News From The University of Alberta Engineering Librarians

.: Greetings.  E-Books Directory is a site that indexes free downloadable e-books.  Details:

E-Books Directory is a free web resource which contains links to free downloadable e-books, technical papers, documents, as well as user contributed content, articles, reviews and comments. E-Books Directory is a service to students, researchers and e-book lovers.

Please check the site at your convenience.  There are 209 ebooks listed in Engineering.

Tags: e-books, E-Books Directory, ebooks, engineering e-books

.: Greetings. I’m pleased to report that the UA Libraries has ordered access to five more sections of Knovel. One of the sections is already available for your use: Industrial Engineering & Operations Management.

Upcoming in Spring 2012:

• Mining Engineering & Extractive Metallurgy
• Optics & Photonics
• Nanotechnology
• Welding Engineering & Materials Joining

Feel free to contact me in Cameron Library if you have any questions.

- Randy Reichardt, Research Services Librarian (Engineering)

Ottawa, ON, June 20, 2011 – NRC’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI) has launched the first federal library mobile website and one of the first federal mobile websites. NRC-CISTI Mobile makes location irrelevant, allowing clients with smart phones and other mobile devices to easily and conveniently take NRC-CISTI’s collection of scientific, technical and medical information resources with them — no matter where they go.

NRC-CISTI Mobile brings many of the information discovery abilities of NRC-CISTI to the smart phone. The new website allows users to:

• search and order from NRC-CISTI’s local catalogue and information sources, as well as many science and technology publications around the world;
• retrieve and order full-text;
• access maps and directions to all NRC-CISTI locations;
• contact NRC-CISTI on the go, via a form, or by placing a call directly to a local branch;
• follow NRC-CISTI on Twitter and Facebook;
• access the full NRC-CISTI website.

Compatible with most up-to-date mobile devices, this site is best viewed using a mobile device and not via a regular desktop browser.

To promote and help direct clients to the new mobile site, NRC-CISTI has also introduced a Quick Response (QR) code that can be scanned to launch the NRC-CISTI Mobile. The QR code is being used on the NRC-CISTI website, posters and signage to promote the new service.

http://m.cisti.nrc.gc.ca/eng/

If you have any difficulties accessing NRC-CISTI Mobile, please contact: 613-998-8544 or 1-800-668-1222.

From the press release:

Oak Ridge, TN – Scientific videos highlighting the most exciting research and development sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) are now available through ScienceCinema. The multimedia search tool was launched today as part of a one-day workshop, “Multimedia and Visualization Innovations for Science,” jointly hosted by Microsoft and the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI), held in Redmond, Washington.

Jeffrey Salmon, Deputy Director for Resource Management with the DOE Office of Science, said, “Video, animation, visualization, and other forms of multimedia are now widely used to record, share, and collaborate in science. Because of the U.S. Department of Energy’s central role in science, we are also at the center of technology for collecting and disseminating this new media. ScienceCinema’s pioneering search and retrieval capability provides the public with a way to quickly access and view our multimedia-based R&D information.”

ScienceCinema uses innovative, state-of-the-art audio indexing and speech recognition technology from Microsoft Research to allow users to quickly find video files produced by the DOE National Laboratories and other DOE research facilities. When users search for specific scientific words and phrases of interest to them, precise snippets of the video where the specific search term was spoken will appear along with a timeline. Users can then select a snippet or a segment along the timeline to begin playing the video at the exact point in the video where the words were spoken. The timeline is synced with transcripts of the targeted portion of video.

It is anticipated that scientific videos, animations, interactive visualizations, and other multimedia will become an increasingly prominent form of scientific communications. ScienceCinema was produced, in part, as a proof of concept to demonstrate the value of speech recognition in the complex vocabulary of science. While the launch of the video database will include an initial 1,000 hours of content, it will continue to grow as new DOE R&D-related videos are produced.

ScienceCinema was developed by the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) in partnership with Microsoft Research. OSTI, within the Office of Science, is responsible for broadly disseminating and preserving the Energy Department’s scientific output. Microsoft Research provides the audio indexing technology for ScienceCinema as part of the Microsoft Research Audio Video Indexing System (MAVIS) project. MAVIS is a set of software components that use speech recognition technology to enable searching of digitized spoken content. More information about MAVIS and the technology can be viewed at the MAVIS project page.

Tags: ScienceCinema, US Department of Energy

.: The University of Alberta recently finished third in the annual Knovel University Challenge.   With 360 entries,  we were 246 ahead of the next Canadian institution, the British Columbia Institute of Technology!  Additionally, one of our students, Ed Sperling, third-year mech eng co-op, was one of the winners of an iPod Nano.

Our thanks to everyone for participating, and especially to all the engineering faculty members who encouraged their students to enter the Challenge.  This was the first time the University of Alberta finished in the Top Ten, and was far and away our best showing to date!

Randy Reichardt with Ed Sperling, 3rd yr Mech Eng student, winner of the iPod Nano

.: PBS is hosting a web-only series on the secret lives of scientists and engineers.  Secret Life introduces you to a new scientist or engineer every two week – and each one has a secret life!

For example, meet Dava Newman.  “Dava is an Aeronautics and Engineering Professor at MIT. She is currently working with NASA to develop a new, more efficient spacesuit for future space exploration.”

Tags: Dava Newman, PBS, Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers

.: Hello everyone. For those of you who are using RefWorks and have been waiting for it to be compatible with Web of Science, I have good news. Effective immediately, RefWorks is now one of the options available when you want to save your references to a bibliographic management software package.

Please contact me if you have any questions.

- Randy

Tags: RefWorks, Web of Science

.: This article appeared in ScienceWatch, and is an interesting read.

The Most-Cited Institutions in Engineering, 1999-2009

This month, ScienceWatch.com presents a listing of the top 20 institutions which, as of the fifth bimonthly update of Essential Science IndicatorsSM (January 1, 1999-October 31, 2009) attracted the highest total citations to their papers published in Thomson Reuters-indexed Engineering journals. These institutions are the top 20 out of a pool of 1,084 institutions comprising the top 1% ranked by total citation count in this field.

There are no Canadian institutions in the Top 20 list.

The list, however, can be considered a bit misleading.  A better ranking may have been by cites per paper, in which case Stanford would have been ranked #1.  Also, perhaps the Top 50 schools, ranked by cites per paper, might include smaller schools, which be default would have a smaller number of papers published and therefore would not have made a Top 20 list based on said number of papers published.

Tags: Citation Analysis, Most-cited Institutions

Amsterdam, 20 January 2009 – Elsevier today announced the launch of SciTopics, a free online expert-generated knowledge sharing service for the research community to quickly offer scientific, technical and medical knowledge on a variety of subjects. Designed as a perfect starting point for scientific research, the website integrates a content publishing platform with search functionalities and community features. SciTopics guarantees high scientific standards by incorporating a very strict editorial policy, safeguarded by subject specific editors. The service includes a continually growing number of pages with over 650 SciTopics pages today, from more than 800 scientists.

The site creates a starting point for researchers to gain an introductory overview of a particular scientific topic and serves as a collaboration resource where users can share their views and engage in discussions with other SciTopics members. SciTopics allows scientists to easily identify relevant players, journals, websites and science news services in the field. Thereby offering a channel for researchers to identify potential collaboration partners and help journal editors find suitable authors and reviewers for their publications.

Using keywords selected by the SciTopics page author, Elsevier provides links to the most recent and most cited published articles on the subject through Scopus, the world’s largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Keywords are also used to identify links to relevant Web results and news through Scirus, Elsevier’s science-specific search engine. These external links, updated each time the page is viewed, allow for more in-depth coverage of the subject reflecting the most current information. SciTopics page authors also offer a list of references and suggested Web resources.

“The speed of sharing information that has been made possible by the Internet has opened up a new fast-paced content channel, however, it has created a sense of data overload as well as significant concerns over quality and accuracy,” commented Dr. Garry Corthals, SciTopics Subject Editor, Biochemistry & Genetics. “SciTopics will leverage the instantaneous and interactive nature of the Web, while narrowing the scope of content and offering the peace of mind that comes with authoritative and moderated material.”

SciTopics pages include a link to the author’s profile page including affiliation, research interests, a list of publications and contact details. Authors are invited by a SciTopics Subject Editor or Elsevier Journal Editor to write a summary on a scientific topic of their choice. Additionally, those interested in creating a SciTopics page may submit a suggested topic via the site.

“While inclusion in a traditional peer-reviewed journal is still regarded as the ultimate signal of scientific integrity, in addition, authors are also interested looking for faster, more informal, dynamic and interactive ways to share their knowledge and highlight their research,” said Michiel van der Heyden, Head of Product Management, Academic & Government Product Group, Elsevier. “We are excited to introduce SciTopics as a free solution to help researchers, authors and editors locate information quickly and collaborate with other members of the scientific community.”

.: Keeping up-to-date with the scholarly literature just became much easier, thanks to a new service called ticTOCs – Journal Tables of Contents Service.

http://www.tictocs.ac.uk

ticTOCs is a new scholarly journal tables of contents (TOCs) service. It’s free, its easy to use, and it provides access to the most recent tables of contents of over 11,000 scholarly journals from more than 400 publishers. It helps scholars, researchers, academics and anyone else keep up-to-date with what’s being published in the most recent issues of journals on almost any subject.

Using ticTOCs, you can find journals of interest by title, subject or publisher, view the latest TOC, link through to the full text of over 250,000 articles (where institutional or personal subscriptions, or Open Access, allow), and save selected journals to MyTOCs so that you can view future TOCs (free registration is required if you want to permanently save your MyTOCs). ticTOCs also makes it easy to export selected TOC RSS feeds to popular feedreaders such as Google Reader and Bloglines, and in addition you can import article citations into RefWorks (where institutional or personal subscriptions allow).

You select TOCs by ticking those of interest – thousands of TOCs, within a tick or two (hence the name ticTOCs).

ticTOCs has been funded under the JISC Users & Innovations programme, and has been developed by an international consortium consisting of the University of Liverpool Library (lead), Heriot-Watt University, CrossRef, ProQuest, Emerald, RefWorks, MIMAS, Cranfield University, Institute of Physics, SAGE Publishers, Inderscience Publishers, DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Open J-Gate, and Intute.

For the full press release, please see: http://tictocsnews.wordpress.com/2008/12/11/scholarly-journals-new-free-service-makes-keeping-up-to-date-easy/