Since early April 2009, the access to INIS database has been opened to all Internet users around the world. Free, open and unrestricted access is available from the INIS Homepage, or directly from the following link: INIS Database.

This initiative provides easy access to reliable nuclear information on the peaceful uses of nuclear science and technology, including nonconventional literature, and makes nuclear knowledge readily available worldwide.

Established in 1970, INIS represents the world’s largest database of scientific and technical literature on a wide range of subjects from nuclear engineering, safeguards and non-proliferation to applications in agriculture, health and industry.

Currently, the INIS Database contains over 3 million bibliographic records and almost 200,000 full-text nonconventional documents, consisting of scientific and technical reports and other non copyrighted information.

** photo by clark

New York Times was running an interesting article – “Concrete Is Remixed With Environment in Mind” last week which is certainly an interesting read.

The article discussed various ways to make environment friendly concrete.

A quick search in Web of Science database for (concrete or cement) AND environment* finds almost 9,000 articles on the topic.

A quick search in Compendex, a primary engineering database finds 12,000 articles, the last one published on April 4, 2009.

** Photo by Thomas Hawk

Educause has released its new report – “7 Things You Should Know About Location-Aware Applications“.

Location-aware applications deliver online content to users based on their physical location. Various technologies employ GPS, cell phone infrastructure, or wireless access points to identify where electronic devices such as mobile phones or laptops are, and users can choose to share that information with location-aware applications. As mobile devices offer greater amounts of data about the environment through which we move, location-aware systems will become increasingly effective at predicting what users would like to know about in the geographical space around them, offering a layer of knowledge superimposed on the physical world that can be accessed for information and convenience.

You can research this topic in many of our online databases, however,  IEEE digital Library would be your first source.  Try this search in IEEE database – http://tinyurl.com/d6y5aj

** Photo by fotoopa

Imagine no facebook, twitter, myspace, email, internet for a entire day?

Shutdown Day is a Global Internet Experiment whose purpose is to get people to think about how their lives have changed with the increasing use of the home computer, and whether or not any good things are being lost because of this.

The idea of Shutdown Day project is simple – just shutdown your computer for one whole day of the year and involve yourself in some other activities: outdoors, nature, sports, fun stuff with friends and family – whatever, just to remind yourself that there still exists a world outside your monitor screen.

For more information, go to Shutdown Day

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Science and Engineering Liaison Librarian

The 2009 UPPAC conference takes place on Saturday March 14, 2009 at the Hennings Building here on the UBC Vancouver campus.

The Undergraduate Pacific Physics and Astronomy Conference is the conference where undergraduate students from Western Canada and the Pacific Northwest can share their research, learn about further opportunities for research and education, and meet other undergraduate students. UPPAC features undergraduate research talks, lab tours, a keynote lecture by a distinguished researcher, and lots of opportunities for undergraduate students to network and to explore Vancouver and the UBC campus.

For an example of papers presented at last years conference, have a look at the 2008 UPPAC Conference Proceedings.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Physics and Astronomy

BC Wood WORKS!/Canadian Wood Council annually host the Western Canadian Wood Catapult Competition on the UBC Campus in Vancouver BC. The third annual Wood Catapult Competition will take place at the UBC Campus in Vancouver on March 28th, 2009.

The purpose of the competition is to challenge registered college or university students to design and build a wood siege engine capable of accurately hitting targets at 20, 30 and 45 meters using a cement ball. Teams consisting of students and one faculty member submit a short report prior to the competition about their catapult design. On the morning of the competition each team will be required to give a fifteen-minute presentation to the judges, after their weigh-in and setup.

For information on the registering for this competition and technical requirements, go to the
BC Wood WORKS! Competitions website.

Background Reading

Denny, Mark. Siege engine dynamics. European Journal of Physics. 2005. 26 561-577.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Materials Engineering, Physics and Astronomy

The most recent Sci-Bites newsletter from Thomson Reuters reports that UBC CS department has the Highest Impact in Computer Science in Canada, ranked by average citations per paper, among Canadian universities that published at least 50 papers in Thomson Reuters-indexed journals of computer science & engineering between 2003 and 2007.

http://sciencewatch.com/dr/sci/09/feb22-09_2/

Congrats to our CS faculty and students!

** Photo by gillicious

There are wide variety of CO2 calculators available on the web. Here’s a short list.

Government of Canada’s ecoACTION Tools and Calculators

EPA Climate Change – Greenhouse Gas Emissions Personal Emissions Calculator

My Carbon Footprint Carbon Calculator

Umweltbundesamt CO2 Rechner

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Earth and Ocean Sciences, Chemical and Biological Engineering, Chemistry, Physics and Astronomy, and Geography.

Our new article – “Comparing Safari Tech Books Online and Books24x7 E-book Collections: A Case Study from the University of British Columbia Library” has just been published this week in the Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship.

It is open access and is available for everyone.

Abstract:

Most academic libraries are seeking to provide electronic access to the very dynamic and changing field of technology related material. Safari Tech Books Online and Books24x7 are the major e-book collections in this area. We compared the Safari Tech Books Online and Books24x7 e-book packages as to their usefulness for the University of British Columbia Library, second largest academic library in Canada. In our sample, we found that Books24x7 had more titles to offer (25% more); the overlap between the collections was relatively small (13-16%) and publishers varied considerably; and although there were no major differences in the “usefulness” measures of the titles in the two packages (Amazon.com ratings, WorldCat holdings and Reviews.com reviews were quite similar for both packages), O’Reilly titles, available only through Safari Tech Books Online, were held by a slightly higher number of libraries worldwide. We conclude that in order to have comprehensive coverage of this constantly changing area of knowledge, a large research academic library needs to subscribe to both collections. If subscribing to both collections is not an option, we recommend selecting a package based on the pricing that the library can negotiate with ProQuest, the vendor of both products, since the collections are complimentary in their nature.

Please feel free to ask us any questions or follow-up with this area of ebooks evaluation.

** photo by Adrian

A short article from the New Scientist discusses the Financial Times Energy Conference in London last week. It is a pretty interesting short read.

To see UBC researchers work in this area, you could go to Compendex database (a primary engineering database) – http://toby.library.ubc.ca/resources/infopage.cfm?id=715
and type “sustainable energy” as a topic search and UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA as “author affiliation”

** Photo by Lollie-Pop