Natural Sciences Library News

University of Washington Libraries

Spring/Summer, 2000

Can one person make a difference? Can one organization? Yes! For many years, there was a direct correlation between increases in journal prices and academic libraries' cancellation of journal subscriptions.

At the UW's forum on Scholarly Communication on March 3, Dr. Mike Rosenzweig, of the University of Arizona, described his actions. As editor, he and his entire editorial board (including UW Zoology Professor Ray Huey), resigned from an expensively priced biology journal (Evolutionary Ecology, published by Wolters-Kluwer) to start a comparable and more reasonably priced journal.

The new journal, Evolutionary Ecology Research, costs just $300 a year for print and online access. The commercial publisher's yearly charge is comparatively much higher at $800 per year, with an almost 300% markup/profit over production costs.

SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition, which is an international alliance of research libraries that aims to foster expanded competition in scholarly communication, has supported and encouraged this and similar developments.

One of SPARC's current developments is BioOne, which will provide Web access to full-text bioscience research journals, most of which are published by small, under-capitalized societies individually lacking resources to make the technological leap to digital publishing. BioOne was created in mid-1999 by an unprecedented public-private non-profit partnership between five organizations: AIBS (the American Institute of Biological Sciences); SPARC; the University of Kansas; the Big 12 Plus Libraries Consortium; and Allen Press, Inc.

UW Libraries is a charter member of SPARC and of BioOne. Watch for future announcements regarding online availability of BioOne titles!

The Natural Sciences Library is the new home to a rather impressive reptile from the Late Pleistocene. Thanks to a special arrangement with the UW's Burke Museum, a cast of the 28-foot long fossil crocodile, Tomistoma machikanense, now hangs in the library's foyer.

The crocodile, some 10,000 years old, was discovered in Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture, on Japan's Honshu Island. It is on loan from the Burke Museum, which obtained it in a cast exchange with the Osaka Museum.

Crocodiles and dinosaurs are both types of archosaurs that arose approximately 240 million years ago during the Triassic Period. Only crocodiles survived the extinction event that occurred 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period.

For further information about crocodiles, visit the Crocodile Information Table in the Natural Sciences reference area, or visit our crocodile Web site at http://www.lib.washington.edu/natsci/croc.html.

The UW Libraries Information Gateway contains a wealth of information. We will be bringing you “glimpses” of available options from the Gateway in this and subsequent issues.

The Gateway also provides access to the following circulation services:

• Register for E-mail Notification – Register your e-mail address to receive library notices, such as overdue and recall notices, via e-mail instead of postal mail.

• Link Your Barcode – Linking your barcode to your Libraries' record will allow you to use circulation functions available through the Web.

• Purchase Request – Have an item you'd like included in the Libraries' collection? Fill out an online purchase request form.

It's 1:00 AM. The library's closed. You need to find a definition for the term fruticolous for an article you're writing. Where to turn? The UW Libraries Information Gateway can help. Go to the Gateway, under Find It click on Reference Tools.

From the list of reference tools, simply click on Dictionaries, scroll down to Medical & Scientific, and click on Academic Press Dictionary of Science and Technology. This full-text source searches from over 130,000 terms defined in 130 fields of science. It will tell you that fruticolous is an ecology term, meaning “living or growing on shrubs.”

You'll find lots of other dictionaries at the Reference Tools site, as well as calculators, directories, encyclopedias, and many other useful resources.

The Gateway lists dozens of databases for finding articles in the various subject areas. WebSPIRS is the search engine used to access many of the science databases such as Biosis, GeoRef, PsycInfo and Zoological Record. It is a very powerful interface, but few know how to use its full potential. Here are some tips.

• Use the truncation or wildcard symbol to find plurals or variants: fish* will retrieve fish, fishes, and fisheries.

• Search in specific fields, such as the Source field (SO), which includes the journal citation information: crustacean research in SO

• Combine sets by checking boxes and clicking “Combined Checked.”
  

For more search features see the WebSPIRS help on the UW Libraries Information Gateway (Help -- Research Guides -- WebSPIRS Help). For database specific help, including the list of search fields available, click on the Help box on the top of the WebSPIRS search screen.

Betty Bengtson is retiring on December 31, 2000, after 10 innovative years as Director of the UW Libraries. During her tenure, the Libraries reached several milestones: the Allen Library addition, the acquisition of the 5 millionth volume, implementation of the UWired Program, automation of the Libraries' collection, and the migration from UWIN to the Web-based Information Gateway.

A search advisory committee chaired by David Hodge, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, was charged by President McCormick to identify and recommend candidates for the directorship. Of the 16 members, five are from the Libraries. It is hoped that the new Director will assume office on January 1, 2001.

Spring Quarter Hours and Phone Numbers

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