Ready to start that term paper?  Not sure how to start?  The University of Minnesota Libraries have created an assignment calculator to help students organize their time to meet their research needs.  Start with today’s date, enter the date assignment is due, a timeline is provided, with research milestones.  Use Duke Library links for local, on-site research assistance.  For example, How do I begin my research? or  Find a Librarian in my subject area? or ask for help are just a few of the services available to you through the Duke Libraries.

We’ve been getting more and more questions in the library about how researchers can find information from other disciplines.  For example, how can someone working on membranes in Psychiatry connect up with someone working on membranes in Materials Science?  In a world where waiting for the published article is increasingly too late,  we’ve been trying to find new avenues.

To answer the question above, I thought, ‘I wonder if there is a social networking site for scientists?’, did a Google search, and voila – Labmeeting!

The interesting part about Labmeeting is that it is only freely available to scientific researchers.  You have to either get invited by a scientific researcher you know, or show online proof that you are doing scientific research.  Or pay $99.  Thus, not being a scientific researcher, nor willing to part with $99 for a look-see, I was unable to join.

A search on Duke presented 120 results and included the following:

• Associate Professor at Duke University  interested in the following topics: Monomeric lambda repressor, Ribonuclease P protein, Protein A, NMR, CD, fluorescence, stopped flow, amide exchange, dynamic NMR
• PhD Student at Duke University interested in the following topics: In vivo model systems, genetic screens, immunoblotting
• PhD Student at Duke University interested in the following topics: Photonics

Give it a shot and let us know what you think:  http://www.labmeeting.com

Addendum:  As William Gunn points out in the comments below, there are other similar tools which you may want to try.  They include:

• https://www.researchgate.net/
• http://www.mendeley.com/
• http://www.academia.edu/
• http://www.myexperiment.org/

Here is a brief summary of enhancements based on that focus statement:

1. Digital Collections are now searchable from the homepage via a new tab in the ‘Search Our Resources’ section.
2. Links were reviewed and edited down to only those most used as was identified by statistics and a circle maps exercise.
   • Links to services and resources are given priority and located in the top portion of the site.
   • Help links (How Do I?…) are located under links to resources and services.
3. News headlines are now each aligned with a corresponding image.  Clicking an image will bring you to the related story.  Two news items display at a time; more can be accessed without leaving the homepage by clicking the left & right arrows.
4. Recent posts from the Libraries’ various blogs (including the professional school libraries) are displayed; use the left & right arrows to browse through posts without leaving the homepage.
5. In an effort to give greater prominence to the Libraries’ exhibits, an image and link for a current Library Exhibit is visible in the lower right portion of the screen.

You can preview these changes at the following URL while the DPD works to put them in production:

We will review these changes this fall and make adjustments as necessary.  Please watch for invitations to participate in assessment activities for the Libraries’ web resources.

Have a great semester!

The new Library Guides button automatically directs you to a page of research tips and resources developed, in many cases, by a librarian who specializes in a subject area related to your course.

See a general research guide or a page that doesn’t reflect the goals of your course? Contact your subject specialist, who will replace the Library Guides link with a more appropriate page or work with you to design a guide specific to your objectives and assignments like the one below, which was created for a Writing 20 course:

Still have questions about this CIT/Libraries collaboration? Email Emily Daly, or check out CIT’s Blackboard support for more info.

The Data & GIS Services Department at Perkins Library supports ArcGIS software as well as Google Earth Pro.  The Brandaleone Family Center for Data and GIS Services on the second floor of Perkins Library has this software installed.  ArcGIS software is also site licensed for faculty and staff at Duke, and is available in OIT labs on campus, while basic Google Earth is free to download.  Duke affiliates who want the Pro version of Google Earth can contact Joel Herndon or Mark Thomas.

ArcGIS is great for analyzing any sort of data with a spatial element (for instance: data organized by county; associated with addresses; or containing latitude/longitude coordinates, such as GPS data).

You don’t even have to make a map … you might just want to answer questions about distance (example: what are the closest stores that sell tobacco to each school, and how far are they; or which such stores are within a certain distance from each school), location (example: for a set of crime data, identify the census tract that each crime is in, if you want to study socio-economic characteristics of the neighborhood); or network analysis (example: least-cost routes along roads and rivers to bring logs from tree plantations to mills).  These are only a few of many possibilities (examples reflect real projects done here).

If you do want to build your own map for a paper or publication, ArcGIS is great for creating one that shows just the features you need, starting with a simple basemap and editing or adding more layers to created a customized presentation.

Google Earth has fewer analysis capabilities, but has a short learning curve and a large database of online geographic layers ready to go.  Some sorts of data are easy to add (such as addresses or latitude/longitude coordinates).  The map creation is less customizable than ArcGIS, but there are a lot of options for novel visualization.  Some Duke users, for instance, have found it useful for creating attention-getting maps for poster sessions.

A few of the more focused interactive mapping databases (often dealing only with US Census data) that have GIS analysis or presentation features, or GIS layer download capabilities, include SimplyMap, Social Explorer, National Historic GIS, and Neighborhood Change Database.

At Duke, there are a number of great ways to work in the library wherever you are.  You can use the library’s mobile website to find library hours, available computers, directions, contact info and more.  If you’re doing medical research, take a look at Duke’s Medical Center Library mobile site.  It’s full of features enabling you to do PICO analysis, browse e-journals, and link to many helpful mobile resources.

On the Digital Collections blog, it was recently announced that you can search, browse and view our Digital Collections on your mobile device.  Be sure to watch the short video demonstrating the ease of this feature in their post announcing this new tool.  Just announced this week, you can now watch vintage ads from Duke Libraries Hartman Center from Duke iTunes U.

There are other nice mobile tools outside of Duke as well.  This is just a partial list and some of these are third-party apps, but this will give you an idea of the possibilities out there.  Some useful apps include those for WorldCat.org, the arXiv pre-print server for physics, math, computer science, etc, or the Papers PDF organizer software in mobile form.

I’m sure I’ve missed some helpful mobile resources.  What others are out there?

Stixy

Here is beefed-up, electronic version of your paper sticky note.  Here you can create sticky boards and  cover them notes, photos, to-do lists and documents and mark them up as you want.  Then you can share them with group members and they can make and see edits and updates too.

MindMeister

This tool is a great way to organize your thoughts and is very easy to use.  The interface is very appealing and is really fun to use.   Plus, you can share your maps and collaborate with others with Twitter, Skype, iGoogle gadgets, Firefox add-ons and various export options. You can get a basic account (read: free) with up to six maps and premium accounts for a little more than free.  Check out a completed map.

Bubbl.us

This is a similar tool to MindMeister.  It’s not as feature-rich, but for what it does, it’s simple and easy.  It has great keyboard shortcuts that allow for quick brainstorming and notetaking.  Again, it keeps things organized and related in a way that you can make sense of all the notes you’re taking.

Twiddla

What you get here is basically a clean slate.  It approximates a clean white board and you are free to doodle, add text, change colors, etc.  It also has browser buttons that, when clicked, bring that web page into Twiddla where you can mark on them and share with others.  This could be a helpful way to comment on the design or content of a web page and let others see your ideas.

What web tools do you like for keeping track of your thoughts and collaborating?

*Thanks to Lisa R. Johnston for her SciTech News column which inspired this post.

Attention: Faculty and Teaching Assistants

Do you teach classes in non-English languages?

Does your class need library resources?

Subject specialists, with language skills across the curriculum, are available to create online guides that showcase the wonderful range of non-English resources the library has on offer. These guides can be easily integrated into Blackboard for use by students.

Would you like a library guide for your class? Ask a Librarian!

For many faculty and graduate students who remain on-campus, the summer is the time to catch up with all those things that got left behind in the end-of-semester rush.

With the deluge of articles and books in your field, it’s sometimes a challenge to keep up-to-date.

Not any more.

If you use Duke’s databases for your research, you can use RSS feeds to send you automatic updates on relevant articles, authors, journals, search results and citations.

These feeds allow you to automatically and effortlessly:

-Find out who’s citing your work

-Find new research in your field…

Read More

Joining this group is Publish or Perish, with a slightly different take on this process.  Publish or Perish uses data from Google Scholar, but it automatically does analysis on the citation patterns for specific authors.  After searching for an author (works best with first initial and quotes, such as “DG Schaeffer”) you can select the papers you want to analyze and you get metrics such as total citations, cites per year, h-index, g-index, etc.  Any analysis done can be exported to EndNote, BibTeX or a CSV file.

The software is available for Windows and Linux and is a quick, light, free download from the Publish or Perish website.  It’s more of a do-one-thing-well software and isn’t full of features, but this makes it easy to use.  It was created by an Australian professor and she includes some thoughts on her site about GoogleScholar as a citation tool as well as an explanation of the metrics used in the software.