LANL Research Library Newsletter - November 1999
| New Engineering Index® at LANL |
A new interface and search engine is now available for Engineering Index® at LANL, our version of the world's most comprehensive interdisciplinary engineering database. The new system is similar to SciSearch® at LANL. Features include:
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Engineering Index contains over four million abstracts. Each year, over 220,000 new abstracts are added from almost 4,500 international journals, conference proceedings, books, technical reports and dissertations. Coverage spans over 175 disciplines and major specialties within engineering. Engineering Index corresponds to the print publication by the same name. Coverage begins in 1969 and is updated weekly.
Kathy Varjabedian
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| Science Server® at LANL upgraded |
As of November 1, 1999 a new version of Science Server® at LANL is available.
What is Science Server® at LANL? Science Server® at LANL is an electronic product created to promote scientific communication and collaboration. Science Server® at LANL manages content and delivers electronic journals directly to your desktop.
The Research Library has created Science Server® at LANL to provide a single solution for searching, browsing and delivery of search results through a standard web browser interface. Science Server® at LANL consists of three pieces—the electronic content, the content management software, and the value added by integrating content in a single package.
The electronic content provided by Science Server® at LANL currently includes 1100+ scientific, medical and technical journals from publisher Elsevier Science.
Current version: Science Server® at LANL is now runs on a locally modified version of the 3.0 software provided by Science Server LLC. New features in this version include:
Future plans: Plans for future additions to Science Server® at LANL include:
Science Server® at LANL is accessible at http://sciserver.lanl.gov/ or via the link in the middle of the Electronic Journals page.
Miriam Blake
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| Free trial access to Kluwer electronic journals |
The LANL Research Library is providing access to electronic journals from Kluwer Academic Press free at your desktop from now through November 30. That's 368 Kluwer ejournal titles including Aquatic Geochemistry, Natural Hazards, Environmental Geochemistry and Health, Environment, Development and Sustainability and Computational Economics.
Kluwer electronic journals allows seamless (no userids or passwords) access to the full-text of Kluwer journals. Currently Kluwer electronic journals contain articles from January 1997 onwards. Full-text articles are available in PDF and can be viewed using the Adobe Acrobat® Reader, which is freely available on the web. The full-text of each article is exactly the same as that in the printed version of the journal, and will be available up to 8 weeks before the printed issue arrives at a subscriber's address.
You can access Kluwer electronic journals at http://www.wkap.nl/kaphtml.htm/ONLINEJOURNALS.
Carol Hoover
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| Free trial access to electronic Annual Reviews |
Until the end of December, 1999, the LANL Research Library has arranged for a Lab-wide trial for access to all the Annual Review volumes which are available online. Annual Reviews provide systematic, periodic examinations of scholarly advances in a number of fields of science through critical authoritative reviews. From http://www.annualreviews.org/, you can access full-image of articles from the following titles:
The Annual Review of:
| Astronomy and Astrophysics | Medicine | |
| Anthropology | Microbiology | |
| Biochemistry | Neuroscience | |
| Biomedical Engineering | Nuclear and Particle Science | |
| Biophysics and Biomolecular Structure | Nutrition | |
| Cell and Developmental Biology | Pharmacology and Toxicology | |
| Earth and Planetary Sciences | Physical Chemistry | |
| Ecology and Systematics | Physiology | |
| Energy and the Environment | Phytopathology | |
| Entomology | Plant Physiology and Plant Molecular Biology | |
| Fluid Mechanics | Political Science | |
| Genetics | Psychology | |
| Immunology | Public Health | |
| Materials Science | Sociology |
The Research Library does not subscribe to the printed version of all the subjects (Sociology, Political Science, etc.) but the trial includes access to all. The full-image coverage varies for each title; most start around 1996, with a searchable table of contents back to around 1984 for each.
Your feedback is important in our determining whether to continue the electronic access to this source after December 31, so please be sure to send comments and/or suggestions to Marie Harper (mharper@lanl.gov; 7-5809).
Marie Harper
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| Universal Preprint Service initiated |
The first meeting of the Universal Preprint Service initiative took place in Santa Fe last week. This initiative has been set up to create a forum to discuss and solve matters of interoperability between author self-archiving solutions, as a way to promote their global acceptance (see http://vole.lanl.gov/ups/ups.htm). The meeting was sponsored by the LANL Research Library along with the Council on Library and Information Resources, the Digital Library Federation, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and the Association of Research Libraries.
The first, largest and most important such archive is the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) e-Print arXiv (xxx) in physics. Founded by Paul Ginsparg in 1991, this archive now houses over 100,000 papers, mirrored worldwide in 15 countries with over 50,000 users daily and still growing. Other disciplines and institutions have begun to create public research archives along the lines of LANL but what is needed are conventions that archives could adopt to ensure that they work together so that any paper in any of these archives could be found from anyone's desktop worldwide, as if it were all in one virtual public library.
The participants in the meeting were digital librarians and computer scientists specializing in archiving, metadata, and interoperability, and they included the founders of the principal public research archives that exist so far. The participants were diverse in their underlying motivations, but entirely unified in their objective of paving the way for universal public archiving of the scientific and scholarly research literature on the Web.
The group agreed on minimal technical requirements for archives. These will be published separately as the "Santa Fe Conventions" and, in the next six months, will be implemented in the existing archives.
The name "UPS" will shortly be changed to reflect the fact that the initiative is decidedly not just about "Preprints" but about creating interoperable archives for "Eprints," which includes unrefereed, unpublished preprints, refereed, published reprints, and related kinds of research documents and data.
For more information see the formal press
release.
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| A family tree for mathematicians |
Harry B. Coonce was frustrated when he tried to trace his mathematical roots. He wanted to discover the identity of his academic advisor's advisor. Coonce, a retired mathematics professor, has created a resource to help mathematicians track their intellectual lineage. The result is the Genealogy Project for Mathematicians, a Web site that lists the advisors of thousands of mathematicians. The site has over 28,000 names from 380 universities--with over 30,000 records waiting to be added. A record includes name of degree recipient, university, year in which degree was awarded, dissertation title, name of advisor (linked to a list of their other students), and a list of the degree recipient's students, if any. Users can search the database by personal name, school, or year of degree. Visitors who have math Ph.D.'s can order t-shirts tracing their own personal genealogy. Anyone with names to add to the site can send an e-mail message to Mr. Coonce at harry.coonce@mankato.msus.edu.
Donna Berg
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| New electronic journals from the Research Library |
The following new electronic journals have been added to the library collection and are available from your desktop:
Carol Hoover
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| Search engine profile: AskJeeves |
AskJeeves (http://www.askjeeves.com/) is strictly a plain-English search engine. Natural language is welcomed here. It proudly proclaims this in its help (http://www.askjeeves.com/docs/help/) menus and give in-depth advice on how to search effectively on its systems. AskJeeves encourages the full sentence approach as opposed to a phrase for better retrieval. Boolean is not welcome here, nor is field searching. Don't be afraid to just put in a term because you will get results, but the ones with questions will almost always deliver a relevant link. The beauty of AskJeeves is that it works like a personal butler, hence the title name of the engine and the image of a butler greeting you with a serving platter. It has a user-friendly way of searching and, as most researchers would agree, a lazy way of searching, but still provides a highly effective mode of getting around on the Web.
In AskJeeves, you have the good fortune of having the system search many of the Net's popular engines all at once. AltaVista just searches Web pages located by its system. In AskJeeves, using plain English, you will locate pages in Excite, Yahoo! Infoseek, Webcrawler, and Alta Vista. This does on occasion have its downside. You may miss something in the major search engines because your question reads differently in each search engine it uses. On the plus side, however, AskJeeves does not come back with 5 million links. It returns a sufficient amount of pages to use as a starting place, especially if you have no idea about your topic.
Lou Pray
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Need a reminder?
Newsletter Editorial Team: Donna Berg, Helen Boorman, Jack Carter, Lou Pray, and Kathy Varjabedian.
The name and e-mail address of the Library member who contributed an article appears at the end of the article. If you have comments or further questions, please contact that person. If you have general questions or comments about the Newsletter itself, please contact the Newsletter Editor, Kathy Varjabedian.
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