Electronic books platforms – or eBooks – have been a popular discussion topic in library circles in recent years. They offer a number of apparent virtues, as they take up no physical shelf space and they enable searching on a book’s complete text, including bibliographies and footnotes (thereby compensating for sketchy tables of contents and indexes). Some publishers, such as Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, enable searching on ebooks alongside journals and other publication types, providing an online research environment which can bypass the “silos” of particular formats. For libraries constrained by tight budgets and staff shortages in a poor economy, they may provide a faster and more economic means of expanding a book collection.Sunday, 20 September 2009
Trend Watch: Nano
In recent years, a BIG research topic has been about things very small – nano-sized to be exact. Nano-technology and nano-science have been high on the radar of engineers, scientists, and STEM librarians. Consequently, when Tufts released its new Engineering Research Guides this fall, we devoted a page to nanotechnology.
The usual criteria for anything nano is that one dimension must be between .1 to 100 nanometers (one billionth of a meter) – a fraction of a single hair. Consequently, many applications involve very slender, often invisible (to the human eye) applications. Applications for nano involve all the STEM disciplines, from specialty coatings and miniature sensors to nano-membranes for water purification.
Some debate exists as whether all of the so-called nano-applications are really new or simply being repurposed to excite interest. But there is no doubt that nano is considered to be enough of its own discipline to warrant its own Library of Congress subject heading. Apart from reference books on the topic, a growing number of journal collections publish titles dedicated to nano. The American Chemical Society, IEE, IEEE, the Institute of Physics (IOP), and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) are just a few of the professional societies with their own nano-journals and proceedings, while major STEM publishers such as Wiley and Kluwers also produce titles on the topic. Most of these have nano somewhere in the title although a very fine journal is titled simply, Small. More nano-focused items in our collection can be viewed in the Tufts online catalog as well as the aforementioned nanotechology guide.
A growing number of our research databases are going mobile, e.g. providing applications optimized specifically for iPhones, Blackberries, and other mobile devices. These typically are very streamlined apps designed for small screens and folks on the go. One example is IEEE Xplore, which has built a