A circa 1930 American-made “Comptometer”
hand-cranked mechanical calculator.
Issue 43 gives a brief overview of some of the desktop and hand-held calculators used by chemists over the years and currently on display in the hallway outside of the Oesper Collections in Rieveschl Hall.
Click here for all other issues of Notes from the Oesper Collections and to explore the Jensen-Thomas Apparatus Collection.
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.”
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.
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.
The circa 1920 Zeiss butter refractometer recently acquired by the Oesper Collections.
Issue 42 describes a new addition to the museum’s refractometer collection – a circa 1920 Zeiss butter refractometer – and its historical importance as a means for rapidly differentiating between pure butter and margarine.
Click here for all other issues of Notes from the Oesper Collections and to explore the Jensen-Thomas Apparatus Collection.
UC Libraries is pleased to welcome Craig Person as the operations manager and student supervisor for the Science and Engineering Libraries.
Craig comes to the university from Northern Kentucky University (NKU) Libraries where he was the head of access services since 2008, and was previously the circulation and reserves supervisor and the evening circulation supervisor. Craig may be a familiar face to some as he was a temporary staff member at Langsam Library from September 1996 – June 1997. He is also active as a continuing education instructor for programs at NKU and with the American Library Association (ALA).
As operations manager and student supervisor, Craig will manage daily operations and service points at both the College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS) Library and the Chemistry-Biology Library. His major duties include supervising the student workforce, overseeing interlibrary services and collections maintenance, assisting with facilities and technology initiatives, providing reference and training support and assisting with unit-wide planning.
Welcome to UC Libraries, Craig!
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:
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.
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.
The Varian E-4 EPR instrument as it appeared while still in use in Dr. Bobst’s laboratory.
Issue 41 describes a new addition to the instrument collection on the mezzanine of the chemistry-biology library. Dating from the early 1970s, this desktop Varian E-4 Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) Spectrometer was donated by Dr. Albert Bobst of the UC Chemistry Department.
Click here for all other issues of Notes from The Oesper Collections and to explore the Jensen-Thomas Apparatus Collection.
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.