Don’t miss your chance to win one of two JB HiFi vouchers worth $250 each!

If you haven’t completed the survey - you’re in LUCK.

The deadline for the survey has been extended until Friday 11th September – so you still have a chance at winning one of two vouchers.

Tell us how well you think the Library performs in relation to what you think is important and go in the draw to win one of two JB HiFi vouchers worth $250 each!

All responses are confidential and your honest input will make it very worthwhile. The Library has introduced many improvements based on previous feedback.
If you are on campus, please ensure that you have activated your internet connection (ie logged on via Jet internet authentication) before linking to the survey at:
http://surveys.insyncsurveys.com.au/surveys/adfalibrary2009/

The Academy Library’s  theme is Astronomy: Science of the Universe in recognition of the International Year of Astronomy. To celebrate, there will be a display in the Library foyer from 15 August until 29 August. Dr Stephen James, PEMS, will give a talk on Astronomy on Thursday 20 August 1230-1330 in the Library. Please come and bring your lunch. The Library will provide tea and coffee.Details about National Science Week can be found at www.scienceweek.gov.au

Any debate over which search engine is the best usually focuses on the “big two”: Google and Yahoo.

The University of California Berkeley Library recommends clients get “a second opinion” when searching the internet. Which search engines do they recommend for a second opinion?

1. Exalead
2. Scour
3. Hunch
4. Scirus
5. Indeed

Extracted from “Five slick search engines you should know about” published 30 June 2009 on Computerworld.

Microsoft has released its own search engine called Bing.

Like most search engines, Bing offers options to narrow a search to specific types of results, ie web, images, videos, news, maps and other options. Unlike Google, you need to enter a search statement before you can access any advanced search options. Like Google, you can limit your search to results only from Australian sources.

Bing has made it’s homepage a little more interesting than most. The image changes regularly, and offers interactive elements relating to the image. Run your cursor over the image and watch out for the little information boxes.

Despatches from Gallipoli: Scenes from a Remote War is an online exhibition hosted by the National Library of Australia which includes scanned images of despatches from four Gallipoli war correspondents: C.E.W. Bean, Keith Murdoch, Philip Schuler, and Charles Smith. Included are some 200 newspaper articles, images and interpretative pieces.

Information about other online exhibitions is available from the
National Library website.

From Monday 29 June we have moved to the web version of SciFinder and left the locally-installed client version. SciFinder searches the CAS collection of databases, which covers all primary data and literature in all major life sciences, patent and chemistry databases. You can find compounds, chemical reactions, gene/RNA/protein sequences, and patents quickly and easily.

With the web version, there is nothing to install and the information is usable from anywhere; there are powerful compound searching tools, complete with the ability to restrict to compounds with known biological effects and commercial vendors.  A limitation of the web version is that there are limited number of concurrent users which include both UNSW and UNSW@ADFA.

Access toSciFinder is via Sirius > Find Resources. There are two entries for SciFinder: SciFinder and SciFinder (once-off registration). Go to the latter to fill out a one-time registration form to create your username and password before you can log into SciFinder.

Do you want to include evidence of the impact of your research? Is your work cited in journals which are not ISI listed? Are you applying for tenure, promotion or a new job? Then you might want to try Publish or Perish, designed to help individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage. http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm 

Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the following statistics:

• Total number of papers
• Total number of citations
• Average number of citations per paper
• Average number of citations per author Average number of papers per author
• Average number of citations per year
• Hirsch’s h-index and related parameters
• Egghe’s g-index
• The contemporary h-index
• The age-weighted citation rate
• Two variations of individual h-indices
• An analysis of the number of authors per paper.

Publish or Perish provides cool bibliometrics  and is very easy to download (free).