Category Archives: GMP Library

Provost Technology Innovation Award to Fund Data Visualization across Disciplines

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The Provost Technology Innovation Award will fund visualization technology for faculty and students to communicate knowledge in graphical form.

data visualtion wall

Vendor supplied photograph of a data visualization wall.

The Office of the Provost has provided more than $1.3 million in funding to collaborating departments and groups across UC, helping each of them push the university community to new academic heights. UC Libraries, partnering with the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, the Carl H. Lindner College of Business and IT@UC  was one of four Technology Innovation Award recipients recently announced with the successful proposal “Data Visualization Across Disciplines: Digital Literacy for the University of Cincinnati’s Third Century.” These partners will work together to invest in the development of an interdisciplinary undergraduate certificate in data visualization; training students to communicate complex data by placing it in a visual context. This cross-college program will incorporate coursework designed and team-taught by faculty, blending multiple perspectives on data visualization to a wide range of students. Data visualization is an emerging art and science that has changed people’s relationship with information. It harnesses new technologies to communicate knowledge in graphical form by merging aesthetic form with analytical function to present large and complex datasets in an intuitive and human-interpretable fashion.

From the Provost Office Announcement – As the University of Cincinnati moves toward its Bicentennial in 2019, the Office of the Provost supports academic and technological innovation keeping our university’s educational mission core to what we do and who we are at UC. This is the drive behind the Provost Technology Innovation Awards program, which funds projects developed by faculty and students who collaborate between colleges and discrete disciplines to support interdisciplinary projects that turn original ideas into reality. “At UC we have a strong, shared commitment to the continued modernization of the learning experience,” says Interim UC Provost Peter Landgren. “It is a pleasure to see the spirit of partnership change and improve the academic journey at the university through collaborative ideas like the ones funded through this program.”

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Love Your Data Week Day 4 – Finding the Right Data

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Today’s LYD post is by Don P. Jason III, MLIS, MS, Clinical Informationist based at the Donald C. Harrison Health Sciences Library.

Welcome to Day 4 of “Love Your Data Week!” Whether you’re a student analyzing a data set for a school project or a researcher combining data sets to create new insights, finding the right data is essential! This blog post will list a few places you can look to find free, authoritative and unique data sets. The data sets have be broken down into three categories:  US Government Data Sets, International Data Sets and Google Data Sets.

US Government Data Sets

Data.gov http://data.gov – This web site has an eclectic mix of datasets from criminal justice to climate data.  This government site encourages people to use the data to create web and mobile applications and design data visualizations.

US Census Bureau http://www.census.gov/data.html – This web site provides data on the US population and economy.  Utilizing this site’s data has never been easier thanks to new: API’s, data visualizations, mobile apps and interactive web apps.

Healthdata.gov https://www.healthdata.gov/ – This web site includes US healthcare data.  The site is dedicated to making high value health data more accessible to entrepreneurs, researchers and policy makers.

National Climatic Data Center http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/quick-links#loc-clim – This is the world’s largest archive of weather data. It has a robust collection of environmental, meteorological and climate data sets from the US National Climatic Data Center.

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Patent Searching Workshops in February

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UC Libraries is pleased to present a NEW workshop on Patents and Patent Searching !  Join us in 475 Langsam Library.

US Pat 725,069: Body Attachable Sunshade

Instructor: Dylan Shields, PhD Candidate in Chemistry & Grad Assistant in the Chemistry-Biology Library, scilib@ucmail.uc.edu

Description: A general introduction to patents and patent databases. Learn the basics components of patent documents and the various types of patents. Through hands-on examples, learn techniques for searching in some major patent information databases. Workshop materials can be perused at http://guides.libraries.uc.edu/patentworkshop.  The workshop will be taught multiple times in February (same content each time).

To Register: log in with your UC Central Login at the links below.

R Workshops in the Health Sciences Library: Coming Soon

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In January 2017 the Health Sciences Library will begin to offer workshops on the R programing language and statistical software.

In these workshops participants will learn:

  • the various data types
  • how to install R
  • how to import and export files
  • how to select statistical methods
  • how to perform different statistical analyses on given data
  • how to understand when to choose a statistical analysis for answering a type of research question

In addition, some basic statistical analyses will be covered that include one sample t-test, two-sample t-test, and different types of regression. At the end of both workshops participants will gain a practical experience of using R programming for Data Analysis.

To register for the January R workshops go to http://webcentral.uc.edu/hslclass/home.aspx .  The January schedule will be posted toward the end of December.

If you have any questions, please contact Tiffany Grant, PhD, Research Informationist at the Harrison Health Sciences Library, at 558-9153 or joffritm@ucmail.uc.edu.

Mastodons on Display in the Geo-Math-Phys Library

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Big Bone Lick Exhibit

UC Libraries is honored to host one of four Cincinnati Museum Center collections currently on display at the university as part of the Curate My Community program while the museum undergoes renovation.

Visit the Geology-Mathematics-Physics Library to view Big Bone Lick: A Place of Discovery. From mastodons and sabre-tooth tigers to early American Indians and the Founding Fathers, Big Bone Lick was a gathering place for some of the Ice Age’s most iconic animals, early American hunters and the site of America’s first paleontological expedition, organized by President Thomas Jefferson. The site, and its treasures, continue to be extensively examined by UC researchers.

For more on the Curate My Community Program, visit http://www.cincymuseum.org/curate-my-community. 

Jerry Sheehan Post’s on Federally Funded Research Results and Accessibility

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At the close of the 8th Open Access Week, Jerry Sheehan of the White House Office of Science And Technology Policy blogged about the impact of openly accessible research findings, especially federally funded research.

Three more agencies have announced public access plans (Department of Education (ED), Agency for International Development, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)), bringing the total to 19.  A good resource for understanding the requirements of the plans is the  the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition – http://sparcopen.org/ and the data sharing resource http://datasharing.sparcopen.org/ available through SPARC.

To read the complete blog post,  click here.

Paper featuring Scholar@UC Gets Best Research Paper Award!

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Congratulations to Dr. Nan Niu and his research team!re16_bestresearchpaperaward_niu

Recently Dr. Nan Niu traveled to Beijing, China to attend the RE16 conference- Requirements Engineering16 http://re16.org/downloads/RE16%20program.pdf. He took with him high hopes for the requirements engineering research paper he and his team submitted together with Linda Newman, Head of Repositories and Digital Collections and Amy Koshoffer, Science Informationist. For the beginning of this story and more on the models created using Scholar@UC use cases, see the blog entry “Scholar@UC Goes to Class” (https://libapps.libraries.uc.edu/liblog/2016/01/scholaruc-goes-to-class/).

Dr. Niu has made all the research materials supporting this work available through Scholar@UC https://scholar.uc.edu/works/documents/wm117q084.  Dr. Niu is making brilliant use of Scholar@UC as a teaching tool, a research subject, data preservation tool and an open data/access model.  Again congratulations to Dr. Niu and the whole team!!

September Program for GIS Learning Community

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September program for the

UC GIS (Geographic Information Systems) Learning Community.

Date: Wed Sept 28, 2016

Time: 3:15 – 4:25

Venue: Langsam 462

We have three presenters who will talk on very diverse topics.

1st Lightning Talk – Carolyn Hansen – Metadata Librarian, UC Libraries –Digital Humanities projects using GIS visualizations and discuss how GIS applications can be used to answer humanities research questions.

2nd Lightning Talk – Jeremy Koster – Assoc Professor, A&S Anthropology – Using GIS and remote sensing to understand the spread of the agricultural frontier in the rain forests of Nicaragua

In depth presentation – Jeffery Timberlake- Assoc Professor, A&S Sociology – Understanding and accessing census data

We will also be joined by James Lee who will talk briefly about the Digital Humanities and Scholarship Center and his role as Co-Director and his vision for the center.

Help with Software: ChemDraw, Gaussian, Spartan, MestreNova

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The Chemistry-Biology Library Info Commons includes a number of specialized software applications at each workstation, for drawing chemical structures, molecular modelling, as well as data analysis.  Specifically, the software suite includes Chemdraw Prime, Gaussian/Gaussian View, Spartan, MestreNova, Mathematica, and UnscramblerX.

ChemBio Library softwareTo help you use this software, Chem-Bio Library Graduate Assistant Dylan Shields maintains guides with basic information and helpful tutorials for these programs: http://guides.libraries.uc.edu/chembio-software.

For in-person help, please see Dylan during his usual working hours: Mon 9-1, Tue 11-3, Wed 9-1.