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Upcoming: E-Science colloquium with
Daniel Atkins
What is e-Science? In the future, e-Science will refer
to the large scale science that will increasingly be carried out through distributed
global collaborations enabled by the Internet. Typically, a feature of such collaborative
scientific enterprises is that they will require access to very large data collections,
very large scale computing resources and high performance visualization back
to the individual user scientists.
September 19th Daniel Atkins will be speaking on E-Science
on at 9:00 a.m. in the Physics Auditorium. Atkins is the Chief of the NSF Blue
Ribbon Panel on cyberinfrastructure. The NSF’s committee report, Revolutionizing
Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure stresses that cyberinfrastructure
is “essential,
not optional, to the aspirations of research communities.” The critical
needs of science and the rapid progress in information technology are converging
to provide a unique opportunity to create and apply a sustained cyberinfrastructure
that will “radically empower” scientific research.
Atkins describes a wave of grass-roots collaborative
activities that have pushed technology to a new level where people, information,
research instruments and computational tools are connecting on a global scale.
The talk will survey the emergent concepts of cyberinfrastructure (CI) and
its empowerment of CI-enabled science, a.k.a eScience. This talk is intended
to create understanding and common ground for further consideration of the strategic
role of eScience within the LANL R&D communities. In Los Alamos we need to
begin immediately to create a successful strategy that will provide the ability
to scale across disciplines and institutions with goals and budgets that allow
progress to be assessed and focused.
 Daniel E. Atkins is faculty and head of the Alliance for
Community Technology at the University of Michigan. Since the mid 1980s, Atkins
has been a leader in the use of distributed computing/communication to support
team-based knowledge work. He recently served as Chair of the NSF's Blue
Ribbon Advisory Panel that authored the
landmark 2003 report Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure.
He is leading an NFS effort with a $1 billion per year budget to develop a cyberinfrastructure
that can “change
profoundly what scientists and engineers do, how they do it, and who participates.”
What: Colloquium with Daniel E Atkins, sponsored
by the CSO, the CIO and the Research Library
When: Monday September 19, 2005 9 - 10:30 am. Reception
to follow.
Where: Physics Auditorium
 Donna
Berg (donna.berg@lanl.gov)
New library catalog coming soon
Later this month, the Research Library go into production with a new library catalog
running new software. This new
system will bring faster searching and updated features, some of which will roll
out during the fall. The catalog will continue to enable
searching of both print and electronic resources such as books, reports, patents,
journals, and websites. Features will include basic and advanced searching,
saving and recombining searches, and collecting bibliographic records to save,
email or download. You will still be able to place online requests to borrow
books, see what you have checked out and renew items. The system also offers
alerts, so that you can receive email when the library acquires material of interest
to you.
Over the summer we have been installing and testing the new system, which will
go live near the end of September. During the actual conversion, no new
records will be added to the catalog for a few weeks, but circulation will
continue -- you can still borrow books and other materials.
Watch next month's newsletter for more details.
Kathy
Varjabedian (kv@lanl.gov)
New Google search on the Research Library website
You can now search the Research Library website with its own Google search.
Searches cover most Library website pages, including journal and database information
pages. Also, a variety of locally loaded content such as:
 LANL reports (39,000+) - LANL patents (1300+)
- Science of Tsunami Hazards journal
- LANL-sponsored conference proceedings (80+)
- Library staff publications
- ebooks such as Drawing Requirements Manual; Numerical Recipes Online; the
NAS-NS Radiochemistry series
- Local archive of ANSI and NEIS standards
For most reports, you can search the full-text, providing a deeper level of
searching.
The library catalog, SearchPlus and other databases are not included, so
continue to use those interfaces to find material not listed above.
 BibTeX
output available through LinkSeeker
LinkSeeker users can now download the bibliographic information
of records in BibTeX, a simple but popular format and program for storing
and processing bibliographic references. To capture citation information
of records in BibTeX and other formats, see the Bibliographic Information heading
within the LinkSeeker window found on a results page. Use the dropdown
box under Download citation service to select BibTeX, EndNote, ProCite, Reference
Manager or RefWorks.
Laura
Downs (laurad@lanl.gov)
 The
Energy Daily now available
The LANL Research Library has licensed and is making available online access
to The Energy Daily for
Laboratory employees.
If you need to keep up to date on major developments in the energy industry, The
Energy Daily starts your morning off with up-to-date information.
The Energy Daily will analyze and explain breaking energy business news,
congressional hearings, regulations, market intelligence and trends. You
will be connected to important changes on Capitol Hill, at the White House, DOE,
FERC and within the top echelons of private-sector management not just in the
United States, but worldwide. Get the latest
on DOE developments and funding, EPA's clean air actions, FERC actions and rulings,
European deregulation, legal battles, mergers and acquisitions and much more.
The Energy Daily is available via the web, Monday through Friday, with
a userID and password allowing access anywhere in the world.
If you are interested in access to The Energy Daily, please request an Acknowledgement
Form from the Research Library and return as indicated. A userID and password
will then be provided to you for instant access.
As the number of available IDs is very limited please submit your signed form
as soon as possible.
Carol
Hoover (hoover@lanl.gov)
 ASM Handbooks and Alloy Data now online!
If you work with materials, you are probably familiar with the books from ASM
International. These titles, which include the ASM Handbook Series, Alloy
Digest, Handbook of Corrosion Data and Engineering Properties of
Steel, have been licensed by the Research Library and are now available online
for Laboratory employees.
You can access ASM Materials Information Online (MIO) at
http://products.asminternational.org/matinfo/index.jsp .
The MIO product includes:
- ASM Handbook Series, v.1-21 - including Alloy Phase Diagrams and Fatigue
and Fracture
- Metals Handbook Desk Edition
- Engineered Materials Handbook Desk Edition
- ASM Alloy Center Online - property data from Alloy Digest 1952-present, Handbook
of Corrosion Data and more
For help in using ASM Materials Information Online, use the FAQ under the
Help link or directly at http://products.asminternational.org/matinfo/help.html.
Send
questions or comments to Carol Hoover at hoover@lanl.gov.
New electronic journals from the Research
Library
The following new electronic journals have been added to the library collection
and are available from your desktop:
Biology and Medicine
Nucleic Acids Symposium Series
Chemistry
Acta Chimica Slovenica
Annual
Reports on the Progress of Chemistry. Section A. Inorganic Chemistry
Annual
Reports on the Progress of Chemistry. Section B. Organic Chemistry
Annual
Reports on the Progress of Chemistry. Section C. Physical Chemistry
Engineering
Journal
of Display Technology
Environment and Earth Sciences
New Zealand Journal
of Geology and Geophysics
Mathematics and Computer Science
Journal of the Australian
Mathematical Society
Real Analysis Exchange
Physics
Europhysics News
Journal of the Acoustical
Society of America, 1929-1996
Carol
Hoover (hoover@lanl.gov)
Search
engines: Personalization and search refinement
 Google's newest beta product is
a zippy new Sidebar;
and it really is on the side. Part of Google Desktop, it lives on the right hand
side of your screen and does seem a bit pushy -- shoving your icons about in
order to make room for some cascading windows that are part of one of the Sidebar
tools. You can re-size or choose "Auto
Hide" though and these are good options.
There are nine different parts of the Sidebar. They range from an
Email tool to a photo slideshow. Other features are a smart News tool,
that customizes the content based on tracking your electronic reading. There
is also Web Clips for RSS and Atom feeds; What's Hot delivers popular news
stories; the Scratch Pad lets you jot down notes and Quick View allows
access to your most recently used files and Web pages. The Weather window provides
displays for as many weather locations as you could want and the Stocks tool
helps you track publicly traded stocks. The
Sidebar tools can be customized and the new version allows sorting results by
type which was a major problem with the previous version. Combining all
these applets creates a new group of useful tools in a fresh interface.
Our friends at Yahoo are also spinning out new beta tools. Mindset allows
you to sort search results into commercial and non-commercial groups and
allows you to control the results with a "slider." This
means you can limit results to academic and research-oriented sources.
Their
newest service is "Hot Zone" which will feature war correspondent Kevin Sites
(of NBC and CNN) providing content and video programming on armed conflict. This
will start later this month and is a first indication of the new emphasis from
Yahoo! on media. The new Yahoo! Media Group now ensconced in Santa
Monica is gearing up to develop new media-based services to make your online
time even richer with video, music, IM and photos. Providing new search and recommendation
services for this content will create a very different Yahoo!
Donna
Berg (donna.berg@lanl.gov)
 Van de Sompel receives ANSI Meritorious
Service Award
Herbert Van de Sompel is one of four recipients of the American National
Standards Institute's (ANSI) Meritorious Service Award. The Award is given in
recognition of outstanding service in enabling ANSI to attain the objectives
for which it was founded through significant contribution to the U.S. voluntary
standardization system. Herbert was instrumental in the development of the ANSI/NISO
OpenURL standard, which has transformed information services within the scholarly
and bibliographic community.
ANSI stated that Van de Sompel, of the Digital Library
Research & Prototyping team at the Research Library, was instrumental
in the development of the ANSI/NISO OpenURL standard, which has transformed information
services within the scholarly and bibliographic community. The research he undertook
over many years demonstrates his
capacity to recognize the changes in his environment and respond, and the ability
to apply remarkable energy to his technical vision.
New technique for transferring digital
assets
The June issue of D-Lib Magazine, the key place of publication for digital
library research, featured an article by the Research Library's Jeroen Bekaert
and Herbert Van de Sompel, "A
Standards-based Solution for the Accurate Transfer of Digital Assets."
This article describes results of a collaboration between the LANL
Research Library and the American
Physical Society (APS) aimed at designing and implementing a robust solution
for the recurrent transfer of digital assets from the APS collection to LANL.
In this solution, various recent standards are combined to obtain an asset transfer
framework that should be attractive as a means to optimize content transfer in
environments beyond the specific APS/LANL project. The proposed solution uses
an XML-based complex object format (the MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration Language)
for the application-neutral representation of compound digital assets of all
sorts. It uses a pull-oriented HTTP-based protocol (the Open Archives Initiative
Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) that allows incrementally collecting new and
updated assets, represented as XML documents, from a producing archive. It builds
on an XML-specific technique (W3C XML Signatures) to provide guarantees regarding
authenticity and accuracy of the transferred assets. Because the proposed solution
is standards-based, it is largely deployable using off-the-shelf tools, and it
is well-suited for cross-archive and cross-community content transfer. It is
hoped that the solution will attract the interest of content producers other
than the APS, and content consumers other than LANL.
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H-index: a new measure for individual scientific research impact
Jorge Hirsch, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, has
proposed a new bibliometric measure for evaluating the research quality of individual
researchers. Called the "h-index," it is presented as a way to quantify
the impact and relevance of an individual researcher's scholarly output.
Hirsch has defined "h-index" this way: "A scientist has index h if h of his/her
N papers have at least h citations
each, and the other (N - h) papers have fewer than h citations each." In
other words, a scientist with an h-index of 15 will have published 15 papers
that have received at least 15 citations each. According to Hirsch, the
best researchers should therefore have the highest h-indexes.
The new measure is seen as a way to overcome problems of other measures based
on publication. Counting the total number of papers by a scientist provides
a measure of productivity, but not of quality. The number of citations
for a paper can indicate quality, but co-authoring a widely cited review article
could give a false indication of that quality. And it is difficult to use
self-citation to inflate one's own h-index.
You can easily find the h-index for a given researcher using the Research Library's
SearchPlus database. Just sort the papers by "times cited". Here
are some of the highest ranked physicists, by h-index:
| 110 |
Ed Witten |
Princeton Institute for Advanced Study |
Devised M theory |
| 94 |
Marvin Cohen |
UC Berkeley |
Condensed matter theorist |
| 91 |
Philip Anderson |
Princeton University |
Nobel prize, 1977, condensed matter |
| 86 |
Manual Cardona |
Max Planck Institute |
Superconductors |
| 79 |
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes |
ESPCI, Paris |
Nobel prize, 1991, condensed matter |
You
can read Hirsch's article at arXiv.org. There
are also articles on h-index at Physics
World and Nature.
Carol
Hoover (hoover@lanl.gov)
Scientists reignite open access debate
A group of computer scientists yesterday reignited the debate over access
to results of publicly funded research, issuing a detailed riposte to journal
publishers who oppose plans to make research freely available on the internet.
The seven computer experts — including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of
the worldwide web, who is a professor at Southampton University— sent their
analysis to Research Councils UK, the umbrella body responsible for all publicly
funded research in Britain. It called on the body to stick to its proposal to
make it compulsory for research papers to be deposited in open-access databases
as soon as possible.
Journal publishers are campaigning against the draft RCUK policy, for which
a period of public consultation ends today. Sally Morris, chief executive of
the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, said: "We are
convinced that RCUK's proposed policy will inevitably lead to the destruction
of journals." Reed
Elsevier, the largest commercial publisher of scientific journals, said its analysis "shows
that if the RCUK proposal was implemented, access would not increase beyond current
levels; current quality assurance levels could be reduced; UK higher education
institutes would end up paying more for articles they can already access; the
continuity and completeness of the scientific record would be threatened; and
the productivity of multiple stakeholders in the UK science research community
would be reduced."
But the computer scientists maintain the publisher's claims
are unsubstantiated, "not
least because evidence has shown that not only can journals co-exist and thrive
alongside author self-archiving, they can actually benefit from it. Authors,
institutions, funders and publishers benefit from the increased visibility, use
and impact of research articles that are self-archived and freely available to
all." (from Financial Times, August 31, 2005 issue)
Note: The UK open access debate echoes that of the US NIH debate on the same
issues. For more information read Research Library Newsletter articles
of November 2004 and March 2005.
Carol
Hoover (hoover@lanl.gov)
Comments?
If you have comments or suggestions for other topics you would like to see covered
in this newsletter, please send your ideas to the Newsletter
Editor at kv@lanl.gov.
Want to be notified of new
issues?
Newsletter Editorial Team: Donna Berg, Helen Boorman, Lou
Pray, and Kathy Varjabedian. |
