Branner Blog

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.

The result of one of your requests, our subscription to the conference proceedings of the International Rainwater Catchment Systems Association is now live.

Stanford readers can access the content through the proceedings page of the IRCSA website.

Non-Stanford readers can browse the conference abstracts.

The International Rainwater Catchment Systems Association grew out of a series of international conferences held in Hawaii 1984, Virgin Islands 1984, Thailand 1987 and the Philippines 1989. Since its formation, the association has run conferences every two years, in Taiwan 1991, Kenya 1993, China 1995, Iran 1997, Brazil 1999, Germany 2001, Mexico 2003 and India 2005. The next conference will be held in Australia this year.

Is your research taking you out of the U.S. this summer? Check out the geological survey of your destination-nation. There are a couple of sites with fairly comprehensive lists of international geological surveys and links to websites of the organizations that have them.

Mainz maintains one here and the Geological Survey of Japan here.

We are also storing related documents under the del.icio.us tag “international.” Find them here.

And, of course, come visit us in person for all of materials in print.

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?

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.”

Here’s a link to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) for the Earth Sciences. I offer this site in response to a question from one of our most frequent referencees(?). In addition to the EGU published and patron-recommended Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, DOAJ links to about 100 other Earth Science related open access journals.

For information about DOAJ and their definition of open access, go here.