Table of Contents

• What's better than SciSearch? SciSearch Plus!
• More electronic journals from Springer now available
• Chemistry journal archives online
• Scholarly communication and journal costs
• Library Director re-elected to NISO Board of Directors
• Research Library's Van de Sompel leads at Open Archives Workshop at CERN
• Nature publishes Encyclopedia of Life Sciences
• New electronic journals from the Research Library
• Search engines: Google sticks to their knitting

SciSearch® at LANL is the most popular and heavily used of the bibliographic databases provided by the Research Library. Now the Library is taking it to the next level with SciSearch® Plus. This new resource has more content and many new features. It is currently in beta testing, and when ready will replace the current SciSearch and Social SciSearch databases. (In the future other databases such as INSPEC and Engineering Index will be merged in.) Key features include:

• SciSearch now goes back to 1945 (previously started at 1974).
• SciSearch and Social SciSearch can be searched together, getting a single combined results list.
• conference proceedings in science and technology will be added soon

Features: With SciSearch Plus you can:

• login to set personal settings for your preferred ways of interacting with the database
• view bibliographies (article references) with one click from the results list, and the bibliographies have been enhanced with fuller citations where available
• access full-text and other resources through the LinkSeeker icon
• mark records on the results list to print, e-mail or download records in several formats
• do automatic downloading into bibliographic management software such as EndNote and ProCite
• browse cited authors and search cited references in a completely re-designed interface
• set up alerts to stay current with the literature
• refine a search by using the "Revise this search" link on the results page
• view your search history
• more easily do multiple searches for a given period, because date ranges you set are kept for the session ("sticky dates")

SciSearch Plus will be available as a beta release until the end of January. Take the opportunity to try out this new interface w and send us your comments using the "Report a problem" link that appears on the bottom of most pages.

Kathy Varjabedian

The LANL Research Library has just made available the full-text of all 474 electronic journals published by Springer Verlag. You now have access at your desktop to titles such as Calcolo, Microscopy and Microanalysis, Granular Matter, Nonlinear Differential Equations and Applications and Journal of Human Genetics. Hundreds of additional titles are available in the fields of life sciences, chemical sciences, geosciences, computer science, mathematics, medicine, physics and astronomy, engineering, environmental sciences, law, and economics. Most titles are available back to 1997 and many have volumes from earlier years.

Links to the full-text articles from the Springer e-journals are available through SciSearch® Plus at LANL, INSPEC® at LANL, BIOSIS® at LANL and other databases by using the LinkSeeker icon appearing on search results. The Springer e-journals are also searchable through FlashPoint and directly through Science Server® at LANL.

Two book series from Springer are also available electronically--Lecture Notes in Computer Science and Topics in Current Chemistry.

Please send comments to Eteam@lanl.gov.

Carol Hoover

Older chemistry journals from the American Chemical Society's Journal Archives are now available from the LANL Research Library. This online archive lets you search the full text of every title published by ACS from the year of first issue through 1997. You will have access to more than 11,000 ACS journal issues containing 500,000 articles and 2.5 million pages. Coupled with the Library's current ACS subscriptions, online access is available to the entire collection of ACS online journals. Some of the titles available are Analytical Chemistry, Biochemistry, Chemical Reviews, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Journal of Physical Chemistry, and Macromolecules.

Access to ACS full text articles is available from our online databases using the Linkseeker icon appearing on search results. Another way to get to the ACS journals is via the Research Library's American Chemical Society e-journals page.

Jeane Strub

Several academic libraries have created "sticker-shock" pages to illustrate to their patrons the high costs of many important journals. See these pages:

Sticker Shock at Cornell University Engineering and Computer Science Library
Library Sees Red Over Rising Journal Prices at Brown University

Journal costs are just one aspect of the entire system created by the production and d

issemination of scholarly research. These issues are part of a growing crisis within the scholarly communication system that both academics and professionals are trying to resolve through fundamental restructuring of the system itself. Working for change within this system will involve analysis and sensitive interactions with complex economic, political, and sociological issues.

The Research Library is concerned and working actively to enable change in the area of scholarly communications. If you are interested in these issues please e-mail Lou Pray or Donna Berg for further information (lpray@lanl.gov, donna.berg@lanl.gov)

Donna Berg

The voting members of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have re-elected Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library Director Rick Luce to serve a second three-year term on the Board of Directors.

NISO is the only U.S. group accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to develop and promote technical standards for use in information delivery services, providing voluntary standards for libraries, publishers and related information technology organizations. Under Luce's leadership the LANL Library has become known internationally as one of the cutting edge digital libraries.

Donna Berg

Perhaps the most exciting information meeting this fall was the 2nd Workshop on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) at CERN. Focusing on both the OAI work as well as scholarly communication, attendees came from 20 countries to participate in discussions on OAI technical matters and issues involved in transforming scholarly communication.

OAI Executive and Keynote Speaker Herbert Van de Sompel reported that OAI will continue work on tech specifications to further increase interoperability between e-print repositories. Emerging themes from the workshop were the need to increase awareness among scholars of open archiving and concern about the fundamental shift required in the evaluation of scholars by funding agencies and universities. Presentations covered the latest release of the OAI protocol and repositories such as MathDoc (Germany), the MIT DSpace project (US), the Electronique and HyperArticles at CNRS (France), and the National Science Digital Library.

While in Europe, Herbert Van de Sompel also gave the keynote address at the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Meeting in Florence, Italy. In that keynote, he gave an insight into the motivations that led him to initiating the OAI and OpenURL efforts, and he described how both are evolving. Herbert presented two more keynotes at Belgian meetings focusing on the transformation of scholarly communication: one at his alma mater, Ghent University, and the other at the University Foundation. Both were attended by a very heterogeneous audience including researchers, librarians, and students as well as administrators and provosts of universities.

URLs:
2nd OAI Workshop, Geneva - http://library.cern.ch/Announcement.htm
DCMI Meeting, Florence - http://www.bncf.net/dc2002/
Open Archives for Research Seminar, Ghent -
http://www.lib.rug.ac.be/seminar/seminar_openarchives_EN.html
University Foundation Ethical Forum, Brussels -
http://www.universityfoundation.be/fr/sc_forum.php

Donna Berg

For many years the staff of Nature has discussed the publication of an encyclopedia of biology and biomedicine. The massive work, Encyclopedia of Life Sciences, is now finished and can be found in the Research Library's Reference area
[REF QH 302.5 E525 2002].

The editorial vision was to provide an in-depth synthesis of modern biology. The audience is graduate level, but anyone interested in the life sciences will find the set extremely useful. The work aims to define and describe contemporary biology; to integrate current theory, understanding and practice of all the basic and applied aspects of the life sciences, with special emphasis on cell and molecular biology. There are over 3000 entries, contributed by about 5000 scientists. Each article is self contained, with illustrations and a selected bibliography to provide supplementary reading in key resources. There are also references to the primary journal literature. The index volume includes a special glossary, a study guide to fundamental introductory articles and appendix material aimed at the non-specialist, as well as a topical index and full contents list.

Donna Berg

The following new electronic journals have been added to the library collection and are available from your desktop:

Biology
Applied Vegetation Science
http://www.bioone.org/bioone/?request=get-journals-list&issn=1402-2001
Economics and Human Biology
http://sciserver.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/sciserv.pl?collection=journals&journal=1570677x
Journal of Vegetation Science
http://www.bioone.org/bioone/?request=get-journals-list&issn=1100-9233

Engineering
GPS Solutions
http://sciserver.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/sciserv.pl?collection=journals&journal=10805370
Polymer Engineering and Science
http://www.4plasticsresearch.org/toc.php?mode=byjournal&level=2&
values=Polymer+Engineering+and+Science

Mathematics and Computer Science
Journal of Digital Imaging
http://sciserver.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/sciserv.pl?collection=journals&journal=08971889

eteam@lanl.gov

As Google has developed, the company has taken some strong stands against irritating technologies--they did not run banner ads, they held out against pop-ups and pop-unders; they have refused ads from specific organizations and have done whatever was necessary to keep their site spare and pristine. I think of Google as the zen of search engine sites. Their dominance in the field has made their internal decisions resound throughout the web world. Recently they have been challenged by governments, religious bodies, businesses, and individuals. In spite of these unpleasant incidents Google continues to rely on a code of conduct simply phrased as "don't be evil." As the organization continues to grow we can only hope they will be able to hold fast to their original mission. Recently Google has added image searching availability for those affiliated with Sprint; become a partner with Yahoo! JAPAN and offered new search solutions for corporate administrators in secure computer environments. In case you missed the most recent Google rumor; an IPO is expected this quarter.

Donna Berg

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The name and e-mail address of the Library member who contributed an article appears at the end of the article. If you have comments or further questions, please contact that person. If you have general questions or comments about the Newsletter itself, please contact the Newsletter Editor, Kathy Varjabedian.