The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. –Albert Eistein
We have a new display with Albert Einstein and Pi Day! Pi is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diamerter. Pi Day is celebrated by math entusiasts around the world on March 14th. Pi = 3.1415926535…. we don’t have enough room to fit the whole number in. So please join us and enjoy a slice of pie! March 21 at 1:59 at the Sciences Library.
The Science’s libguides has a new link that is a wonderful addition we hope you will use. It is the ScienceCinema. The following is the offical description of it.
Scientific videos highlighting the most exciting research and development sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) are now available through ScienceCinema. The multimedia search tool was launched today as part of a one-day workshop, “Multimedia and Visualization Innovations for Science,” jointly hosted by Microsoft and the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI), held in Redmond, Washington. Jeffrey Salmon, Deputy Director for Resource Management with the DOE Office of Science, said, “Video, animation, visualization, and other forms of multimedia are now widely used to record, share, and collaborate in science. Because of the U.S. Department of Energy’s central role in science, we are also at the center of technology for collecting and disseminating this new media. ScienceCinema’s pioneering search and retrieval capability provides the public with a way to quickly access and view our multimedia-based R&D information.”
ScienceCinema uses innovative, state-of-the-art audio indexing and speech recognition technology from Microsoft Research to allow users to quickly find video files produced by the DOE National Laboratories and other DOE research facilities. When users search for specific scientific words and phrases of interest to them, precise snippets of the video where the specific search term was spoken will appear along with a timeline. Users can then select a snippet or a segment along the timeline to begin playing the video at the exact point in the video where the words were spoken. The timeline is synced with transcripts of the targeted portion of video.
It is anticipated that scientific videos, animations, interactive visualizations, and other multimedia will become an increasingly prominent form of scientific communications. ScienceCinema was produced, in part, as a proof of concept to demonstrate the value of speech recognition in the complex vocabulary of science. While the launch of the video database will include an initial 1,000 hours of content, it will continue to grow as new DOE R&D-related videos are produced.
ScienceCinema was developed by the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) in partnership with Microsoft Research. OSTI, within the Office of Science, is responsible for broadly disseminating and preserving the Energy Department’s scientific output. Microsoft Research provides the audio indexing technology for ScienceCinema as part of the Microsoft Research Audio Video Indexing System (MAVIS) project. MAVIS is a set of software components that use speech recognition technology to enable searching of digitized spoken content. More information about MAVIS and the technology can be viewed at the MAVIS project page.
The library is currently doing a trial of a database titled: “ProQuest Environmental Science Collection”
This multidisciplinary database, provides unparalleled and comprehensive coverage of the environmental sciences. Abstracts and citations are drawn from over 10,000 serials including scientific journals, conference proceedings, reports, monographs, books and government publications. It includes the subject areas of: Agriculture, Air pollution, Control technologies, Endangered species, Energy, Environmental design, Environmental education, Environmental law and policy, Environmental safety, Geophysical and climate change, Global warming, International environmental policy, Land use and pollution, Marine pollution, Noise pollution, Population, Population studies, Radiological contamination, Resource management, Solid and toxic waste, Sustainability, Toxicological effects, Transportation, Waste management, Water pollution, and Wildlife/Biodiversity as well as full-text to Environmental Impact Statements.
Please send any comments or questions to Kari Kozak at kari-kozak@uiowa.edu before Feb. 20th.
More information can also be found here.
Welcome back to school! Hope you had a wonderful break. We have been busy getting the websites updated and adding our new library guides. If you check out the Chemistry website for example you will find a new way to search and find out news happening in the Sciences Library. Please checkout our current display about snow, and our next one will be about Charles Darwin. We still have free coffee and cookies available so please come and visit us. Don’t forget our wonderful bean bag chairs on second and third floor. If you are in need of help finding books we are here for you. Leo and Kari, our librarians, are here if you have any reference needs.
The holidays are over but at the Sciences Library we have a snow display up. Avalanches, blizzards, and the physics of skiing we have it all . Come and check out our winter wonderland!
If you have any suggestions for a displays please send them to us. We are always looking for new ideas.
The display has been changed to Hibernation and Migration. We have some beautiful wildlife that has been donated by the Museum of Natural History. We hope that you will enjoy the display. Feeling chilly? We still have coffee so please help yourself when you are in.
The Science Libraries is celebrating Halloween! Come join us for coffee, and if you fill out a word search and turn it in you will get a treat. Learn how to make fake blood. Come see bats from Museum of Natural History. Geoscience is lending us some bones. Kai brought in his pet cat Mitra exhumed the other day after 30 years. We have books and trivia to look at.
The American Mathematical Society is pleased to announce the latest version of MathScinet. The new release includes the following enhancements and features:
· Improved display of mathematics using MathJax, an open source JavaScript display engine for mathematics that works in all modern
browsers (http://www.mathjax.org/)
· Direct links to books, book chapters, and series using DOIs registered by publishers
· Bibliographic entries and direct links for Ph.D. theses in mathematics, applied mathematics, and statistics from the ProQuest
Dissertations & Theses database
For more information please see: http://www.ams.org/mathscinet/help/about.html.
Do you know what Oct 23 is?
It’s Mole day and the moles have taken over the Sciences Library.
Come and see how much a mole of sugar is, test your brain with mole trivia, search for the words with a word find and see some real moles!
Check out more information on http://www.moleday.org/index.htm
Want to make the most out of the holiday:
Exciting news, we got new bean bag chairs for 2nd and 3rd floor. They are large and comfortable allowing for studying in any corner of the library.
Come have some coffee, relax and study! 