From the news alert:

The focus of this issue is very much on Australasia. With a new Labor government in place since December 2007, Australia was expecting changes in research funding policy and procedure. The government is now beginning to announce these changes and the impact they will have.
In China, article output has increased 18% per annum over the last 10 years. We examine what is driving this growth and the effect it is having on the global research landscape.

Articles include:

+ Expert opinion: Social sciences literature in citation databases

Social scientists have traditionally published more often in monographs than journals, when compared to fundamental and applied science researchers. However, the last 40 years have seen a continuing trend towards publication in journals, resulting in more citation information for the social sciences being indexed in citation databases. Professor Charles Oppenheim assesses the databases with social sciences coverage.

+ Why did you cite…?
In this section, we ask authors what motivated them to cite certain references. This issue we talk to authors who cited Nobel Prize winners and ask whether winning the Nobel Prize has a positive effect on a scientist’s citation inflow.

Source: Research Trends

Study shows libraries work at supporting other languages

The American Library Association released “Serving Non-English Speakers in U.S. Public Libraries,” a study on the range of specialized library services for non-English speakers Wednesday at the Hennepin County Library’s New American Center.

The study found that Spanish is the most supported non-English language in public libraries. Seventy-eight percent of libraries reported Spanish as a priority language, after English, to which they develop services and programs. Asian languages ranked second in priority at 29 percent. Another

17.6 percent of libraries indicated Indo-European languages as a second priority.

Source: KSAX

See Also: Read the Full Text of the Report (via ALA)

Knowledge Management for Biomedical Literature: The Function of Text-Mining Technologies in Life-Science Research

Efficient information retrieval and extraction is a major challenge in life-science research. The Knowledge Management (KM) for biomedical literature aims to establish an environment, utilizing information technologies, to facilitate better acquisition, generation, codification, and transfer of knowledge. Knowledge Discovery in Text (KDT) is one of the goals in KM, so as to find hidden information in the literature by exploring the internal structure of knowledge network created by the textual information. Knowledge discovery could be major help in the discovery of indirect relationships, which might imply new scientific discoveries. Text-mining provides methods and technologies to retrieve and extract information contained in free-text automatically. Moreover, it enables analysis of large collections of unstructured documents for the purposes of extracting interesting and non-trivial patterns of knowledge. Biomedical text-mining is organized in stages classified into the following steps: identification of biological entities, identification of biological relations and classification of entity relations. Here, we discuss the challenges and function of biomedical text-mining in the KM for biomedical literature.

Source: International Technology, Education and Development Conference (via E-LIS)

The Conference on Convergence and Connectivity 2008: Broadband, Wireless and Mobile: Archived Conference Webcast

The Conference on Convergence and Connectivity 2008 (CCC 2008): Broadband, Wireless and Mobile brings together the best available input from industry, government and academia to develop a vision for digitally connected communities with an emphasis upon the applications and services delivered to public, private and individual users. By gathering leaders from different fields in a neutral setting, we hope to address opportunities created by digital communications technologies, as well as to develop guidance of values in a long-term strategy for future innovations.

The conference took place on Wednesday, March 26, 2008.

Source: Rice University

Lists & Rankings: Brands With the Biggest Impact (2008)

What brands do people select as having the biggest impact in various situations?

Apple and Google top several of the lists.

All of the rankings can be accessed here.

Source: BrandChannel.com

Unemployment Rate of U.S. Scientists and Engineers Drops to Record Low 2.5% in 2006
From the report:

The overall unemployment rate of scientists and engineers in the United States dropped from 3.2% in 2003 to 2.5% in 2006, according to data from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System (SESTAT). This is the lowest unemployment rate measured by SESTAT since the early 1990s. It continues a trend of lower unemployment rates for scientists and engineers compared with unemployment rates in the rest of the U.S. economy. Comparable unemployment rates for the entire U.S. labor force in 2003 and 2006 were 6.0% and 4.7%, respectively.

Source: National Science Foundation

New Bibliography: Private Military Companies
Includes Internet resources, books, documents, periodicals, videos.

Source: Muir S. Fairchild Research Information Center, Air University

Garmin enters deals with MapQuest, Google

Garmin International Inc. on Monday announced new deals with MapQuest Inc. and Google Inc. that will let consumers send data from Web sites directly to personal navigation devices.

Garmin International and MapQuest Inc. will jointly launch a new feature that can send trip-planning results from MapQuest.com to consumers’ Garmin devices. Garmin International and Google Inc. will offer a service that enables Garmin device users to send location information found on Google Maps directly to their Garmin devices.

Source: Kansas City Business Journal

+ Web 2.0 gets down to business (via Fortune)

+ Meet the Librarian: Buchanan book lover finds her passion in new job (via South Bend Tribune)

+ Audio Books: Choice of narrator can be key to enjoying books on tape (via Contra Costa Times)

Posted 30 March 2008 on DocuTicker:
+ Index of State Weakness in the Developing World (Brookings Institution)
+ Selected Laws Governing the Disclosure of Customer Phone Records by Telecommunications Carriers (Congressional Research Service)
+ Student Speech Rights in the Digital Age (Boston College Law School Faculty Papers)

USA Counties — Downloadable data files have been created to accompany the web-based

USA Counties. Now users can download directly more than 5,900 data items from the Web site for the United States, the 50 states and the District of Columbia, and all 3,141 counties and county equivalents.

Information in USA Counties covers topics such as: age, agriculture, ancestry, banking, building permits, business patterns, crime, earnings, education, elections, employment, government, health, households, housing, income, labor force, manufactures, population, poverty, retail trade, social programs, veterans, vital statistics, water use, and wholesale trade.

Source: U.S. Census

NOAA Debuts “Nautical Charts” As New Elementary Multimedia Educational Tool

is launching today a new multimedia elementary educational program, Nautical Charts, at the annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association in Boston.

Designed in cooperation with NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey for students at the third through fifth grade level, the media rich activity teaches young people about charting and navigation. Nautical Charts is available online at http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/nautical_charts/.

The activity uses animation to teach chart symbols, safe boating, and why nautical charts are important. Students have access to movies, sounds, pictures, and links to other resources. This activity uses the same characters and methodology employed in a similar multimedia tool, Sea Floor Mapping, launched last year online at http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education_new/seafloor-mapping/welcome.html.

Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Herald librarian one of a kind

Salt-and-pepper braid to her waist, cigarette in hand, Rose Klayman was a fixture in Miami’s Edgewater neighborhood.

Slowly, haltingly, she’d make her way up Biscayne Boulevard from Northeast 26th Street, where she lived, to Boulevard Liquors at 30th Street, where she helped out.

(sic) and famously quirky retired Miami Herald librarian — dead in her $650 second-floor efficiency. She was 71.

A hard-drinking, two-pack-a-day smoker who swore like a sailor, Rose Klayman died of respiratory failure.

She joined The Miami Herald in the 1960s, left ”in a huff” in 1970, according to one-time supervisor Gay Nemeti, then was lured back in 1984 because she was “a newspaper junkie.”

She took a buyout in 2001.

”We all did everything back then,” Nemeti said. “She was a database editor, then photo librarian. She had encyclopedic memories and knew how to ferret everything out of the files.”
…
Among other things, she had been a Saks Fifth Avenue sales clerk and a Playboy Club “bunny.”

She was married once, to David Klayman, more than a decade her junior. He went to prison on drug charges and died in 2003.

”She was crazy in love with him,” Nemeti said.

Source: Miami Herald

From the post:

Google and Microsoft’s personal health record databases will be integrated into the Nationwide Health Information Network, according to an official in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. The federal health IT official also said that the NHIN will be expanded to include multicommunity integrated health systems.

Source: iHealthBeat

OCLC Programs and Research Offers Online PARcasts

The first (and second) in a new series of podcasts and webinars from Programs and Research staff is now available on the OCLC Web site.

The podcasts are recorded impromptu interviews in which Programs and Research staff ask the question, “What’s keeping you awake at night?” to selected people who are thinking ahead, worrying about big issues or imagining the next big thing.

The first podcast is now available, in which RLG Program Officer Merrilee Proffitt interviews RLG Program Partner Mark Dimunation, Chief of the Rare and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress, about “The Value of Physical Artifacts in an Increasingly Virtual World”

Direct to PARcasts

Source: OCLC