Monthly Archives: March 2018

Design the UCBA Library’s National Library Week Button

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Button Contest Graphic

Create the winning design for our National Library Week buttons and win a $30 UC Bookstore Gift certificate and bragging rights!

Design a 2.25 inch button. Guidelines and templates can be found on the Button Design Contest page. Design submissions will be accepted from March 5 – March 30, 2018. Submit final designs in PDF or JPG format to: ucbalibrary@ucblueash.edu.

The winning design will be determined using a blind submission and voting process among the UCBA Library Team.  Voting team members will not be aware of the students responsible for the button designs during the voting process. The winner will be notified on Monday, April 2, 2018.

Above Board, Below the Ground

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December 12, 2013, Youngstown, Ohio. Truck crash and spill. EPA incident review conducted. Truck was a contractor hauling fracking wastewater from ChemTron in Avon, OH. Liquids went into storm sewers and Crab Creek – a tributary of Mahoning River. Image courtesy of FracTracker. Photos from Lynn Anderson, Frack Free Mahoning, & Jean Engle, Youngstown Community Bill of Rights Committee

In my recent explorations of how recordkeeping practices inform environmental policy and knowledge, an interesting trend has revealed itself in the context of state regulation of fracking in the Marcellus/Utica shale region (i.e., Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia). State agencies in these areas are far more likely to proactively disclose records concerning permits, well locations, and production volume than any other records.

This means that there is significant data on the expansion of fracking – from its geographical extent to the volume of extractive activity. What is far more difficult to obtain is information on the effects of fracking. In other words, the records that contextualize fracking’s impact on the communities where it takes place – complaints, routine inspections, and investigations – are largely absent from the available data on state oil and gas websites. Instead, citizens must file records requests to obtain this information. Pennsylvania is a notable exception in comparison to Ohio and West Virginia, as it discloses records specifically pertaining to inspections and waste production and handling. It also partially discloses complaint and investigation records (primarily related to water contamination issues).

Ohio’s inspection records are highly obscured, requiring one to go through a very confusing process to obtain records from the Department of Natural Resources website. There is no obvious way to search for specific inspection, complaint, or investigation records through either Ohio or West Virginia’s website. Ohio law requires that a database concerning major violations by oil and gas operators be made available to the public on the Division of Oil and Gas resources website. Some of this information may be available through Ohio’s RBDMS application, but due to installation difficulties, I was unable to confirm this. When I asked an agency official regarding whether this web database was available, I was told the agency was “in the process” of creating it. The law calling for such a database was passed in 2010 and amended in 2011.

According to an issue paper authored by the Natural Resources Defense Council and FracTracker, West Virginia once had an active Oil and Gas spills database that was updated at least through 2013. The database is still hosted online, but does not appear to have any records in it from the last several years, or the time period in the issue paper.

When agencies have leeway to determine the scope of their proactive information disclosure, what is shared likely reflects how the agency views it mission. It appears that Ohio and West Virginia’s regulatory agencies prioritize disclosing information about the growth of fracking far more than its potential ramifications for the environment.

Scholar@UC Upgraded to Enhance Both the Use and Access of the University’s Digital Repository

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Scholar@UC, the University of Cincinnati’s digital repository, has been updated and includes enhanced submission and viewing features:

  • improved look & feel
  • content dashboard for easier management of submitted works
  • batch work creation and upload – upload an entire folder of works simultaneously or create multiple works at once including from folders
  • usage analytics of content (views and downloads)
  • new work-relation model allowing works to be nested and related in meaningful ways
  • social media sharing widgets.

All content previously in Scholar@UC was migrated from the old platform, with files validated and the metadata and relationships maintained.

Scholar@UC is a digital repository that enables the University of Cincinnati community to share its research and scholarly work with a worldwide audience. Faculty and staff can use Scholar@UC to collect their work in one location and create a durable and citeable record of papers, presentations, publications, datasets or other scholarly creations. Students, through an approval process, may contribute capstone projects such as senior design projects, theses and dissertations.

The mission of Scholar@UC is to preserve the permanent intellectual output of UC, to advance discovery and innovation, to foster scholarship and learning through the transformation of data into knowledge, to collect a corpus of works that can be used for teaching and to enhance discoverability and access to these resources.

Scholar@UC is an open source, agile development project supported in partnership by the University of Cincinnati Libraries and IT@UC. To submit or view works in Scholar@UC, visit https://scholar.uc.edu/. Contact the Scholar@UC Team (scholar@uc.edu) with any questions.

Celebrate Pi!

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Have you ever pondered pi? Does 3.14 and beyond interest you? Whether you find this mathematical constant fascinating or not, you will want to be a part of our Pi Day celebration.

Beginning March 1, sign up to win a free pi t-shirt. The winner’s names will be drawn on March 14. Five shirts will be given away. Stop by the Clermont College Library and fill out an entry with your name, email, and preferred size.

On March 7, our math professors will be passing out pi(e) and coffee in the hallway, in front of the library. If you are up to a challenge, stop by Dr. Malla’s table and write out pi to as many digits as you can remember. There will be three prizes for the top winners.

 

Penny McGinnis
Technical Services Manager