Rowland Institute Library Blog

The Iraqi Rewards Program is an innovative use of the net to solicit
intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, pending attacks and
missing coalition members. The site has a secure online form and the
agency promises confidentiality.  (Sources: Cassandra Eckhof,
Laura Carlo)

Dave was discussing Bill Gates, Microsoft and Encarta, and how the net
evidently made Encarta moot:  “Who needs an encyclopedia on a
CD-ROM when you have the Web at your fingertips?”

I can’t comment on Encarta, never having used it, but I can’t think of
anything analogous online to an encyclopedia or a whole range of
reference tools that’s freely available.  The wikipedia?

Anyway, Dave’s remark comes perilously close to some made by Sec’y of State Colin Powell
in the fall of 2002: “I told my staff: ‘I no longer have any
encyclopedias, any dictionaries, or any reference materials anywhere in
my office, whatsoever, I don’t
need them. I’ve stopped using all reference materials because you don’t
need it. All you need is a search engine.’

Had the secretary kept his reference materials, might he have appeared at the UN six months later with a vial of white powder?

Update (2/11/04, evening): See Jessica’s thoughtful entry on online sources and reliability. 

The Single Molecule Biophysics Lab
observes biological processes on a fundamental level and have adapted
some widely-used techniques (fluorescence labeling, confocal
microscopy) towards these ends.

On the heels of yesterday’s fine New York Times article promoting libraries in the age of Google, here comes a PC magazine piece written by a UCSD librarian who describes all the databases and resources that your public library may subscribe to and which you can access in or out of the library via the internet. (Source: The Virtual Chase) (Note: As librarian and weblogger colleague j and I have discussed, Gary Price has been making this point for years in the ResourceShelf.) So we have one piece on librarian savvy and resourcefulness (we know our way around information resources - it’s what we do) and another on the range of information tools that are specialized and indexed and free through your library.

Update: j links to Gary’s piece What Google Teaches us Has Nothing to Do With Searching.

A paper (PNAS in press) reports studies of degrees of separation and connectivity among scientists. Robert Savoy, Rowland scientist, and I discussed this once. Think how close you are to the president, he told me. “I know the head of NIH” and the head of NIH knows the president. Still, the actual question of access may be a little more complex. Will the next research involve the physics of “foot in the door” or chutzpah?

Update (12:48 PM): Science’s Next Wave has a column on how to use scientific connections effectively, “So it’s a small world? So what?” (access restricted to subscribers; Harvard users follow this link.)

Robin Good says you can create a feed for Yahoo groups or similar mailing lists in three easy steps.

John DuPuis posted his slides “Blogging for Science Librarians.” Seems like a reasonable overview of the how and why. Mentions two other science library blogs, namely STLQ and Englib, not Pullen or RIH. (Then again, the others are Canadian, like the confessor. I enjoy reading his blog, although he is not as prolific as the others.)

From the O’Reilly network, software and other tips to make cross-platform sharing easier….

Carol Tenopir of Tennesee made an attempt to count how many scholarly journals are online and relates the difficulty of the task. (Source: Stevan Harnad, American Scientist forum)

An Internet News article reports that content providers will begin including ads with their feeds. I find it disturbing but who am I to tell Yahoo and others not to make money. (source; Daypop)