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October 27, 2009
The Chemistry of Autumn Colors
Chemical of the Week has an informative article about where the fall color in trees and shrubs comes from, from a chemical standpoint. Written by University of Wisconsin-Madison Chemistry Professor Bassam Z. Shakhashiri, The Chemistry of Autumn Colors reveals why in the fall leaves go from green to yellow and red.
Summarizing he says:
The range and intensity of autumn colors is greatly influenced by the weather. Low temperatures destroy chlorophyll, and if they stay above freezing, promote the formation of anthocyanins. Bright sunshine also destroys chlorophyll and enhances anthocyanin production. Dry weather, by increasing sugar concentration in sap, also increases the amount of anthocyanin. So the brightest autumn colors are produced when dry, sunny days are followed by cool, dry nights.
For the complete discussion, see:
http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/chemweek/fallcolr/fallcolr.html or the pdf version:
http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/chemweek/PDF/fall_colors.pdf
Posted by Katie Newman at 4:43 PM
October 7, 2009
IDEALS Digital Repository Surpasses 1-millionth Download
NEWS RELEASE
7 October 2009
IDEALS Digital Repository Surpasses 1-millionth Download
Urbana, Illinois—The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS), a digital repository for research and scholarship developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has surpassed its one-millionth download.
The service, offered through the University Library and Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES), is sponsored by the Office of the Provost at Illinois and was launched in 2006. The campus institutional repository includes articles, working papers, preprints, technical reports, conference papers and, data sets in various digital formats provided by University faculty, staff, and graduate students. Although central to the University of Illinois, anyone can access and benefit from IDEALS collections and services.
“Today, over 12,000 items have been uploaded into IDEALS,” said Sarah Shreeves, associate professor and IDEALS coordinator. “The success of this service has surpassed what anyone envisioned two and a half years ago, and we hope that others in the Illinois community will take advantage of its services.”
The mission of IDEALS is to preserve and provide persistent and reliable access to digital research and scholarship in order to give these works the greatest possible recognition and distribution. IDEALS endeavors to ensure that its materials appear in search engines such as Google, Google Scholar, and Bing and that the majority of the research is openly available for anyone to access. As a result of its efforts to disseminate research produced at the University of Illinois, IDEALS was recently ranked in the top 10 of institutional repositories worldwide.
“I am delighted with the exposure that IDEALS has provided us with. Whenever we place a thesis or a report, the downloads start and never stop. We get many comments back from readers and researchers who have seen our work only on IDEALS,” said Amr Elnashai, head, Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
IDEALS contains a wealth of diverse information, from a Mid-America Earthquake Center report on the Kashmir Earthquake of 2005 to the Ethnography of the University Initiative’s publications and presentations, including campus folklore and cultural perceptions.
“I appreciate that my thesis is archived in a stable location for reliable long-term access. The document is now freely available to anyone in the world, yet I retain the copyright,” said David P. Hruska, an Illinois graduate. “Furthermore, my thesis is now displayed in search results returned by Google Scholar, improving the dissemination of my research.
"This depository has been exceptionally helpful in preserving in an easily-accessed archive, the extensive field data sets I accumulated over a 25-year period," said Lowell Getz, professor emeritus, Ecology, Ethology, and Evolution (now Animal Biology) at the University of Illinois. "There are no other such data sets and most likely never will be again."
For more information about, or to access, the IDEALS digital repository, visit www.ideals.illinois.edu.
###
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library holds over eleven million volumes, more than 90,000 serial titles, and more than nine million manuscripts, maps, slides, audio tapes, microforms, videotapes, laser discs, and other non-print material. The University Library is ranked highly nationally and globally, and its collections and services are used heavily by students, faculty, and scholars. More than one million items are circulated annually, and many more are used on site and virtually from anywhere in the world. For more information, please visit www.library.illinois.edu.
--
Heather Murphy
Assistant Director of Advancement for Publications and Public Affairs
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library
435 Main Library, MC-522
1408 West Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801
Phone: 217-333-3758
Fax: 217-244-7201
hmurphy@illinois.edu
www.library.illinois.edu/friends
"Uncover and Discover"
Posted by Katie Newman at 11:36 AM
October 2, 2009
Use Pubget for Quick Access to PDFs
Do you regularly use PubMed? Do you often wish it were easier to view and save the PDFs of journal articles?
Try Pubget -- illinois.pubget.com -- and see how this new tool saves steps so you can devote more time to your research.
Pubget is a search tool for the life sciences that searches PubMed and more. The Pubget search system is very similar to those of PubMed or Google Scholar. The difference is Pubget gets you the PDFs right away! The Pubget results screen shows the actual PDFs of the documents side-by-side with your search results. The Library has worked with Pubget so the pdfs for journals for which the University has licensed access are available (thanks for your help, Sharif!). For maximum functionality, be sure to register with Pubget, creating a personal login and password.
Other Features:
Read the latest issue of a journal:
- In the search box, type latest:, and then the name of the journal
- Click on a journal title in a results list
- Or, even better, if you're a registered user, customize the first screen so the latest journals of interest are listed.
Alerts:
As a registered user, you'll have the option to set up email alerts
Keepers:
Stash items of interest in Keepers, for quick access to the pdfs in the future (must be a registered user for this feature)
Download PDFs
- Download pdfs one by one, as they appear on the screen
- Or, download up to 50 at a time, if you're a registered user, use Firefox, and have installed the Pubget downloader plugin
- For articles for which the University of Illinois does not have electronic access, the familiar DISCOVER link will appear. Use Discover to explore other options for access, including requesting the article from the library's Interlibrary Loan department
Searching:
- Searching is quite robust. The advanced search, available from the results screen, supports searching by keyword (any/all), article title, journal title (publication), author, affiliation, last author, first author, MESH, and more
- Pubget's citation matching is stellar, so if you know the citation (journal, volume, pages, year), Pubget will locate the article quickly for you
- Pubget does not automatically "explode" searched concepts, such as occurs in PubMed. If you need to do a comprehensive search on your topic, search PubMed and other databases in addition to Pubget.
Off-campus use:
- Use this URL from off campus: illinois.pubget.com, and you'll be prompted for your netID and password before any PDFs can be displayed
- Or click on the link to Pubget found on the Biotechnology Information Center website (www.library.illinois.edu/biotech/), or in the ORR; you'll you'll be prompted for your netID and password.
- Or, access PubGet after logging in to the campus VPN
Help:
Pubget HELP is quite useful and is located at illinois.Pubget.com/site/help/.
Please send any comments, suggestions, or questions about Pubget to Katie Newman, florador@illinois.edu
Posted by Katie Newman at 2:40 PM
October 1, 2009
SciFinder is Now Available on the Web!
Passing along a note from the Chemistry Librarian, Tina Chrzastowski.
Use SciFinder Web to search Chemical Abstracts, which indexes "chemistry" in the broadest sense. It is updated daily and indexes & abstracts over 8000 journals. Coverage: 1907-present. SciFinder has cited & citing references from 1995-present. One of the new features of the web version is the ability to set up email alerts.
Note: our "seats" for this resource are very limited, so if you get turned away the first time you try to access it, please try again another time.
--Katie
------- Note from Tina Chrzastowski ----------
We now have access to the latest version of SciFinder Scholar in its new format: SciFinder Web (SFWeb).
You must register as an individual to gain access to SFWeb, and you must register with a Illinois.edu email account. In addition, SFWeb will only work from a computer with a University of Illinois IP address (or via the VPN, which mimics a U of Illinois IP, if you need to use it from off-campus). Since this new application is web-based, Macs and PCs can use the same platform.
To register for a SciFinder Web (SFW) account, please go to:
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/chx/sfschanges.html
and follow the links from "Register for SciFinder Web Version." You may also need to download the Java Plug-in for structure searching, which is also available at this URL. You will also find the link to login once you register your user name and password: https://scifinder.cas.org/ .
Full information on this migration, as well as the many positives of the new SF Web version are available at our FAQ page.
As always, please let me know about any problems or questions using SciFinder Web. Tutorials are available through the FAQ page and we will be holding training sessions on SF Web later this fall. Tina
*********************************
Tina E. Chrzastowski
Chemistry Librarian
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
chrz@illinois.edu
Posted by Katie Newman at 4:46 PM