Life Sciences Library

CONTENTS

• Fall Semester Activities
• Retirement and Other Changes
• Knovel
• University Libraries and Life Sciences Library Home Page
• Biological Abstracts and Web of Science
• AccessScience
• JSTOR Additions
• RAND Documents Online Records Added to The CAT
• PubMed Central Update
• Library Contacts
• Library Hours
• Electronic Newsletter Subscription Information

Fall Semester Activities in Full Swing

Classes
It's not to late to schedule a fall class, contact your subject librarian. Help your students find information they need for their course work and research quickly and easily.

Open House 2007 - Next Week
Tuesday, September 18 - Wednesday, September 19 10:00am to 6:00pm
This event introduces new students to the resources and facilities of the University Libraries. This year’s theme is Treasure Island and students will get to explore many areas of the Libraries. The self-guided "tour" takes approximately an hour to complete. The Open House is fun event for new students to see the buildings, collections, and meet library faculty and staff.

Last fall we created a nature trail to give the students a taste of the resources available in the Life Sciences Library. We were surprised at the numbers of students who took the short hike and learned about the Reference Desk, the Stacks, the Current Journals area, and the Reference Collection. This year the trail is a beach trail with more explanations of library resources at the 4 stops. Last fall over 5500 students attended the Open House with over 3500 visiting the Life Sciences Library. So please understand if the Library is a bit noisy and hectic those days.

Angel
Librarians can create specialized Angel Guides for your classes so that students are directed to the best databases and other library resources for their projects.

Joann's Retirement and Other Changes

Joann Warefield who had been part of the Life Sciences Library since the 1950s retired on June 30th. She requested that we only have a tiny gathering of family and coworkers. If you would like to send her best wishes in a card, we will collect and forward them to her. Send the card to Kathy Fescemyer, Life Sciences Library, 408 Paterno.

Nancy Henry has assumed the role of acting head of the Life Sciences Library for this fiscal year. Amy Paster is still at the Library but is taking a year’s rest from being head of the library.

Knovel

Knovel brings essential sci-tech reference data to life in a virtual technical library that solves problems for engineers, applied scientists and librarians worldwide. With one interface the Knovel Library combines authoritative reference content from major sci-tech publishers including John Wiley & Sons, McGraw-Hill and Elsevier. This data is enhanced with time-saving analytical tools to help analyze and manipulate the data.

Users can analyze and reorganize the data in over 800 full-text engineering and scientific reference works, handbooks, and databases with Knovel. They can sort, filter and export data from 'live tables', resolve equations and plot graphs, capture values from existing graphs and perform 'what if' experiments on the data.

The engineers love this system and with its many relevant handbooks and encyclopedias. Resources are included for agriculture especially, food science, biology and biochemistry, environmental research and chemical information. Take a few minutes and experiment with Knovel system, you might find it very useful for you and your’s lab’s research.

University Libraries and the Life Sciences Library Home Pages

Both have new versions, but essentially the same content just rearranged. Please let us know if you can't find the information that you previously used. The new page is in line with the overall library web site. We hope this will help you navigate through the system more easily. If you are looking for the E-Resources List (A-Z), it has been renamed to "Databases by Title (A-Z)".

Biological Abstracts and Web of Science

The interface for searching Biological Abstracts has changed to the same one that searches Web of Science (Science Citation Index). The same company owns both databases and EndNote. Access to the full range of Biological Abstracts from 1926 to current is now available and updated weekly. You can save your searches on the ISI server or your local hard drive.

The ISI platform offers results analysis to rank results by source, author or other criteria, easy export to citation managers such as EndNote, creation of citation alerts to email you when a particular article is cited (so you can track when your own articles or your favorite articles by other researchers are cited), and various other features. It allows you to cross-search Web of Science to find unique (i.e. not in Biological Abstracts) citations with a simple click on the "Cross Search: view additional results from other databases" link.

But don’t get used to this interface for Biological Abstracts or Web of Science, because it is in the process of changing. The new interface is available from the current screens. Try it out and see what you think – it has some new capabilities.

AccessScience

AccessScience now has a new look also, which features fully searchable content from McGraw-Hill's Encyclopedia of Science & Technology, 10th Edition. The home page has improved topic organization and features to help you find your subject quickly and easily. What you will find in AccessSciences includes:

• Over 8,500 online articles from over 5,000 contributors, including 36 Nobel Prize winners.
• Research updates from the McGraw-Hill Yearbooks of Science & Technology, 110,000+
  definitions from the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and  Technical Terms.
• 15,000 illustrations and graphics, and bibliographies containing more than 28,000 literature
  citations.
• Biographies of 2,000 well-known scientists from the Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific
   Biography®.
• The latest news in science and technology from Science News® and ScienCentral® videos.

JSTOR Additions

JSTOR added another group of new journals in May. Here's the list of ones for the Life Sciences.

•Agricultural History - Vols. 1 - 77, 1927-2003 : Moving Wall: 3 years
•Epidemiology and Infection, previously The Journal of Hygiene - Vols. 3 - 127, 1903-2001 :
  Moving Wall: 5 years
•Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment - Vols. 1, Issues 1-10, 2003 : Moving Wall:
  3 years
•Northeastern Naturalist, previously Maine Naturalist - Vols. 1 - 10, 1993-2003 : Moving Wall:
  3 years
•The Plant Cell - Vols. 1 - 16, 1989-2004 : Moving Wall: 2 years
•Southeastern Naturalist - Vols. 1 - 2, 2002-2003 : Moving Wall: 3 years
•Ursus, previously Bears: Their Biology and Management, also previously Proceedings
   of the Bear Workshop (International Conference on Bear Research and Management) -
   Vols. 1 - 14, 1968-2003 : Moving Wall: 3 years

RAND Documents Online

Over 1,200 records for RAND documents available online have been added to The CAT. For nearly 60 years, the RAND Corporation has pursued its nonprofit mission by conducting research on a wide array of public policy issues, including national security, business, education, health, law, and science.

An Advanced Search on Author "Rand Corporation" limited to Library "Online Resources" will retrieve the records.

PubMed Central Update

PubMed Central (PMC), NLM's free digital archive of full-text journal articles, reached the one million-article mark the week of June 18. Now in its seventh year, PMC is enhanced each week with articles from over 350 important life sciences journals whose publishers have agreed to deposit current issues. All of the content submitted to PMC is converted to a normalized electronic format for long-term storage and display on the web.

PMC Back Issue Digitization Project has made several historically important works available in their entirety, including: Annals of Surgery from v.1, 1885; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. from v. 1, 1915; and all of the titles published by the American Society for Microbiology, including the Journal of Bacteriology, from v.1, 1916. This year, scanning was completed for the American Journal of Public Health v. 2 1912, and very soon BMJ will be available back to v. 1, 1857 along with all of the specialty journals published by the British Medical Association. Each of these titles continues to participate in PMC by submitting current content in full-text electronic form for every issue.

To learn more about PubMed Central, or to browse its contents, go to:

Library Contacts

Responsibility for instruction, reference assistance, and the selection of books and other materials for the Life Sciences Library is divided by broad subject areas. Faculty, staff and students are encouraged to request assistance or to recommend new titles for purchase. Please contact the appropriate subject specialist.

The Campus mail address for all these individuals is 408 Paterno Library.

Library Hours

Library hours, are available on the Libraries webpage:

http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/hours/uphours.html

Electronic Newsletter Subscription Information

This newsletter is available only in electronic form. If you know of anyone who is interested in receiving this newsletter, please send their name, department and e-mail address to:

  •  Kathy Fescemyer. We encourage comments, suggestions and questions!