Two articles in the DU Magazine

There are two new articles that focus on DU Faculty...

The Trouble with Tamarisk"The problem with tamarisk is that it's able to establish itself and effect other changes to the ecosystem that are harmful to the original plants and animals," says Sher, who also directs research, herbaria and records at the Denver Botanic Gardens. "It changes the structure of the forest." Imported from Asia in the 1800s as an ornamental, tamarisk spread from gardens to natural waterways, boosted along the way by planting programs to control erosion. It spread across the West, and concentrations are now found on an estimated 2 million acres throughout the Western and Southwestern U.S.The People ProblemAccording to U.S. Census Bureau projections, Colorado is on track to add a million more residents by 2015. The population is expected to grow by still another million by 2025, bringing the total number of residents to 6.4 million. Much of that population will gravitate to cities, particularly those in the sprawling Front Range.

Wiley InterScience - now back online

Wiley InterScience recently completed the transition of Blackwell content to the new platform. Penrose staff have now updated most/all of the records to reflect the new web-based location of the content. Please let us know if you have any problem accessing a Wiley or a Blackwell journal.

Educational Benefits Of Social Networking

Educational Benefits Of Social Networking Sites UncoveredScienceDaily (June 21, 2008) — In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered the educational benefits of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. The same study found that low-income students are in many ways just as technologically proficient as their counterparts, going against what results from previous studies have suggested.Go to the site for more info...

Firefox and LibX

If you downloaded the new Firefox version 3.0, make sure that you also update to the new version of LibX for Firefox, too.

New Journal Citation Reports

The rumor is true, the new Journal Citation Reports is out with data from 2007 publications. Hence, the new journal "Impact Factors" are available.

Another good graduation speech

Got this from the Blue Skunk Blog, which I found from Stephen Abram.

Everything I know in 15 minutes -- Everything I have learned about education and life over the past 55 years summed up in 15 or 20 minutes. (Graduation address for Nova Southeastern University June 7, 2008)

"I've been asked to give a commencement address tomorrow down in Ft. Lauderdale. Here are my current thoughts about what I'm addressing. My solemn pledge is not to go longer than 20 minutes.

Congratulations graduates of the Fischler School of Education and Human Resources. You have demonstrated intelligence, perseverance, and great tolerance for uncomfortable chairs for long periods of time. Many of you completed much of your coursework before laptops and wireless connectivity allowed you to endure tedious lectures by multi-tasking and updating your Facebook page. To all of you, my deepest admiration."

Etc., etc., etc....

Timely thoughts for new graduates

Here is a bit of inspirational verbiage from the venerable Denver Post -- "Please don't change the world."

Google Scholar’s Coverage of the Engineering Literature

Interesting article by John J. Meier and Thomas W. Conkling, Google Scholar’s Coverage of the Engineering Literature: An Empirical Study, The Journal of Academic Librarianship, May 2008. Google Scholar’s coverage of the engineering literature is analyzed by comparing its contents with those of Compendex, the premier engineering database. Records retrieved from Compendex were searched in Google Scholar, and a decade by decade comparison was done from the 1950s through 2007. The results show that the percentage of records appearing in Google Scholar increased over time, approaching a 90 percent matching rate for materials published after 1990.Thanks to Mel DeSart at the U of Washington for noting this.

Library budgets, open access, and the future of scholarly communication

This is a new article in College & Research Libraries News. May 2008, Vol. 69(5):271- Fact one -- We need to begin with a fundamental fact—the cost of scholarly journals has increased at 10 percent per year for the last three decades. This is over six times the rate of general inflation and over two-and-a-half times the rate of increase of the cost of health care. Between 1975 and 2005 the average cost of journals in chemistry and physics rose from $76.84 to $1,879.56. In the same period, the cost of a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline rose from 55 cents to $1.82. If the gallon of gas had increased in price at the same rate as chemistry and physics journals over this period it would have reached $12.43 in 2005, and would be over $14.50 today.

World Wide Telescope

This service was launched about an hour ago!

The World Wide Telescope is a "single rich application portal that blends terabytes of images, information, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a seamless, immersive, rich media experience. Kids of all ages will feel empowered to explore and understand the universe with its simple and powerful user interface."

Looks cool, but you need some serious hardware and software -- here are the requirements...

• Microsoft® XP SP2 (minimum), Windows® Vista® (recommended)
• PC with Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2 gigahertz (GHz) or faster, recommended
  1 gigabyte (GB) of RAM; 2 GB RAM recommended
• 3D accelerated card with 128 megabytes (MB) RAM; discrete graphics card with dedicated 256-MB VRAM recommended for higher performance
• 1 GB of available hard disk space; 10 GB recommended for off-line features and higher performance browsing

Chance to win a $50 gift certificate

Please take a couple of minutes to tell Quick Copy your views on the services offered at the Quick Copy Center in the Penrose Library, and the University Mail Services. Your opinions will help us ensure that we fulfill your needs, and feel free to make suggestions also. As a token of our appreciation, after you have submitted the surveys, sign up to win one of four $50 DU Bookstore gift certificates or a $20 Stick-e-Star gift certificate! Please fill out the surveys online by Friday, May 16th.

The Quick Copy Center survey is at https://taurus.cair.du.edu/ir/quickcopy/
and the Mail Services survey is https://taurus.cair.du.edu/ir/mailservices/

Use of Technology in Education

Are we using enough technology to teach our students? Maybe -- maybe not. What do you think?

Information Resources in High-Energy Physics

This is an interesting article -- Information Resources in High-Energy Physics: Surveying the Present Landscape and Charting the Future Course by Anne Gentil-Beccot, Salvatore Mele, Annette Holtkamp, Heath B. O'Connell, Travis C. Brooks Abstract: Access to previous results is of paramount importance in the scientific process. Recent progress in information management focuses on building e-infrastructures for the optimization of the research workflow, through both policy-driven and user-pulled dynamics. For decades, High-Energy Physics (HEP) has pioneered innovative solutions in the field of information management and dissemination. In light of a transforming information environment, it is important to assess the current usage of information resources by researchers and HEP provides a unique test-bed for this assessment. A survey of about 10% of practitioners in the field reveals usage trends and information needs. Community-based services, such as the pioneering arXiv and SPIRES systems, largely answer the need of the scientists, with a limited but increasing fraction of younger users relying on Google. Commercial services offered by publishers or database vendors are essentially unused in the field. The survey offers an insight into the most important features that users require to optimize their research workflow. These results inform the future evolution of information management in HEP and, as these researchers are traditionally "early adopters" of innovation in scholarly communication, can inspire developments of disciplinary repositories serving other communities.
The PDF of the preprint is here.

DUTube

There is a new student video contest, courtesy of Student Life.

Do you have an experience, a story, an opinion or an idea that you think first year students at DU need to hear? Make a DUtube video about...

Diversity at DU
Gender Violence
sexual assault, dating violence,
domestic violence, stalking
Alcohol on campus
Marijuana on campus
Dealing with stress
Life at DU

What faculty authors can do to ensure open access to their work through their institution

This is a good report from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) -- "OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS: What faculty authors can do to ensure open access to their work through their institution," A SPARC / SCIENCE COMMONS WHITE PAPER (April 2008) Overview: The Internet has brought unparalleled opportunities for expanding availability of research by bringing down economic and physical barriers to sharing. The digitally networked environment promises to democratize access, carry knowledge beyond traditional research niches, accelerate discovery, encourage new and interdisciplinary approaches to ever more complex research challenges, and enable new computational research strategies. However, despite these opportunities for increasing access to knowledge, the prices of scholarly journals have risen sharply over the past two decades, often forcing libraries to cancel subscriptions. Today even the wealthiest institutions cannot afford to sustain all of the journals needed by their faculties and students.Be on the lookout for the University of Denver Institutional Repository, coming in the near future. The PDF is available here.

Writing, Technology and Teens

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has produced another great report - "Writing, Technology and Teens", 4/24/2008, by Amanda Lenhart, Sousan Arafeh, Aaron Smith, and Alexandra Rankin Macgill Summary -- "Teens write a lot, but they do not think of their emails, instant and text messages as writing. This disconnect matters because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them."The full 83 page PDF version is available here, and this is their press release.

Thanks to Stephen Abram for finding this.

RSC Website will be worked on

Here is some information concerning the Royal Society of Chemistry downtimes.

Monday 28th April – Journals search will be unavailable all day 2:00am – 11:00am, MT.

Tuesday 6th May – Website unavailable from 3:00am – 11.00am MT -- FTP & AutoPDF will also be unavailable from 2:00am – 11:00am MT

Monday 12th May – Website Unavailable from 2:00am to 8:00am MT.

I am pretty sure that the times are pretty accurate. The reason for the downtime? -- "In order to expand the RSC’s web offering we need to update our web infrastructure to newer technologies that we believe will enable us to provide a more reliable service to our customers. This has been a project that has been on going for about a year and we’re now at the stage to move our web systems into the new infrastructure."

Penrose Website received an honor

The Penrose Library Website was voted as the "College Library Web Site of the Month" from the College Libraries Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries.

Added the CITI Program Today

The University of Denver now has access to the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) Program.

This is a web-based training program in animal and human research subjects protections. It includes basic courses covering subjects such as: biomedicine, social and behavioral topics, refreshers, good clinical practice, Health Information Privacy and Security (HIPS), laboratory animal welfare, and the responsible conduct of research. When you register, please select the University of Denver as your home institution.

SciFinder Scholar available on the Web???

It looks like CAS has finally developed a basic level web-based search platform for the commercial SciFinder product. Maybe they will have an interface for SciFinder Scholar ready soon, too. [It should be ready sometime in August, 2008 according to an email I received from their customer support.] More information can be found here and a flash demo is here. Thanks to Randy Reichardt at the University of Alberta for finding this.