Falconer Biology Library

The familiar CRISP (Computer Retrieval of Information on Scientific Projects) system has been replaced by the RePORT Expenditures and Results (RePORTER) query tool.

RePORTER is an upgraded version of CRISP that provides enhanced searching capabilities and access to the results (publications and patents) of both intramural and extramural projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It also links to related information in other databases such as the National Library of Medicine’s Medline. RePORTER provides access to records of projects funded each year from fiscal year 1985 to the present.

Recently Stanford University Libraries & Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) released xSearch for use by the Stanford community. Developed through a partnership with Deep Web Technologies, xSearch provides Stanford researchers and students with a single search option for multiple online resources. Searches may be limited to specific databases, or all available sources may be searched simultaneously. Search results are merged into one relevance ranked list, and are clustered by topic, author, source publication, publisher, and date. Custom searches using any selection of available databases can be created and re-used.

Users may also create alerts in order to be informed automatically of new items that match search criteria. Alerts are quick and easy to set up and are a particularly useful feature of xSearch because they can merge results from multiple databases. Results of alerts can be received via email or RSS.

Currently xSearch covers 28 databases, including all of the most important journal article indexing and abstracting databases in the life sciences. The list of databases can grow and change in response to user demand and patterns of use. These databases are now available:

ABI/Inform Global
Academic Search Premier
ACM Guide to Computing Literature
ADS (Astrophysical Data System) Abstracts Service
Aerospace & High Technology Database
American Chemical Society Journals
Annual Reviews
ASFA: Aquatic Sciences & Fisheries Abstracts
BIOSIS Previews
CAB Abstracts
COS Funding Opportunities
Current Index to Statistics
Derwent Innovations Index
Dissertations and Theses
Engineering Village
Environmental Sciences & Pollution Management
GeoRef
HighWire Press
IEEE Xplore
INSPEC
Knovel
Lexis Nexis Academic
MathSciNet
PsycINFO
PubMed
SCI-TECHnetBASE
Web of Science
Zoological Record

To celebrate Halloween, the October display in Falconer Biology Library focuses on books about spiders and webs. The library has a large collection of books about spiders and other arthropods, including Ecophysiology of Spiders and The Evolution of Mating Systems in Insects and Arachnids . The library also has a large collection of books about webs, including food webs and applications of the semantic web in life sciences, in addition to books about spider webs. Some of these are on display along with the books about spiders. Visit the library in October and see our seasonal display.

Falconer Biology Library’s home page now includes a link to a page of Tutorials and Interactive Guides . Brief videos created at Falconer demonstrate how to find journals in Socrates, how to find journals using the Ejournals page, and how to use BIOSIS Previews, the index to journal articles in the life sciences. Basic Subject Search in BIOSIS shows how to perform a subject search, how to view results, and how to use those results to improve and refine your search.

Our first videos were created by Kim Stuart, Falconer’s summer intern, and we hope to build on Kim’s work with additional tutorials.

In addition to providing links to videos created at Falconer, the Tutorials and Interactive Guides page lists other tutorials. These cover EndNote, PubMed, RefWorks, and some of the most frequently used journal article databases in biology. Send a message to Falconer Biology Library if you’d like to suggest additional tutorials to list on this page.

On July 1, 2009, Falconer Biology Library completed the final step in launching its new website by deleting links to the old site and redirecting old URLs to the new site. The process of planning, design, and development of the new site has taken nearly a year, and this work is a part of a larger effort to enhance and update websites across the science and engineering libraries at Stanford.

The new website was designed using Drupal, an open-source content management platform. Drupal is easier to use than our old platform and it gives us greater control over the appearance and features of the site. All content has been updated, new content has been added, and we plan to add more content in the future. Drupal also allows us to make our website content more dynamic, and our new homepage now changes weekly and highlights a new library acquisition.

A major feature of Falconer’s website is a collection of Research Guides . The Research Guides cover more than a dozen topics in biology and are designed to serve as a starting point for research. Through Research Guides, you can select a topic and identify databases, article resources, organizations, government agencies, encyclopedias, and other web resources that provide information on that topic.

After August 31, 2009, OPPIE, LANL’s database search system, will no longer be available to Stanford users. The subscription to OPPIE will be discontinued because all databases offered through LANL’s system are now available at Stanford through other platforms, primarily Web of Science/Web of Knowledge. In addition, Los Alamos National Laboratory plans to cease offering the OPPIE system in the near future.

If you use OPPIE, please contact Falconer Biology Library or your local library for help with the transition to other database platforms.

Databases in the Life Sciences is a list of databases that are available to Stanford users. Use this list to find alternatives to OPPIE. Note that in this list, Key Site is used to designate the most important databases.

On June 24, 2009, OskiCat replaced Pathfinder and GLADIS as the UC Berkeley library catalog. If you’ve used Pathfinder, OskiCat will look familiar but with OskiCat you can:

• Find books and journals from more UCB campus libraries, including the Institutes of Governmental Studies and Transportation Studies Libraries and the Water Resources Center Archives.
• Limit results to available items.
• Limit results to online items.
• View status of individual volumes and journal issues.
• Save and e-mail your search results.
• Export records to citation management software.

Melvyl remains as the catalog of all University of California libraries. The Research Libraries Cooperative Program (RLCP) allows Stanford faculty, academic staff, and graduate students to request research materials directly from the University of California at Berkeley or the University of Texas at Austin if these materials are not available at Stanford. For best results, check OskiCat to be sure the item you need is at UC Berkeley before submitting your RLCP request. For more information, see Interlibrary Services.

The libraries at Stanford are purchasing increasing numbers of digital books and these ebooks are becoming easier to find in Socrates, the library catalog. Like ejournals, ebooks offer advantages in comparison with print, but sometimes you need a printed copy. Springer, one of the largest publishers of printed books and ebooks in the life sciences, now offers MyCopy, a new option for obtaining a printed copy of an ebook. For most ebooks available through SpringerLink at Stanford, Springer’s MyCopy offers the option to order a print-on-demand copy of the book. The link to MyCopy is available when viewing the ebook. The cost for the printed copy is $24.95, which can be paid with a credit card or PayPal, and the book is shipped to your address in a few days. For an example, see the link to MyCopy on “Ecology of Social Evolution”: http://www.springerlink.com/content/x42712/ Some restrictions apply to MyCopy. It is available only for Springer titles published in English. The book you receive is a high-quality monochrome copy and color copies are not available at this time. Springer will ship books only to addresses in the United States. Because the cost is only $24.95, books over 832 pages are not available. And finally, MyCopy is available to individuals only, and libraries cannot purchase books through this service. For many of the ebooks purchased by the libraries, we also purchase a printed copy for Falconer Library or for another library at Stanford, and you can find these through Socrates. If the library does not own a copy, we can borrow one for you through interlibrary loan. Budget reductions will force difficult choices between printed books and ebooks for libraries in the future, but for now, you’re likely to find the printed books you need at Falconer. Springer’s MyCopy provides another option if you need a printed copy.

Falconer Biology Library’s monthly display for March celebrates the life and work of Charles Darwin on the two hundredth anniversary of his birth in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. On display are books by and about Darwin and evolutionary theory. The display also features writings of Alfred Russel Wallace. The exhibit includes a portrait of Darwin drawn by Stanford’s Darryl Wheye, who writes about the connections between science and art. Birds played a central role in Darwin’s studies, and the display includes several books that focus on Darwin’s finches, more recent studies of avian evolution, and very recent work on avian adaptation to global change.

Through February 17, 2009, the Science and Engineering Libraries at Stanford are conducting a user needs assessment survey. Most people can complete the form in 15 minutes. Find the survey at:

http://tinyurl.com/scilib-survey

During these times of rapid technological and economic change it is important to periodically check in with faculty, staff and students, to make sure that we are meeting the needs of library users. While this survey was designed to help plan for a proposed combined science library, it will also help us restructure services and collections during a period of budget reductions. Input from users will be extremely helpful as we align the collections, services and facilities of our libraries with changing needs and interests.

Please contact us at falconerlibrary@stanford.edu if you have questions or comments.

CAB Abstracts , the database of journal article citations on agricultural science, veterinary medicine, nutrition, and natural resources, is now available in Web of Knowledge. It joins a collection of useful databases for life scientists: BIOSIS, Web of Science, and Zoological Record. In ISI Web of Knowledge, these databases can be searched simultaneously or separately.

In addition to cross-database searching, ISI Web of Knowledge offers features that are useful when searching CAB Abstracts. Topics can be searched using a variety of indexes and search limits. Search histories can be saved to create weekly alerts. Search results can be imported to EndNote, RefWorks, or other file management software. Results can be analyzed to reveal important authors, institutions, or journals associated with a topic.

CAB Abstracts indexes journal articles in the applied life sciences. It covers the fields of agriculture, forestry, animal and veterinary sciences, human health and communicable diseases, human nutrition, food science, animal health and welfare, microbiology and parasitology, leisure and tourism, plant science and crop science, and the management and conservation of natural resources. The database indexes literature published from 1910 to the present. Over 9,000 serials representing 125 countries are indexed in full or in part.

Visit Falconer Biology Library in January to view our display, “Diversity: Evolution, Cooperation, Sex, and Gender”. The exhibit features books in Falconer’s collection on a wide range of topics related to evolution, sexual selection, competition and cooperation, sex determination, and sexual expression. Central to the display is Joan Roughgarden’s book, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People. The exhibit highlights the diversity of Falconer’s collection, including books that focus on fungi, animals, and plants, with molecular, behavioral, and population approaches. It is appropriate to start the year with a display related to evolutionary theory because in 2009 we mark the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth and 150 years since the publication of On the Origin of Species. As the year progresses, we plan to develop additional displays related to Darwin, natural selection, and evolutionary theory. Falconer Library’s displays change approximately monthly. With each display, we highlight Stanford research and place that research in the context of related literature that is available in Falconer Library. Frequently we work with our colleagues at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve to focus on research being done at the Preserve, and we look forward to working with other Stanford units on future displays.

Short Attention Span Science Theater presents short films on topics in ecology and conservation.
In collaboration with Garthwait and Griffin Films and PISCO, the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans, Stephen Palumbi, the Harold A. Miller Professor for the Director of Hopkins Marine Station and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, developed a series of short films about marine ecology and conservation. These three-minute films address important questions through field and laboratory research. Each film covers a single topic and is filmed on location and narration provided by professor Palumbi.

The Nobel Prize for Chemistry for 2008 is awarded to scientists who discovered a green, fluorescent protein in the jellyfish, Aequorea victoria. Check out the Falconer Research Guide on Genetics and Genomics for a photo showing the use of this protein in research with neurospora.
Read article on prize winners

Falconer Biology Library has added a subscription to the Henry Stewart Talks Biomedical and Life Sciences Collection, and the talks are available from Stanford IP addresses at this URL: http://www.hstalks.com/access

The Henry Stewart Talks are a growing collection of high-quality audiovisual presentations on advanced topics by leading experts. Falconer coordinated a free trial of the talks in the spring and Stanford people who used the site gave it strong reviews. Please review the site and feel free to send me your comments. This collection is somewhat expensive and it's likely that I will need to consider canceling the subscription in future years without strong positive comments from users.

Michael Newman mnewman@stanford.edu

Stanford biologist sees money in preservation
Gretchen Daily wants to protect the planet by convincing governments and big investors there's money to be made - or at least saved - in preserving nature instead of exploiting it.
Read full article

Falconer Library has a new exhibit in recognition of the Beijing Olympics. The exhibit highlights some of our materials on human and animal physiology in addition to books about biology in China.

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