Google Books Settlement Summary

This post by Jill Hurst-Wahl does a great job of putting together the relevant links that explain the suit.

Great World Wide Star Count

Schoolchildren, families, and citizen scientists around the world will gaze skyward after dark from October 20 to November 3, looking for specific constellations and then sharing their observations through the Internet. The Great World Wide Star Count, now in its second year, helps scientists map light pollution globally while educating participants about the stars.

The event, which is free and open to everyone who wants to participate, is organized by the Windows to the Universe project at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), in conjunction with planetariums and scientific societies across the country and abroad. Funding is provided by the National Science Foundation.

"The star count brings families together to enjoy the night sky and become involved in science," says Dennis Ward of UCAR's Office of Education and Outreach. "It also raises awareness about the impact of artificial lighting on our ability to see the stars."

The 2007 star count drew 6,624 observations taken on all seven continents, and organizers expect the number of participants to double this year. UCAR used last year's observations to generate maps of star visibility across the United States and around the world. The results show a strong correlation between development and a lack of night sky visibility. Next year, the star count will be included in a cornerstone project of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy, a global effort initiated by the International Astronomical Union and the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization to promote interest in astronomy.

-----How the count works-----

Participants in the Northern Hemisphere will look for the constellation Cygnus, while those in the Southern Hemisphere will look for Sagittarius. They will then match their observations with
magnitude charts downloaded from the Great World Wide Star Count Web site (see below). The site contains instructions for finding the constellations and other event details, and it links to background about astronomy on the Windows to the Universe Web site.

Participants may make observations outside their homes or go to less developed areas where more stars are visible. Those in overcast areas who cannot see stars will be able to input data about cloud conditions instead.

Bright outdoor lighting at night is a growing problem for astronomical observing programs around the world. By searching for the same constellations in their respective hemispheres, participants in the Great World Wide Star Count will be able to compare their observations with what others see, giving them a sense of how star visibility varies from place to place. The observers will also learn more about the economic and geographic factors that control light pollution in their communities and around the world.

"Last year's results showed a strong correlation between dense development, where there is a lot of light, and a lack of star visibility," Ward says. "Without even being aware of it, many of us have lost the ability to see many stars at night. Part of our goal is getting people to look up and regain an appreciation of the night sky."

Happy Open Access Day

Hope you all have a great Open Access Day. If you are interested, submit a blog post so you can enter a contest and win lots o' swag. It is simple, just answer the following questions in your post:

• Why does Open Access matter to you?
• How did you first become aware of it?
• Why should scientific and medical research be an open-access resource for the world?
• What do you do to support Open Access, and what can others do?

For more info on Open Access, take a look at posting from Peter Suber and John Wilbanks. You should also take a look at some of the great journals that are in the Directory of Open Access Journals. The Open Access Wiki is another great place to start.

The 2008 Ig Nobel Prizes have been awarded!

The 2008 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded last night at the 18th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Recorded video is posted for your viewing pleasure, displeasure or indifference. Here is a list of the "winners".

Two interesting articles

Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor, The Telegraph
"An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists."

Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy -- PLoS Biology, 6(9): e240
"Scientific discovery occurs in the lab one experiment at a time, but science itself moves forward based on a series of ongoing conversations, from a Nobel Prize winner's acceptance speech to collegial chats at a pub. When these conversations flow into the mainstream, they nurture the development of an informed public who understand the value of funding basic research and making evidence-based voting decisions. It is in the interests of scientists and academic institutions alike to bring these conversations into the public sphere."

Knovel University Challenge

Try to win a Wii, an iPod Nano, or some music. go to http://pages.knovel.com/KnovelUniversityChallenge.html.

1,400+ Knovel records are now cataloged

We now have over 1,000 records from the Knovel ebook platform. There are many great titles, such as the four volume set -- Mechanical Engineers Handbook, Lange's handbook of Chemistry, or Sittig's Handbook of Toxic and Hazardous Chemicals and Carcinogens.

Lots of new things today

Welcome back to school. The Penrose Library has lots of new things for the Fall Quarter.

1) We are pleased to announce the launch of a new home page! This redesign affects only the home page and is intended to feature our new tools for searching the catalog and article databases. The same content is still available on the home page and your old bookmarks and links to pages within our site will still work. Please let us know if you have trouble finding what you need on the new home page. Stay tuned for a complete Web site redesign this year!

2) Be sure to try out the new discovery tool, Encore, to search the catalog. Penrose has branded Encore as “PEAK Beta”, and made it the default catalog search. You can still search the “old” way by selecting “PEAK Classic” from the drop down box or going to the “Advanced Keyword Search”. Students love PEAK Beta’s more intuitive searching, refinement options, and tag clouds. Peak Beta’s relevancy-ranked results are more useful to most searchers. Peak Beta even corrects your spelling! For more precise searching, you will still have access to PEAK Classic and the “Advanced Search.”

3) The Book Drop Cafe is now open for business.

August 26th Server Upgrades -- Very Limited Access to Databases and Peak

There will be no off-campus access to our databases on Tuesday, Aug. 26 because of server upgrades. Limited access to our databases may be available from on-campus via Database & Article Search. During this time, the Peak catalog will also be down. You may check the library’s holdings through Prospector. Thank you for your patience and we apologize for any inconvenience.

Chemistry Journal Use at the University of Denver

The article that Rachel Hansen and I worked on was finally published today. The title of it is -- "Local Evaluation of Chemistry Journals."

This paper reports on the evaluation of local usage statistics of a specific set of chemistry journals at the University of Denver in Colorado, USA. The objective of the study is to demonstrate that commercial publishers in chemistry charge considerably more for their journals than those from the non-commercial sector. There are three variables that are considered in this research: institutional cost of the journal, cost per Thomson Scientific Impact Factor (IF), and cost per article downloaded. In the defined set of 65 journals, it is found that commercial publishers charge more for their journals by a ratio of 2.59. Commercial publishers cost more per impact factor by a ratio of 3.20 and significantly more per local article download by a ratio of 6.16. This research demonstrates that local usage statistics should be used as part of the journal evaluation process.

Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century

The Council on Library and Information Resources has released a new report.

It is
No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century

Abstract -- How should we be rethinking the research library in a swiftly changing information landscape? In February 2008, CLIR convened 25 leading librarians, publishers, faculty members, and information technology specialists to consider this question. Participants discussed the challenges and opportunities that libraries are likely to face in the next five to ten years, and how changes in scholarly communication will affect the future library. Essays by eight of the participants—Paul Courant, Andrew Dillon, Rick Luce, Stephen Nichols, Daphnée Rentfrow, Abby Smith, Kate Wittenberg, and Lee Zia—were circulated to participants in advance and provided background for the conversation. This report contains these background essays as well as a summary of the meeting.

Games in the Library

We will be getting some recreational board and video gaming systems for the library soon. What kind of recommendations do you have for game titles (board or video)? We do plan on getting either Rock Band or Guitar Hero. We will be getting a Wii, too! What would you like to play?

Full Text Dissertations

We can now access the full text (in PDF format) from over 900,000 dissertations from the United States and Canada.

With more than 2.4 million entries, the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) database is the most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses in the world. UMI offers over 2 million titles for purchase in microfilm or paper formats. More than 930,000 are available in PDF format for immediate free download, and an average of 2,000 new PDFs are added to the database each week.

Note that some of the documents are HUGE. This dissertation in astrophysics from Princeton is about 54 MB.

Unconference at DU for Librarians

I will be helping to organize an un-conference here at DU on Friday, October 10, 2008. It is officially called the Library Camp of the West. Here is more information about it.

http://librarycampwest.pbwiki.com

Stop on by if you get a chance.

New Databases

We recently signed up some new databases.

Knovel Library. There are over 1,000 ebooks in this collection. It covers chemistry and engineering sources for the most part.

Columbia Gazetteer of the World. Derived from the 3 volume set.

Columbia Earthscape. This is "a comprehensive aggregation of resources in the Earth and Environmental Sciences".

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.