Posts By:

Science Literacy Week: Register today

Posted on by
Comment

At Schulich Library we ♥ science and we have created an amazing lineup of events to share our love of science with you. This year we are participating in Science Literacy Week and it is only one week away: September 21st – 27th.

I invite you to visit our guide to Science Literacy Week @ McGill, where you will find info on exhibits and events organized by the Library and the Redpath Museum.

There are so many events scheduled that I will let the list speak for itself:

Register today!

Sprint in to the Library!

Posted on by
Comment

McGill Library SprintThe McGill Library Sprint is a new interactive game and self-guided tour. Choose between the Schulich Library and the Humanities and Social Sciences Library and answer some challenging questions.

Prizes include a Fitbit Flex and McGill Bookstore gift certificates.

We had a lot of fun putting together the questions for Schulich Library and we hope that you have as much fun playing!

Want to take a scheduled tour around Schulich Library? We have those too! Take a look at the list of upcoming tours and MyLibrary introductory workshops. Tours and workshops are also being offered in Mandarin Chinese and Persian.

And the winning CCOM 206 paper is…

Posted on by
Comment

I could not be more excited to be a member of the CCOM 206: Communication in Engineering Writing Recognition Committee, alongside some of the fantastic course lecturers. One of the assignments in CCOM 206 is to write a research paper and the committee had the difficult task of awarding the best paper to one student in the fall term. There were 337 students enrolled in the course and 12 papers were shortlisted for the award by instructors. We carefully considered the originality and practicality of the research question and proposed solutions in each paper, along with the depth of research and academic sources referenced, argument coherency and consistency, and overall clarity and quality of the writing.

The best paper among all those excellent research papers chosen for consideration is “Recycling Carbon Fibre Reinforced Composites: A Market and Environmental Assessment” by Maxime Lauzé.

McGill Library is hosting the winning paper in eScholarship, a digital repository which stores and showcases the publications and theses of McGill University faculty and students. Maxime will also receive a formal certificate from the McGill Writing Centre and a $50 gift certificate for the McGill Bookstore.

Here is the abstract of the winning paper:

Both environmental and economic factors have driven the development of carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) waste recycling processes. This paper will present the causes of increased use of carbon fibre composites as well as the consequences of such growth. As well, the advantages and disadvantages of three current recycling technologies available are discussed, focusing on fibre quality, commercial flexibility, and environmental impact. Chemical recycling produces best quality fibre with negative environmental impact while mechanical recycling produces bad quality fibre with good environmental impact. As a result, this paper argues that the best recycling method available today is a thermal process called conventional pyrolysis, because it produces good quality recyclate while being very energy efficient, tolerant to contamination and therefore also the best commercial candidate.

On behalf of the Writing Recognition Committee, congratulations to all those who were shortlisted for the award!

Apps from 2 big MOOC providers

Posted on by
Comment

I have been waiting for this – edX mobile is finally here.

I’ve been taking courses from the two big names in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), edX and Coursera, and making good use of Coursera’s iOS app on my iPhone (also available for Android). What I like about having the apps is that I can download course videos and view them anytime, even offline.

I can now get on with the course I’ve signed up for from MITx: Design and Development of Games for Learning. The furthest I’ve got is through their pre-course tutorial videos on Gameblox. I designed my first game (don’t judge!).

Keep your eye on offerings from McGill on McGillx. You can now follow courses on your mobile (yay).

@mymom I’m back on Twitter!

Posted on by
Comment

After a four year hiatus I am returning to Twitter (@tweetapril) and quickly realizing that I have really missed out. As a participant in a MOOC, Introduction to Learning Technologies, I was prompted to connect via their hashtag (#ilt_usask) on Twitter (in 140 characters or less at a time).

For anyone new to Twitter, course instructors pointed us to the very sweet and useful Mom This is How Twitter Works. It has some quick tips if you are a little rusty as well. For example, if you start a tweet with a username like @mymom it will limit who gets to see it, versus putting a period or other characters in front of it.

We were also directed to 10 Commandments of Twitter for Academics from The Chronicle for Higher Education, with some sage advice on using Twitter in your personal and professional lives. I will of course recommend that you follow McGill Library (@McGillLib) but please do not stop there. I’m following a lot of Montreal- sci-tech- library-oriented people and discovering new things everyday.

Here is one that I will leave you with: British Library’s #ShareMyThesis competition. First prize for this worldwide competition is a 15-inch MacBook pro. Take a look at how past and present PhD students have been sharing why their project is important #ShareMyThesis and consider contributing.

Bagels in space

Posted on by
Comment

FairmountBagels

I have the pleasure of living right between Fairmount and St-Viateur Bagel and I refuse to pick a side, but here is one cool thing that I noticed on my bag of bagels from Fairmount: 1st bagel in space!

There has been some attention on Fairmount Bagel lately, since they were thought to have joined the world of Twitter but then the account turned out to be a fake.

The NASA mission to the International Space Station was STS 124 when Montreal-born astronaut, Greg Chamitoff, brought 18 sesame bagels with him. I don’t know how I missed this but you can read more about it in this 2008 article from CTV News.

Recommend a graphic novel

Posted on by
Comment

IMG_Book_coverI checked this book out of the library to get myself thinking about graphic novels for the Schulich collection. Feynman, from our Education Curriculum Resources Centre, is juvenile literature and worth a read but there are other great ones out there written for adults.

I have been talking with librarians from other university science and engineering libraries that have been purchasing books in this format but I’d love to hear from you. Do you have any graphic novels to recommend that touch on science and technology?

McGill researchers make another highly cited list

Posted on by
Comment

The first edition of the list of 382 Highly Cited Researchers (h>100) according to Google Scholar Citations includes two McGill scientists: Alan Evans has an h-index of 152, putting him at #34 in the list, and Andreas Warburton is #99 with an h-index of 128. Alan Evans is no stranger to citation fame, as he was also included in the 2014 Highly Cited Researchers list from Thomson Reuters, along with Chemistry professor, Chao-Jun Li (read more on this from McGill News and Events).

The h-index marks the place where the number of citations a researcher receives meets the number of papers they have published (see the graph below). Read more about the h-index from Hirsch’s article in arXiv.

h-index

You can create your own citations page in Google Scholar by looking for the “My Citations” option.

Image is in the public domain.

MOOCs and OERs

Posted on by
Comment

Welcome / welcome back! I wanted to bring your attention to some free resources, such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), that may help support your studies. I know, classes have just begun so the last thing that you are thinking about is enrolling in another course but there is some great material out there to help reinforce or expand your learning.

We have a new guide to MOOCs and open education resources (OERs for short) on our Schulich Library site. These include places where you can go to register for courses, but also options for viewing course materials, such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare, or for taking advantage of openly available textbooks in science and engineering.

I’m currently following (when I can) a Linux MOOC and waiting on Writing in the Sciences from Stanford.

There is also Comic Books and Graphic Novels starting in a few weeks on Coursera, but that is neither here nor there…

Try this: Altmetric it

Posted on by
Comment

Last year I posted on Altmetric for Scopus where you can find metrics, like tweets, blogs, and saves to citation managers, that are alternatives to the traditional citation counts. Altmetric now has a tool to allow you to see these metrics for articles that you are viewing in your browser. I installed this Altmetric bookmarklet to my bookmarks bar. Give it a try and let me know what you think.