Branner Blog

This question has us scurrying. A few suggestions to start, and we’ll add more later:

Geology of United States Highpoints is a fun and informative site I stumbled upon. I wish I’d seen it in time for the GES1 student who was writing his term paper on Mt. Washington.

Nature’s new preprint server is up and running at: http://precedings.nature.com/

Background and details.

Coverage to amass on connotea.

Thanks for the tip-off, reader(s).

We’ve been asked this question a few times recently, and while there is no guarantee that a thesis or dissertation from the School of Earth Sciences has an accessible, digital version, here are several places to check:

Other options:

Try the website of the students former research group. For example, the Environmental Geophysics group has links to some of their former students’ works here: link

Of course, there’s always google.

And, email. (Most students would be quite pleased to hear from someone with an interest in their work.)

All of these thesis links live together under this del.icio.us tag:
http://del.icio.us/branner/theses

Any other ideas?

clipped from www.ipy.org

(Also, giving clipmarks a try. Note the image above.)

The Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1963 published “The Quiet Crisis,” alerting Americans to environmental degradation on multiple fronts. Twenty-five years later, Stewart Udall updated his seminal work, with addition of Part Two, “The Next Generation.” This second section described ecological progress during the intervening decades, albeit with some rollback under the Reagan administration. I consider this work a classic not so much for its eloquence and originality, as for its addressing a serious problem in a readable, well-organized, compelling way. And I’m impressed that this country once had an Interior Secretary who not only cared about preserving federal lands for future generations, but was talented enough to write a book about it.

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was another government official whose concern about environmental degradation led him in 1972 to write The Three Hundred Year War: a chronicle of ecological disaster. Even after Congress’s passage of the Clean Air (1967) and Clean Water (1966) acts, Douglas found much to worry about, in his chapters on air, water, radiation, pesticides, garbage, noise, estuaries, mining, wildlife, forest and wilderness, transportation, and land use. Add to these on-going problems, the hole in the ozone layer and global warming, and there’s no dearth of issues for environmentalists to work on. But how are they to effect change? Douglas’s chapter on “Political Action,” is sobering, but not without hope. He counseled a shift in priorities from war abroad to righting the wrongs of the “300 year war” at home, with the judiciary playing a key role in upholding laws and checking abuses of power. Surfing the web, I see that Douglas’s writings, including his Supreme Court opinions, have been criticized for being hasty, dashed-off, draft-like. “The Three Hundred Year War” is not beautiful prose; but it is a passionate and informed argument about the fate of our national (and increasingly global) commons.

If you’ve ever searched for a book on amazon or some such site, but hesitated with your purchase because you wondered if you might just borrow the book from the library, then book burro is the tool for you. From the site:

Book Burro is a Web 2.0 extension for Firefox and Flock. When it senses you are looking at a page that contains a book, it will overlay a small panel which when opened lists prices at online bookstores such as Amazon, Buy, Half (and many more) and whether the book is available at your library.

So rather than cut-and-paste the title from amazon to socrates, book burro links to WorldCat and lets you see if we (or another local library) have the volume. Once you install the plug-in, update your zip code so book burro knows where you are.

In response to user requests (questions that start off like: isn’t there a way to…, or wouldn’t it be nice if we could… and end with musings about the possibilities of doing it all: searching for references, saving/storing pdfs, tagging/labeling/manipulating/creating records, retrieving information, and incorporating it into the writing process), I’m trying to get a handle on the various bibliographic management tools out there. Our library serves a diverse set of users whose studies span the Earth Sciences from geologists and petroleum engineers to earthsystem-ists and environmental policy types. I don’t expect one tool to meet all of their needs, but I’ve suspected that we can offer different and better suggestions and solutions than Endnote and Refworks.

These two resources are great tools, but both can be a little bit clunky and pre-2.0. To date, our advice tends to fork at the intersection between web-based (Refworks) vs. local (Endnote), and free (we have a campus site license to Refworks) vs. pay (Endnote). (As an aside, you technically adept users who have found your way to the world of BibDesk/BibTeX, we’d love to hear what has worked for you.)

I may be coming late to the blogosphere on this topic, but as I’ve researched the options, I’ve realized that our preferences and observations as librarians are different from some of the other commenters out there so I hope this will be a useful exercise. In that spirit, I offer a review of some options that are out there (in no particular order), relying heavily on what others have written.

I have really enjoyed posts from Academic Productivity about reference management tools, and specifically on online reference management and its convergence with social networking tools. I recommend them, and the blog in general, if you’re interested in these topics.

Here are my picks:

1. Zotero:
Zotero lets you

“gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways.”

I installed Zotero about a year ago, but really haven’t given it much time yet. I was excited about its potential as a way of managing ephemeral web content and pdfs, but haven’t used it much as a bibliographic tool.

One extensive review that I found helpful comes from a PhD student in history. It’s a different perspective from over here in the sciences, but incredibly thorough and insightful.

2. LibraryThing
I mentioned LibraryThing a few posts ago and haven’t done much with it since. It is a great tool, but is geared toward books not articles, and although this is hardly a criticism, seems too much fun for work (ie. it doesn’t have that sobering “this is intended for an academic audience” disclaimer that some of the tools promise). Others might find this more useful, but in a journal-heavy discipline, it seems best left for hobby reading.

3. Citeulike
Citeulike is free and web-based. It allows you to export references to BibTeX or Endnote during the writing process. It stores links, not whole articles, and has been described as del.icio.us for academic papers. It’s an interesting iteration of the tagging/social bookmarking/sharing world as applied to academic content. You can install the citeulike bookmarklet in your browser, do your searching and click the link when you’re ready to add a reference. The service works with several publishers/platforms and extracts metadata from their sites so you don’t have to.

Other services do this as well, but citeulike offers some nice points of discovery (always a sought-after feature for a librarian) including RSS feeds and watchlists allowing users to track the latest additions to particular tag categories as well as other users’ libraries. You can also monitor additions according to subject, as in the latest papers saved in “Earth/Environmental Science.”

This article provided a good explanation of the features.

4. Connotea
Connotea, a web-based service from the Nature Publishing Group, has a lot in common with citeulike including: saving, organizing, tagging and sharing references. It is also free, and gives you the ability to discover new leads from other users. I found this review from Duke Library’s libraryhacks to be quite helpful.

I’ve been toying with the idea of making a table to compare the various options, but it’s been done. Here’s a comparison of reference management software from wikipedia with information about operating system compatability, ability to import and export citations, what citation styles are supported, database connectivity and word processor integration.

In the end, no one product does it all–it’s a personal choice, but all of this searching has left me with a few questions: is the social networking option important or just distracting? It seems really exciting now, but will it offer more than traditional citation linking? Do users want their libraries and references to be public? And, would anyone really subscribe to (and then follow) a feed consisting of updates to someone else’s library?

(This is first attempt. I expect that there will be updates to this topic down the line.)

As of June 4, 2007, the USGS released selected Landsat 7 image data of the United States through the Web (glovis.usgs.gov or earthexplorer.usgs.gov), high quality data with limited cloud cover.

From the USGS news release:

“This Web-enabled distribution of new and recently acquired data is a pilot project for the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM), currently projected for launch in 2011. The project will allow the Landsat data user community to help refine the distribution system planned for the upcoming LDCM. Each scene will be registered to the terrain, or ortho-rectified, prior to being placed on the Web. Copies of these data will also be available on CD or DVD at the cost of reproduction.”

With the G-8 leaders assembling in Europe this week, global warming is a likely topic of conversation. One hopes they are aware of this informative map, which graphically compares the leading emitters of carbon dioxide.