Branner Blog

Take a look at Google Experimental Search. They’re offering five experimental features to enhance your searching: alternate views for search results, keyword suggestions, keyboard shortcuts, left-hand search navigation, and right-hand contextual search navigation.

I tried two. First, the keyword suggestions:

For a librarian, this wasn’t a very interesting option.

Next I tried alternative views. This was nice:

Once again I searched for “gold rush,” and although it’s hard to see in the example above, with the timeline view, you have a visualization of the 19th century and its related gold rush activity. I think this will be a nice aid for the students in our California Gold Rush class.

What do you think?

LANL will be doing necessary upgrades and maintenance on their SearchPlus and FlashPoint systems. They will be unavailable beginning at 5pm on Thursday, January 17 with resumption of service on Tuesday, January 22nd.

If you need to access SciSearch you may do so through ISI’s Web of Science.

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.

A round-up of news from the fall AGU meeting up in San Francisco:

• From the AGU website, news and a few podcasts.
• AGU dispatches from realclimate.
• Lots of Ink: News from the American Geophysical Union Meeting from the Knight Science Journalism Tracker.
• NYT’s dot earth.

Any more?

It’s time for the 2nd annual Bay Area Automated Mapping Association (BAAMA) Education award and mapping challenge. The competition is designed to support students in higher education using GIS both as a major field of study and in support of their own research fields. The top prize is $2,500 with a one-year membership in BAAMA, and a complementary entry to CalGIS in April, 2008 where you’ll present your work. Entries are due February 15, 2008. More information can be found at the BAAMA website. It would be great to have a Stanford student win this year!

In honor of the International Polar Year, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), created LIMA, the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica.

From the site: “As the first major scientific outcome of the IPY, LIMA truly fulfills the IPY goals. LIMA is an international effort, supports current scientific polar research, encourages new projects, and helps the general public visualize Antarctica and changes happening to this southernmost environment. Researchers and the general public can download LIMA and all of the component Landsat scenes at no charge.”

Take a look.

[via] Climate Feedback.

The Everglades are in the news again, with Congress for the first time (11/9/07) over-riding one of President Bush’s rare vetoes. At issue was a $23.2 billion water projects bill, which includes funds for restoring the damaged southern Florida ecosystem. For a vivid picture of the Everglades landscape and ecology before decades of development changed it, read Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s “Everglades, River of Grass.” The first edition came out in 1947, a revised edition in 1978, a 50th anniversary edition in 1997, and the 60th anniversary edition this year. Douglas was a lifelong champion of the ‘glades, and a long life indeed she lived: 108 years. Even in old age, she was a riveting speaker. Before she was an environmentalist, Douglas was a journalist (for her father’s Miami Herald newspaper), and her book contains lively stories of early Florida history and flamboyant personalities. Although untrained in science, she had taken a course at Wellesley in environmental geography, so she saw and wrote about the Everglades as a complex system, whose fragile aquatic balance was greatly impacted by agriculture (sugar-growing in the south and dairy-farming in the north), drainage, channelling, and “improvement.” She grasped the intricate interplay between environment and public policy, and strove to influence policy in the direction of preserving the unique and precious region she cherished.

Are you going to be in or around Chicago between now and March 2008? If you love cartography, you will not want to miss the Festival of Maps. Over 30 organizations are joining in this city-wide celebration by hosting exhibits, talks, and meetings devoted to cartography. The Field Museum has mounted an exhibit entitled “Maps: Finding Our Place in the World” featuring a stone Inca map, a landscape vessel from Peru, a eucalyptus bark map from Australia, as well as more conventional maps from the 1200s to the present. The University of Chicago is hosting an exhibit featuring the spectacular Roman “Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae dating from the mid-1570’s. The Art Institute of Chicago has mounted an exhibit of historical maps of Paris. Other events can be found at the Festival of Maps Web site.

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.

Satellite imagery and digital mapping has changed the way we interact with and know about large-scale disasters. A case in point are the Southern California wildfires.

The San Diego Office Of Emergency Services is releasing maps each day of the burn areas, the perimeters of the fires, and the evacuation areas.

NASA has a series of satellite images showing the spread of the fires over the past few days over all of Southern California, one taken from the Space Shuttle Discovery as it rose into orbit on Tuesday.

Google is offering content from KPBS, which can be loaded into Google Earth.

The US Forest Service has released infrared imagery showing the locations and intensity of the fires in San Diego. I have yet to be able to access this imagery. My guess is the traffic has been so heavy that the site is down. Keep trying to get in over the next few days.