LISNews: Librarian News

Webwire
reported a collaboration between Scirus and the Indian Institute of Science in which the digital content of the Institute will be indexed in Scirus.
Scirus will index two institutional repositories, ePrints@IISc and etd@IISc. The former is an eprints archiving facility for the IISc research community and the latter a digital repository of theses and dissertations of IISc' students and researchers.
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Scirus Partners with Indian Institute of Science

Directory of Medical and Health Feeds

Submit RSS feeds that relate to medical or health issues to this topical medical feeds directory. All the feeds are grouped by topic so that someone interested in say Rheumatology can easily locate appropriate feeds, to stay current on that medical issue or condition.

See:
Medical Feeds

Source:
Directory of Medical and Health Feeds

About the Open Source Geospatial Foundation

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, or OSGeo, is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. The Foundation provides financial, organizational and legal support to the broader open source geospatial community. It also serves as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding and other resources, secure in the knowledge that their contributions will be maintained for public benefit. Recently concluded four day FOSS4G2006 conference, brought together all the Free and Open Source Software for Geoinformatics (FOSS4G) communities. The conference incorporated the OSGIS Conference, Mapserver User Meeting, GRASS Users Conference, Java oriented FOSS4G and EOGEO Workshops.

Source: FOSS4G 2006 Conference - A Great Success

Despite 99% of all Public Libraries in the United States provide free public access to the Internet, they have not seen a corresponding increase in budgets.

Excerpt: The study, "Public Libraries and the Internet 2006," was conducted by the Information Use Management and Policy Institute at Florida State University (FSU) and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the American Library Association.

"Libraries do an incredible job of connecting people with technology, but demand for this service is significantly outpacing libraries' capacity to make necessary upgrades, purchases, and repairs," said John Bertot, Florida State University professor and author of the report."

See Full article at:

Today's Public Libraries Are Thriving Technology Hubs That Millions Rely on for First or Only Choice for Internet Access.

Sachin Kalbag reports a unique project to digitally archive and preserve 700 year old Indian scriptures in his article in DNAINDIA.
Excerpts: "The project will digitally preserve 13th century scholar Madhavacharya’s Sarvamoola granthas, a collection of 36 works with commentaries on his Dvaita philosophy of the meaning of life and the role of God. PR Mukund, Gleason professor of electrical engineering at RIT, and his colleague Roger Easton, have embarked on this project to restore 340 palm leaves, each of which is 26 inches long and two inches wide, and is bound together with braided cord threaded through two holes. "

Read the full article at:
US university restores 700-yr-old Indian scriptures

The "Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research" (DRIVER) project responds to the vision that any form of scientific-content resource, including scientific/technical reports, research articles, experimental or observational data, rich media and other digital objects should be freely accessible through simple Internet-based infrastructures.

Read the Full Article at:
DRIVER: Networking European Scientific Repositories

Is there a similar initiative to network repositories in the United States? Worldwide? Can Google Scholar provide an option to search within worldwide repositories?

How is the Internet helping tele-medicine to grow in villages of India? An article recently published in Moneycontrol website points out the benefits of Internet in shaping tele-medicine in India.

Excerpt:"But now, Telemedicine has got a new lease of life, thanks to the spread of the Internet. With the number of Internet users growing by leaps and bounds (numbering over 50 million as of December 2005, according to Internetworldstats.com) and broadband set to explode into Indian homes, the World Wide Web might just be the medicine that the doctor had prescribed for an ailing tele-medicine."
and "The advent of the Internet in healthcare has divided the field into two distinct approaches: eHealth and telemedicine. eHealth mainly deals with dissemination of information over the Internet. Telemedicine deals with the provision of actual treatment through e-consultation and videoconferencing."

Read the full article at:
Doc's prescription for tele-medicine.

Questions for us to explore are: Is it possible to digitally archive all the procedures that have been conducted through tele-medicine for future references? How would this help to doctors in training? Can medical libraries help in the archival process? Where would the funding come from?

LEGAL RESEARCH GUIDE: Finding Facts from Virtualchase is a compilation of electronic reference sites. Some of the sites included here are: Airport & City Code Converter, helps to convert airport or city codes to airport or city names and vice versa. It also provides market data including the number of domestic markets served, the daily average number of passengers, the average price of a one-way fare, and the daily average number of miles flown. Another site City Search (Find a County) provides a utility for looking up counties by city. Enter a city name to find a list of matching counties. Alternatively, you can display all cities within a state and the counties in which they reside. If you follow the link for the county name, the utility displays a list of all cities within the county.

As Reported in Lifehacker web site, you can 'Check out MileByMile.com's bonanza of free, printable highway travel guides for the US, Canada, and Mexico' at Free Highway Travel Guides. Note: Hundreds of these guides were created by local businesses in exchange for advertising.

Here is an article that points out how business of a public library grows rapidly when all its outdated computers were updated resulting in more community members using the computers and contributing to bridge the digital divide.

Excerpts:

"The new computers, which replaced outdated 7-year-old models, are fully Internet accessible, have USB ports, privacy screens, and feature the latest Microsoft Office software." and "In fact, they have become so popular, their use increased 58 percent from an average of 5,954 sessions per quarter last year to 9,389 sessions from April through June."

Read the full article at

Library upgrade bridges digital divide

Janet Murphy in the Summer 2003 issue of 'Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship' points out the importance of developing and learning 'extensive scientific background, vocabulary and various subject research tools' in order to be able to efficiently retrieve needed information by the scientists and researchers. Excerpt: "It is clear that interdisciplinary researchers carry a heavy research burden, and many are having difficulty keeping up with the literature despite the increased availability of online databases."

Read the full article at:
Information-Seeking Habits of Environmental Scientists: A Study of Interdisciplinary Scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina

Question: What should the database designers envision while designing new search interfaces that would help interdisciplinary researchers learn vocabulary and the necessary subject background related to their research?

Excerpt from a recent news items from Yahoo News.
"An Indian village has uploaded itself onto the Internet, giving the outside world a glimpse of life in rural India.Visitors to Hansdehar village's Web site
smartvillages can see the names, jobs and other details of its 1,753 residents, browse photographs of their shops and read detailed specifications about their drainage and electricity facilities."

See Indian village uploads itself onto Internet for the complete article.

The AZoM.com (the A to Z of Materials) was formed with the primary aim of increasing the use of Advanced Materials by the engineering and design community worldwide. AZoM has recently implemented an RSS news feed of 10 most current news articles. These articles change on a daily basis and can be found on the front page of the AZoM site.

See: AZoM's Materials/Engineering RSS News Feed

AZoM also provides open access to its new electronic journal - The AZo Journal of Materials Online

As reported in Marylaine's 'Neat New Stuff I found on the Net This Week', Science in your backyard is a database in which one can choose a state and find links to real-time information on that state's water, drought, and earthquake activity, to biological, mineral and recreation resources, and Geological Survey news releases.

EarthTrends is a comprehensive online database, maintained by the World Resources Institute, that focuses on the environmental, social, and economic trends that shape our world. It provides access to statistical data on various environmetal topics such as coastal and marine ecosystems, water resources and freshwater ecosystems, climate and atmosphere including air pollution data, population and health, energy resources, biodiversity and watersheds of the world. EarthTrends updates are also available through RSS feeds.

According to a recent article published in E-Composites.com, MSU/DOE Fatigue Database for Composite Materials is one of the world's largest open-access libraries on wind turbine materials and the largest in the United States. It is used by researchers around the globe. This data is available from the Sandia National Laboratories web site.

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One of nation's largest databases for wind energy research

Online Abstracts and Reports of the applied wind energy research are also available through Sandia's Wind Energy Technology web site.

Collective images of the World can be accessed from Global Memory Net made available through UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme.

Excerpt: "Global Memory Net, an online image library and gateway to cultural, historical, and heritage images around the world, has just been launched with a number of collections included in UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme."

Read the full article at:
Gateway to Global Culture Launched

As reported in a recent posting,
Internet Brands Launches Wikipedia for Cars (from ResearchBuzz), Wikicars is a collaborative guide about new cars and all things automotive.

Title: Scholarly use of information:
Graduate students' information seeking behavior

Authors: Carole George, Alice Bright, Terry Hurlbert, Erika C. Linke, Gloriana St. Clair, and Joan Stein
Carnegie Mellon University Libraries

Abstract
Introduction. This study explored the graduate students' information behavior as it informs their process of inquiry and scholarly activities.

One of the findings of this research study indicates that "Graduate students rely on library personnel for help finding and using resources and they also rely on academic personnel. This places librarians in a key position to affect students' and faculty information behavior."

Read the full article at:

Scholarly use of information:
Graduate students' information seeking behavior

Google School from Lifehacker provides some tips that we may find useful while answering some reference questions at our Information Desk. For example, Google School: Map Area Codes provides ability to see a map of that Area code at the very top as well as the area that it covers.

Source of this finding: PopSciBlog