Canadian Library Support Staff Day

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Today, Friday, October 19, 2012, has been designated by Canadian Library Association (CLA) as “Canadian Library Support Staff Day“. Library support staff members provide a wide variety of services in the library day-to-day operations: answer your questions, lend you a laptop, help you locate a particular book on the shelf, assist you in using uPrint machines in the library, etc. As the CLA website says, “the purpose of the day is to celebrate and show our appreciation for the work of library technicians, library assistants, library clerks, pages, shelvers, and all other support staff members who perform daily miracles in our public, private, school, government, academic, and corporate libraries.” So, if you will come to the library today for whatever reason, please do not forget to say thank you to the staff.

OA Week approaches

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Open access (OA) is free, mostly unrestricted, online access to scholarly output. There is a strong international movement to promote OA and this month there is an Open Access Week, from October 22-28.

From the OA Week About site:

“Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.

Over 100 countries will participate in OA Week this year. You will see us around the Library wearing OA t-shirts so be sure to stop and ask us questions. We hope to have a series of blog posts on OA so I will kick things off by pointing to the McGill Library OA pages, including the extensive list of resources on the Learn more about open access page.

Image from PLOS

Keep up-to-date with new pulications in your area

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At the beginning of this month I posted about a helpful and time saving current awareness tool, email alerts, and how to set up a search alert in an article database. Today I want draw your attention to another current awareness tool, Table of Contents (TOC) alerts and to JournalTOCs, an excellent aggregating service that allows you to get TOC alerts for specific journals. JournalTOCs contains the latest Tables of Contents of over 20 000 scholarly journals, 4 400 of which are Open Access.

By setting up an account for free (simply a username and password) you can search or browse for the journal titles you want to follow, then JournalTOCs alerts you when new issues of your followed journals are published. You can save and import your selected journal titles into your favourite RSS feed reader, set up TOC email alerts, or both. There are other customization options to explore as well.

Visit the website, sign up, and give it a try. One way to look for journal titles in your discipline is to go to Browse > Subject and then scroll through the alphabetical list. Once you select a subject, you can view those subject-specific journal titles as well as how many followers that title has. You can also see whether the journal listed is subscription-based or Open Access.

JournalTOCs has made it simple to go into your account and deselect journal titles you no longer wish to follow, and to add new ones. So don’t be shy and start experimenting with some of these tools that help to keep you on top of the latest research in your field.

Image from www.journaltocs.ac.uk

Beagle – the €9.90 e-reader

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A tiny e-reader, called Beagle, only five inches and 128 grams, was introduced by Txtr at the Frankfurt Book Fair last week. It has no Wi-Fi embedded, and it needs to work with smartphone to add e-books.  “The main selling point is its low price – €9.90 ($12.88 USD)”. Read more at here.

At McGill University, you actually can borrow an e-reader from the Library. To find an e-book, you may explore this page or search in the e-book sub-catalogue.

Did you feel the earthquake?

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I felt the earthquake last Wednesday night and I only realized that it was an earthquake after it had happened.  The Government of Canada has some safety tips on its website about what to do before, during, and after an earthquake.  Natural Resources Canada also has an Earthquake Database that you can search to obtain data about earthquakes in or near Canada since 1985.  Details about last week’s earthquake are available (use the “Report details” menu on the left-hand side of the page to look at the different sections of the report).

Image from Microsoft Office Clipart

Open access textbooks downloadable for free – bookboon.com

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If you would like a quality and free e-book on a topic of your studies, bookboon.com might be a place to go. It provides more than 800 free textbooks in PDF format for everyone to download, even without registration. Topics cover from economics, statistics, IT, engineering, to natural science. Don’t think free things are always in poor quality. Actually, most titles on bookboon.com were written by authoritative authors in the field. Find a book that you are interested in at bookboon.com.

Gault Nature Reserve

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This is a great time of year to get outdoors in a big scarf and take a walk, listening to the crunching of the leaves under your feet. You don’t have to venture too far outside Montreal to get a nature fix and find some nice hiking trails. Close by, in Mont Saint-Hilaire, you’ll find the Gault Nature Reserve, a private Reserve affiliated with the Faculty of Science of McGill University. From their website:

Gault Nature Reserve of McGill University is a private Reserve which protects 1000 hectares of natural primeval forests of the St. Lawrence Valley. Situated at Mont-Saint-Hilaire approximately 40 km from Montreal, this panoramic natural landscape is ideal for discovering nature, teaching and university research. The public sector with 25 km of trail network is open 365 days per year for visitors’ enjoyment.

Affiliated with the Faculty of Science of McGill University, the Gault team offers support to research and teaching of natural sciences while providing a wide range of services to the university community and the general public.

Image from www.mcgill.ca/gault

Science & technology research in Canada

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The Council of Canadian Academies recently released a report entitled, The State of Science and Technology in Canada, 2012.  It reveals the 6 research fields in which Canada is among the best.  These are:

  • Clinical Medicine
  • Historical Studies
  • Information and Communication Technologies
  • Physics and Astronomy
  • Psychology and Cognitive Sciences
  • Visual and Performing Arts

For more information, read the report or watch the video below:

Women in Science, Engineering and Medicine Symposium at McGill on Friday and Saturday

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Carrie Derick, Canada's first female full professor

Carrie Derick, Canada’s first female full professor

If you’re coming to McGill for Homecoming next weekend, you might want to check out the Women in Science, Engineering and Medicine Symposium (WISEMS) 2012, on Friday, October 12 and Saturday, October 13 in the Redpath Museum Auditorium.

“As part of McGill Homecoming 2012, this first Women in Science, Engineering and Medicine Symposium (WISEMS) marks the centenary of the university’s first geneticist, Carrie Derick, being appointed as Canada’s first female professor.”

Have a look at the full schedule for this free symposium, which will look at the history, current status and future of women in STM fields.

Previously: We’ve come a long way baby, right?

Image: by Smithsonian Institution (from flickr Commons)

No plans for the long weekend? Why not catch some zzz’s?

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This is one of my favourite TED Talks from Arianna Huffington: How to succeed? Get more sleep. It was recorded live at TEDWomen in December, 2010. She knows something about the value of sleep, having fainted from exhaustion and broken her cheekbone on her desk. If you feel exhaustion creeping up, this short pep talk may be just the thing.

Schulich Library will be closed this Thanksgiving Monday so I plan on taking her advice and getting the most out of the long weekend with a few good sleeps.

Sweet dreams!