood” of interest too.

This site provides access to detailed information and title lists for major bibliographic and full text databases, and key service information for database and eBook content platforms. In each case the information has been provided directly by the relevant suppliers. The site provides functionality to compare databases automatically.

About JISC
The mission of Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is to provide world-class leadership in the innovative use of information and communications technology to support education and research. JISC funds a national services portfolio and a range of programs and projects.

The 2008 Winter issue of Speaking of Computers is now available.This e-newsletter highlights the latest news in technology-related and computing activities, services, and resources on the Stanford campus. The table of contents for this latest issue is below:

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Many Eyes: Democratizing Visualization

Data visualization has historically been accessible only to the elite in academia, business, and government. But in recent years web-based visualizations — ranging from political art projects to news stories — have reached audiences of millions. Unfortunately, while lay users can view many sophisticated visualizations, they have few ways to create them.

In order to “democratize” visualization, IBM’s Visual Communication Lab has built Many Eyes, a web site where people may upload their own data, create interactive visualizations, and carry on conversations. The goal is to foster a social style of data analysis in which visualizations serve not only as a discovery tool for individuals but also as a means to spur discussion and collaboration.

This new version of DiscoveryGate provides significant changes.

• Microsoft Windows Vista is now supported.
• JRE 1.5.0_12 or higher is now supported.
• Autoupdate is now user initiated. If Autoupdate is enabled for the site then a user logging into DiscoveryGate will be prompted to allow or deny the update to occur.
• Cross-referencing of indexed databases, including the Available Chemicals Directory, with Beilstein reaction records has been enabled.

To take advantage of these improvements you must download the new installer and install it on your client machines and/or enable Autoupdate at your site. Be sure to use a current version of your browser software too (IE for PCs, Safari for Macs). If you have any questions or experience any problems, please contact graceb@stanford.edu.

ISI Web of Knowledge has a new face and powerful new search features built into its newly designed interface. Based on months of intensive usability testing and studies, we have developed a new approach to research. Both novice and professional researchers have told us what they wanted — a simplified user interface and a streamlined search process that’s easy to navigate, with easy-to-read fonts and a clear, intuitive presentation of search results. You will soon see these new features in all ISI Web of Knowledge products.

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Swain’s new book list for January 2008 is now available:

Swain Library monthly new book list

The Cambridge Structural Database has been updated. Any earlier versions you downloaded have expired. SuperStar, a program for Predicting Protein-Ligand Interactions Using Experimental Data, will be available for downloading for Stanford students, faculty, and staff soon.

Three methods are being used to make the CSD available to you:

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