Branner Blog

Welcome to the 2008/2009 school year! We’ve been busy at the library over the summer working on access to new digital content, loading digital book content into Socrates, and expanding the map and GIS collections. You can find out more about these changes by reading the fall newsletter.

Stanford affiliates now have access to the California Sanborn Fire Insurance maps from 1867-1970. These maps provide a unique view of the history of California’s cities and towns show urban growth, changes in ownership, building use, and materials.

The Urban & Environmental Footprint 2050 Project at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development (IURD) at UC, Berkeley have constructed a GIS toolkit consisting of a series of ESRI shapefiles and grids describing, “many of the physical, administrative, transportation, demographic, economic, land use and land cover, and environmental characteristics of the 48 contiguous United States.” The data were pulled together by the Penn Institute for Urban Research and and the IURD. Layers include boundary files, census block files and attributes, transportation networks, major employment center information, measures of job accessibility, boundaries of federal lands, elevation and slope data, location of water bodies, and location of wetlands. The data are free and can be used for any purpose with attribution. A great new, free resource!

The AGU Digital Library is here!

Contents include:

Socrates records will be updated soon to reflect the new electronic content, but right now, the best way to access the articles is by clicking on individual journal titles from the AGU contents page. Full articles are available as pdfs. The AGU search engine covers 1988-present currently, but will allow you to search for content back to 1896 soon.

Let us know if you have any questions.

Read books.
Read them electronically.
Branner has many e-books for you to peruse.
Visit this page to see what we have and what’s on the way.

On a related task, we were trying to figure out what’s going on with the record for the microfilm version of the Phosphate Rocks of Arkansas (everyone talks about the future of print, but you really don’t hear much about the fate of microfilm…). It turns out that our print copy is now findable on Google Books, and it also turns out that Google Books has a nice new embeddable clip sharing feature. Run your mouse over the icon to the right of the hand and you can “save, send or embed a section of the page.”

The Phosphate Rocks of Arkansas By John Casper Branner, John Flesher Newsom

Clip away.

Stanford readers, we now have access to the Lyell Collection from the Geological Society of London. Check it out and let us know what you think.

From the site:

The Lyell Collection , created to mark the Geological Society of London’s 200th anniversary in 2007, represents one of the largest integrated collections of online Earth science literature available. Bringing together Journal of the Geological Society, Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology, Special Publications and key book series on a single electronic platform,the Lyell Collection is a unique resource for researcher and student alike.

We made reference to AGU’s digitizing efforts in the spring. More news is available here. Looks like the historic content will be ready for 2008.

Stanford readers:

SPE has changed the way our subscription connects to their elibrary. Before our IP authentication linked you through to the elibrary, but this procedure seems to have complicated access to the rest of their site. So, the next time you visit the site, you will need to create a login and register as a new user (if you’re already an SPE member, then you can use that information), then your IP will be recognized as before. More information and instructions follow on the SPE site.

Let us know if you have any questions.

Just found this site, African Journals Online, a collection of journals published in Africa. The objective of AJOL is to give greater visibility to the participating journals, and to the research they convey. The database covers the full range of academic disciplines, but does have a science section.

Earth Science titles include:

Nigerian Journal of Soil Science
Global Journal of Environmental Sciences
Journal of Mining and Geology

Years available and access vary depending on where you’re located.