Friday, October 13, 2006

Fall Quarter - week 3

* Where can I find peer reviewed journal articles on mallard ducks?

* Where can I find articles about the life cycle of pens and pencils?

* I need articles on how herbal dietary supplements effect women's cardiovascular health.

* Is there a book here that I can check out which covers all of high school chemistry?

* What associations are for Chinese-Americans in the Sciences and Engineering?

* How do I find journal articles on...? [The questions are all different, but they are all looking for the same thing, how to find an article on their topic,and once they have an article, how do they get their hands on it]

* Can I download lots of articles and then burn them on a DVD? And, I'm not affilitated with the UO.

Friday, October 06, 2006

Fall Quarter - weeks 1-2

We are back with loads of interesting questions. We also have a new article searching function and a brand new web page.

*I'm looking for a source that allows me to look for chemicals for sale arranged by structure.

*Where is your physics section? [Patron was actually looking for a specific book, which we figured out after some initial unhelpful searching...]

*How do I use databases off campus? Can I set up my library PIN from off campus? [We think so]

*Why can't I download a Science Direct/Elsevier article on my computer? [Turns out that Safari, on a mac doesn't really work with SD. Thanks again IT for letting me have a mac so that I knew about this bug!]

*How do I find articles on ambystoma macrodactylum (long toed amphibians)?

*How do I convert 50 hertz to 600 hertz using solar energy?

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Summer questions

It is slow around here in the summer months. Still, I've been remiss and now I don't remember most of the questions I *have* been asked.

*Plant ecology in the Sisters Wilderness
*Volume of the sternoclavicular joint
*Do we have a copy of the Treaty for Nonproliferation of nuclear weapons
*The article here is supposed to be in this issue of the journal, but it isn't (seems to be an epub ahead of publication problem...)
*Where do I find? How do I find?...
*Do you have this journal in our library system?
*Why doesn't Web of Science show me articles about science education?
*A journal article explaining a gene to high school students.
*What treatments are there for labyrinthitis?
*Addresses of undergraduate deparments in biochemistry.

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Summer Week 1

*Bract communities in neotropical environments. Am I spelling the genus name correctly?
*I can't get into SciFinder Scholar, what am I doing wrong? (several times)

Monday, June 19, 2006

Finals Week

It was busy for a few days and then prety slow for a the rest of the week.
We got some great questions, none of which I recorded and have now completely forgotten.

Happy Graduation!

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Week 10 - The Grind towards the Finish

*I need an article on drugs (and their health effects, especially meth).
*I need help with EndNote.
*How do I cite a source for the 2nd time in an endnote?
*Where can I find articles about trickle down economics?
*Is Wikipedia a good source?
*Can I get the article proving the Poincare Conjecture from the _Asian Journal of Mathematics_?
*I want to set up alerts and save searches on Pubmed about the physiology of hypercapnia.
*Is there someplace where we can practice our group PowerPoint presentation?
*Can our class borrow a digital projector for the next 50 minutes?

More EndNote tricks for Mac
EBSCO + EN 9 for Mac
-put stuff in a folder
-save To Disk
-Save as "Citations in Direct Export format."
-uncheck remove items from folder
-save button
-go to finder, drag the DeliveryPrintSave xxx.asp file into EN 9
-select the EN library


WoS
-put articles in the marked list
-export to bibliographic software
-get a UMI_view file
-import this with the WoS filter

UO catalog
-Save to marked list
-import using Endnote Import

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Week 9

*How do I cite this using Chicago Manual of Style?
*Where can I copy this?
*The printer needs more paper.
*Can I check this journal out?
*Where are your journals?
*Where should I return these books?
*Where are the magazines/journals (rinse, repeat)? Where can I find this book? (repeat)
*Can I get a copy of the article "Fuzzy Balls"?
*I need a calculus textbook that talks about using integrals in biology.
*Is this book that I asked for at the beginning of the year available yet?
*Where can I find articles on sludge or filtration treatment of water?
*I'm looking for an article in an IEEE publication, how do I get to the digital library?
*What are the health effects of Polyvinyl Choride used in buildings?
*I need articles on envelope proteins, CD4+, HIV and its link to AIDS.

Monday, May 22, 2006

Week 8

*What are the top 3 pesticides used on apples?
*Are disposable or cloth diapers better?
*Where can I find books on biomechanics?
*[electronic] Information on Grace Hopper?
*[electronic] Why do Mexicans immigrate?
*[electronic] How do I make a persuasive speech?
*[electronic] How do I make a lasso?
*Where can I find articles on Lake Vostok?
*Where can I get a journal article on teaching elementary school students about astronauts?
*How many organic and conventional fertilizers are used? What kinds?
*Do we have books on purple non sulfur bacteria and how they impact the environment?
*Did Steven Speilberg direct a 1971 Columbo show?
*Is the library open on Memorial Day?
*Do you have a printer that *doesn't* print double sided?

Monday, May 15, 2006

Week 7

* I need an address for Martin Fairchild. (Turns out it was Lockheed Martin corporate address).
* Patron needs an article from 1952 Metallurical journal that we don't have. Tried to get an article title without luck, filled out the ILL form anyway.
* Questions about citing web pages versus electronic sources.
* Lots of folks looking for computers which use MS Word.
* A color reproduction of the cover or spine of a physics textbook published in 1987.
* I can't get SciFinder Scholar to install on my new Mac running OS X.
* How do I find a journal article from _Science_ from 1966?
* How do I open an ILL article from my email? (This one came as an attachment, not a link to the Ariel web site....interesting)
* Where can I find articles on brown garden snails?
* Is this a peer-reviewed article?
* Where can I find information on the life cycle inventory of organic farming v. conventional farming?
* I need books on koala bears.
* Where can I find articles on predators and the size of birds?
* Who was the New Zealand born chemist who discovered quanta theory?
* How many books and journals do you have a the Science Library?
* How come we can put a woman in space, but we can't make it easy for patrons to set up a Science Direct login?
* Where can I find articles on cichlid fish in Lake Victoria?

Monday, May 08, 2006

Weeks 5-6

*Lots of questions about finding journal articles and showing students the magic of indexes and databases.
*How do I find articles that aren't too technical about hydrotherapy and it's use on acute (not chronic) pain?
*Where can I find Journals or books on heat transfer and heat transmission in this library?
*Can I scan a photo from this old journal article?
*Is the new book on dioramas already checked out?
*Is there a computer in here that has MS word (repeat several times)?

I'm still trying to get folks to use Scholar's Bank. Seems like I can only make the sale if Carol Hixson does the pitch.

Also it turns out that the students in running around in red shirts with Porn Nation on them were from a Pro-Christian organization. Interesting marketing.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Week 4

*Where can I find a white rhinoceras?
*Where is the CRC Atlas for spectral data?
*Books on the math of Jewish calendars?
*How do I find peer reviewed articles on steroid use in baseball?
*Long term gender differences with athletes who have had hip/knee replacements?

Thursday, April 20, 2006

The quarter moves on

*Lots of directional questions
*Looking for the Journal of the Chemical Society from 1949.
*Making stuff out of sulfur (promises to be stinky!).
*Looking for the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London from 1908 - I don't think we have it.
*A book about Protezoa.
*Request for a database with data on metal complexes. (Metal attaching to organic compounds)
*Structural data for inorganic chemistry
*Still moving books and journals to CDA/MDLS and out of my office. Yeah spring!

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Teaching CIS 199

Blogger is back up. Students are sleepy. What more is there?

Monday, April 10, 2006

Week 2 - Spring Term

*If you need something from SCI storage FAST, pick it up at Knight
*Birds/Audubon books on birds
*EndNote formatting questions
*Articles on fish that live in the desert (namely, cyprinodon nevadensis)
*Maps of Nevada
*A Swiss patent in English (SciFinder Scholar to the rescue)
*A table of compounds listed by their melting points

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Spring is in the air

*Folks looking for public health documents from the turn of the last century.
*Someone looking for an 1808 publication. Turns out wikipedia was surprizingly helpful, but the patron had already left.
*A patron wanting to know what phase of the moon North America saw during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
*Lots of geology articles from all over the place, but lots of it behind the Science Desk.
*A patron who needed to know how to enlarge her ID photo on the photocopier to use it for a class assignment.

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Teaching English

I'm a little out of my league here, but everyone is being very nice. No bobbing heads yet!

Friday, March 10, 2006

Heading towards the end of Winter Term

*How do I turn a .wav file into an .mp3 file?

*How do I abbreviate journal titles in the style of Chemical Abstracts?

*How do I use EndNote with a database like PsychInfo?

*Where is the most recent copy of the Bulletin of the Geographical Society of America? (Also known as the Geographical Society of America Bulletin)

*Where is the journal x located? repeated many times.

*Where is the Bulletin of the US Department of Fisheries from 1880something?

*How do different types of images get recalled from the posterior part of the temporal lobe?

*How do I write the equation (p1-p2/SA)*100,000 in excel?

*What is Scholar's Bank?

*Where does International Women's Day come from/commemmorate?

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

What a difference an S makes

Patron came in looking for volume 4 of The enzyme by Boyle. Like the Boyle of Boyle's Law. A classmate of the patron had found this book in our library and it had what they needed for something in their Chemistry class.

Finally found our reference set of The Enzymes by Paul Boyer.

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

A busy couple of days

*Evolution/sexual selection/adaptation of blackbirds, birds (aves), and tadpoles. Oh my!
Replete with printing problems, missing volumes and confusing journal titles.

*St. John's Wort/Hypericum perforatum use in history and in different cultures.

*Spectral data for [Co(NH3)6]Cl3, starting with finding its CAS registry number.

*We are missing 11x17 paper for the photocopier and the Feb 9, 2006 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

*Nutritional information for organic food (and organic food labeling laws).

Friday, February 03, 2006

Questions I hath answered

*A book or a chapter in a book on Newton's Law of Linear Momentum. (hint, it's also Newton's 2nd law of motion and covered in every basic textbook on physics.)

*Still trying to help folks sign on to Science Direct.

*A missing book on fractals.

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Google

Check this out, from Google employee #1:

"My guess is about 300 years until computers are as good as, say, your local reference library in doing search," says Craig Silverstein. "But we can make slow and steady progress, and maybe one day we'll get there."

from URL: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/25/sunday/main608672.shtml

And some Google tips:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/25/technology/circuits/25POGUE-EMAIL.html?ex=1138856400&en=76c7158acd2602eb&ei=5070

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Biology 131 proposals are due

I was having difficulties helping students with the topic "Hunting or fishing as a means of evolution or natural selection." At least I think that's the topic. Here are some tips:

1. If the student can idenify a particular species, it makes things a bit easier.
like, instead of searching wolf or wolves anywhere, try canis lupus as a descriptor

2. Zoo. Record
line 1
-search
evolution OR selection as descriptor
to expand your search
line 2
- hunt* as a descriptor
this gets you things like:
influence of hunting by humans, Hunting impact on population dynamics in primeval forest, human hunting relationship
etc.
OR for line 2 and 3
-hunt* AND pressure anywhere instead of the above
if you're doing fishing try
line 2 and 3
- fishing [no truncation] AND (pressure OR impact) anywhere
line 3 or 4 (you'll have to add a line to get this)
- review searched anywhere gets you some review articles
- you can try adding the name of the species but remove review

3.biosis
-evolution and adaptation is a Subject heading
-hunting is a keyword
-narrowing by latin name for wolves not so useful in this search and this database

4. ASFA (Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts)
***Please use this if you're doing fish***
Use the words impact or pressure or selection anywhere
But, evolution as a descriptor doesn't seem to really work
Fishing anywhere or possibly as a descriptor

5. Words to use from Dean. Not clear which database he used:
selective pressure of hunting
hunting and speciation
poaching as a selective pressure on rare species
many terms for fishing

6. Several searches work really well in Web of Science (the ands are important in these searches)

selection and hunting and sheep
selection and hunting and elk
selection and hunting and deer

selection and fishing

evolution and hunting and human



Please feel free to come in and ask about how to impliment the above. I'm not sure how clear this is as an email.

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

2006, a New Year and a New Quarter

I am doing research on Marguerite Thomas Williams (b.1895 - d.sometime around 1991), the first African American to get a Ph.D. in geology. She was a full professor by the end of her career and the head of the Division of Geography at Miner Teachers College/University of the Disctrict of Columbia. I can't even find an obituary for her. Luckily there are lots of places to try. None of the actual people I have spoken to have been particularly helpful. Goodness, what fine insights I'm getting on the nature of doing research in libraries.

I'm also working on editing my blogs presentation so it isn't so scary. And, I'm working on coming up with something short and snappy for one Environmental Studies class and something more ponderous for another.

And check this out:
REBINDER, is truly recyclable and reusable because it is a corrugated cardboard binder. Vinyl binders are neither recyclable or reusable.