Open Access Awareness Day--Tuesday, October 14

Open Access Day is an international event being held to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access

Here's a listing of U of U events to be held on Tuesday, October 14th as well as the following week. For more information, contact Allyson Mower, allyson dot mower at utah dot edu; 585-5458.

Date: Tuesday, October 14
Event: Publishing SMART

Description: Authors want their scholarly articles to be seen, cited and utilized. This class provides opportunities for researchers to increase their visibility by exploring various publishing and archiving choices. Tools for evaluating journal impact factors, online usage, local online availability, retaining copyrights, and submission to online archives are covered.

Time: 9:00 am – 11:00 am
Location: Marriott Library, Room 1735
Sign up here

Date: Tuesday, October 14
Event: Sir Richard Roberts, Ph.D., F.R.S. Broadcast

Description: Dr. Roberts will discuss how Open Access impacts research and will answer questions on this topic from participating campuses.

Time: 5:00 pm
Location: Health Sciences Education Building, Room 4100 C
26 S. 2000 E.
(801) 581-8771
Directions

Date: Tuesday, October 14
Event: Philip E. Bourne, Ph.D. Broadcast

Description: Dr. Bourne will discuss how Open Access impacts research and will answer questions on this topic from participating campuses.

Time: 8:00 pm
Location: Salt Lake City Public Library, Sweet Branch Meeting Room
455 F St
(801) 594-8651
Directions


Date: Tuesday, October 21
Event: Publishing SMART

Description: Authors want their scholarly articles to be seen, cited and utilized. This class provides opportunities for researchers to increase their visibility by exploring various publishing and archiving choices. Tools for evaluating journal impact factors, online usage, local online availability, retaining copyrights, and submission to online archives are covered.

Time: 10:30 am – 12:30 pm
Location: Health Sciences Education Building, Room 3100 B
Sign up here


Date: Wednesday, October 22
Event: Clinical Research & Methods Panel Discussion

Description: Panelists will discuss the larger scholarly communication system and how funding agencies, publishers, editors, reviewers, authors and libraries impact clinical research. The panel members include Dr. Kathleen Digre (Neuro-Ophthalmology), Dr. James Scott (Obstetrics and Gynecology), Mary E. Youngkin (Eccles Library) and Dr. Pat Murphy (Nursing) with Allyson Mower (Marriott Library) moderating.

Time: 12:00 pm
Location: Health Sciences Education Building, Room 2120

Googling Health Info

Did you know you can use Google to find quality health information? Librarians have teamed up with staff at Google to create tools that lead searchers to reliable health information. Do any search for a health-related topic, such as asthma, and you will see options for refining your search:


It's a great way to begin a search for basic health information. If you need more advanced health information, check out PubMed. It's a free database from the National Library of Medicine. You can get to full-text articles the campus libraries have paid for by using the library icon.


Or, look for the PubMed Central icon for free full-text.

Publishing SMART

The next class is Monday, September 29 and there's only TWO seats left! Sign up to attend.

Mathematic Bliss

Every night after work, I bike home past the Math Department's LeRoy Cowles Building, which is connected to the T. Benny Rushing Mathematics Center on the northwest side. From the outside, the Center is pleasant enough: a light-filled, red sandstone structure that complements the original building, with a contemporary University of Utah architectural style (an example, another, and another).

I rarely stop to look inside, which is a shame because within is a magnificent, multi-storied installation of math-related artwork by Utah artist Anna Campbell Bliss. It's visually engaging, intellectually stimulating, playful and whimsical, even. This got me thinking about the relationship between math and art in general.

So, I did a library catalog basic (general keyword) search for math and art. One title in the results, "Fragments of Infinity: A Kaleidoscope of Math and Art" caught my eye. In the catalog record, in the left column, I saw the subject heading mathematics in art. When I clicked on that link, the catalog brought back five more books, including "Art for a House of Mathematics", a book about Anna Bliss' installation. Jackpot!

While looking at the catalog records for those six books, I continued to click and follow lots of interesting subject headings which led to more subject headings (and so on). I never would have come up with all these concepts on my own:

• mathematics--pictorial works
• mathematics in architecture
• geometry in art
• art--mathematics
  
• symbolism of numbers
• Islamic art and symbolism
• decoration and ornament--mathematics
• repetitive patterns (decorative arts)
• fractals
  

Really, I could go on and on. Following subject heading links is a fantastic way to find additional, related resources. It can also help to build your vocabulary about a topic.

Now I'm going to curl up with a good book I found, "Gödel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid".

¡Olé!

This week marks the 2008 Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain, made world-famous by Ernest Hemingway's description of the running of the bulls in his novel "The Sun Also Rises." Watching news coverage of crazy men getting trampled by stampeding other crazy men (oh, and bulls) always reminds me of my own time as a bullfighter!

[cue the Wayne's World flashback sound effect and wavy image]

At the end of my year-long student exchange in Mexico, I spent a week at a bullfighting ranch where I got to try out my matador skills with a real bull. He was only 3 months old but those little horns caused quite a bruise.

[flash forward to the present]

Anyway, this week's festivities sparked my interest to find other literature that mentions bullfighting. Since I saw my first bullfight in Mexico City, I decided to check out the Latino Literature database to see what it could offer. (If you're not on campus, you'll need to authenticate your browser session by logging into my.utah.edu on the Marriott Library homepage to see this database.) It's filled with fiction, non-fiction, poetry and plays by Latina and Latino writers working in the United States. Because it's a full-text database, I can search for even a single instance of my topic within a work of literature.

My first search for bullfighting was disappointing: only 10 results. But after looking in the Help tab menu, I saw that this database supports both Boolean and truncation searching.

Boolean searching includes using AND (to connect different concepts, such as bullfighting AND Spain), as well as OR (to connect synonyms and related concepts, such as bullfighter OR matador OR toreador).

Truncation searching means that I can search for a root term and get results based on all its variations. The most common way is to end the root term with an asterisk (such as bullfight* which will bring back all results with the words bullfight, bullfighting, bullfighter and bullfighters).

A search in Latino Literature for the truncated bullfight* brings back 69 results (yay!). But a complex search also using the Boolean operator OR -- I searched for matador OR toreador OR bullfight* -- brought back 93 results. ¡Olé! These results include a nice mix between fiction, non-fiction and poetry. The Latino Literature database has recently converted to a new interface but has not yet moved the plays over. A duplicate search in the old database found 21 plays, too.

The best part about learning these two search strategies -- Boolean and truncation -- for the Latino Literature database is they can be used in most every database the Marriott Library subscribes to. ¡Andale pues!

Killing Two Birds with One Stone Statue

Over the weekend, I had a patron come to the Fine Arts reference desk who was doing research on the Temple of Zeus in Olympia, Greece. She was looking for research articles about it and also wanted images to include in a class presentation. I knew just the resource she should use, JSTOR*, because she could do one search and get everything she needs.

JSTOR (short for Journal Storage) is one of the best all-around article databases out there. It offers complete, digitized and searchable back issues of significant research publications in every imaginable discipline, from Art to Physics to Economics to Women’s Studies. So, you can do a search and it’ll bring back results with full-text articles scanned right from the published journals.

Anyway, the JSTOR folks recently added an image-filtering feature to their search box. After you look through the article results, you can click on the Images in JSTOR tab and it highlights the exact pages in articles that have images on your topic. This includes photographs, statistical charts and graphs, scientific diagrams, etc.

In addition, there’s another tab for Images in ARTstor, a database with 500,000 images (and still growing) of art, architecture, clothing, interior design, historical artifacts, posters, videos, maps, and much more. Under this tab you’ll see thumbnail images found by searching for the same topic in ARTstor. When you click on an image, it will open a new window with a larger version that you can download and save. Perfect for PowerPoint presentations.

The student’s search for “Temple of Zeus” and Olympia was very successful in finding articles and images. Mileage may vary. You may need to change your search terms just a bit to get more images from ARTstor.

* As always, if you're a member of the University of Utah community, you can gain access to both the JSTOR and the ARTstor databases through the Article Databases list, linked from the Marriott Library homepage.