NIH Public Access Policy Toolkit
For more information on the NIH Public Access Policy, check out this toolkit from the Health Sciences Library .
Job Hunting Resources for Chemists
Bob Buchanan, the Physical Sciences Librarian at Auburn University recently wrote an excellent entry http://units.sla.org/division/dche/newsletters/Jan_2008.pdf discussing the best job-related Web sites for chemists. Buchanan’s article is the origin of the selections and most of the descriptions here.
PhDs.org: Science, Math, and Engineering Career Resources
Aimed at students who are interested in pursuing a Ph.D. or those with a Ph.D. who are looking for a job.
ACS Careers
The American Chemical Society has a careers Web site with a searchable job bank, salary surveys, career advice, and the ACS Careers Blog. For students entering the job market, there is a section on “What Chemists Do” including pages with career descriptions and “Profiles of Chemists at Work.”
Chemical and Engineering News: Career and Employment
This site publishes articles and data on chemistry careers including the annual “Employment Outlook” published in the first November issue.
Job Banks
Science and Web 2.0
There are a number of different Web 2.0 applications that are relevant for the sciences. The 2nd annual North Carolina Science Blogging Conference on January 20, 2008, held in RTP was a forum to discuss how scientists can use social software to communicate and share information. SciTech News, a publication of the Special Libraries Association published a report on this meeting and recommended a few relevant recent articles.
Murray, K. K. (2007). Mass spectroscopy and Web 2.0. Journal of Mass Spectroscopy, 42(10), 1263-1271. DOI: 10.1002/jms.1315. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jms.1315
This introductory tutorial gives brief descriptions of some of the major Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking and how these are being used in the field of mass spectroscopy.
Bonetta, L. (2007). Scientists enter the blogosphere. Cell, 129(3), 443-445. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2007.04.032
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2007.04.032
Who are these bloggers, why are they blogging and how can you start blogging? Bonetta discusses some of the widely-read bloggers and how they are using this new medium to educate and communicate and also gives some tips on how to start your own blog.
Van Noorden, R. (2007). Surfing Web20. Chemistry World 4(12), 46-49 http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2007/December/SurfingWeb20.aspThis article discusses the growing amount of free chemical information on the Internet, the Open Chemistry project and how this is creating new opportunities and new challenges for maintaining quality and interoperability.
Recent Instruction Session Handouts
During the past month, the library conducted workshops demonstrating physical science resources and patent searching. For those who were unable to attend, the handouts from the sessions have been included here. Feel free to contact Zari Kamarei, the Math/Physics/Chemistry Librarian if you have any questions about these topics or if you’d like to schedule a consultation to learn more about information resources in the physical sciences.
IOP Science available for trial until March 18th
IOP Science aggregates the journal content of physics publisher IOP into one site http://iopscience.iop.org/. It contains over 250,000 articles from 1874 to the present. IOP Science provides users a simple search interface with the ability to refine by subject, author, journal or date range along with the ability to link between cited and citing articles.
This resource may be accessed by those affiliated with UNC-Chapel Hill until March 18th with no password required.
Please address any comments you have after evaluating IOP Science to Zari Kamarei, Math/Physics/Chemistry Librarian.
Webcast on NIH public access requirement, March 7
On March 7 there will be webcast dealing with their NIH public access requirement. Presenter are: Kevin L. Smith, JD, Scholarly Communications Officer, Duke University; Jim Siedow, Vice Provost for Research, Duke University; and Tony Waldrop, Vice Chancellor for Reasearch & Economic Development, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Attendees can watch the webcast at their desks (register online by March 3), or come to Health Sciences Library room 527 on March 7 for a group viewing followed by Q & A.
Harvard Faculty Adopts Open-Access Requirement
From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
“Harvard University’s faculty this evening adopted a policy that requires
faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles
available free online.”
New Historical Exhibit Chronicles Centennial of UNC-CH Biology Department
From Organism to Molecule: A Centennial History of the Department of
Biology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
The lobby of Wilson Hall now greets passers-by with a new historical exhibit chronicling 100 years of the Department of Biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Titled From Organism to Molecule, the exhibit was created by UNC Biology Librarian William Burk and School of Library and Information Science graduate student Tom Hailey. After nearly a year of research and preparation, the display opened in mid-January 2008 with plans to have the exhibit maintained for the foreseeable future. Environmentally-friendly LED lighting has been integrated into the exhibit, making it one of the first such exhibits on campus to feature this growing technology. Biology Department Chairman Steven Matson supported the project; Assistant Keeper, North Carolina Collection Gallery, Linda Jacobson provided expert assistance and guidance; and other individuals, too numerous to mention, also provided input and resources.
This exhibit spans the history of the Biology Department at UNC-Chapel Hill from 1908 to 2007. At Carolina, the discipline of biology had its roots in 1819, when professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy Denison Olmsted included lectures on botany and agriculture in his classes. Biology increased its role in the campus curriculum in 1908, when William Chambers Coker and Henry Van Peters Wilson constituted a department of Botany and Zoology, respectively. In 1982, these two departments merged to form a Department of Biology with Lawrence I. Gilbert serving as the department’s first chair.
The display is divided into three sections, each covering one of the component departments and featuring a timeline of significant landmarks. Educational relics and models give a glimpse of teaching methods employed through the century. These include life-like models of mushrooms and a microscope from 1915 used in the botany laboratory, specimens of sponges and models of a frog and crayfish used by zoology students, and a gel electrophoresis chamber and spectrophotometer from recent years. Photographs depict the founders of the component departments, the first female graduate students and staff, as well as the first African American professor. In the early years of biology at UNC, the campus and faculty were small, and its resources were limited. With the passage of time, the predominantly descriptive nature of science became increasingly research-oriented. By the 1960s, the doors of investigation widened into genetic studies; by the 1980s molecular biology and more recently genomic sciences. As scientific inquiry became more interdisciplinary, cooperation in teaching and research among the campus departments grew. From Organism to Molecule provides a synoptic window to viewing the history of the Biology Department—and the advancement of biology—on the Carolina campus and complements the university’s efforts to remember and appreciate its past.
Scientists propose new human-induced geologic epoch
From LiveScience:
“Humans have altered Earth so much that scientists say a new epoch in the planet’s geologic history has begun. Say goodbye to the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch and hello to the Anthropocene.”
UNC-CH Library Collaborates with NC Academy of Science to Digitize Science Journal
In 2005, the North Carolina Academy of Science and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library became collaborative partners in the digitization of the Journal of the North Carolina Academy of Science. Two essential steps initiated the project: the Academy’s desire to digitize its journal; and the University Librarian’s approval for sponsoring the work, which included library staff involvement and the use of CONTENTdm. After we selected and tested a number of features, such as the dpi, color, and the format of the user interface–particularly the navigation and layout of the page–scanning began in earnest. The user interface will include searching by author, title, and keyword as well as browsing by year of publication. Volumes one to thirty-five have been scanned to date.
The Journal of the North Carolina Academy of Science began in 2002, when it superseded the Journal of the Elisha Mitchell Scientific Society. The latter, first published in 1884, was among the earliest scientific journals to be issued in connection with a southern university—the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Covering all fields of science and issued quarterly, the refereed journal currently publishes papers from members and non-members as well as the abstracts and proceedings of the Academy’s annual meetings.