The Graduate School Extols the Benefits of Scholar@UC

scholar@uc

A recent article by Danniah Daher, graduate assistant to the Graduate School Office, entitled Scholar@UC: The Archive You Need, talks about the need to preserve and protect scholarly work and research data by submitting it to the university repository. Linda Newman, head of digital collections and repositories, is quoted as saying, “The mission of Scholar@UC is to preserve the permanent intellectual output of UC…We are very serious about preservation. We’re also very serious about access. We want to make the content accessible—content that otherwise would just be sitting on someone’s hard drive in their office. We consider preservation and access our two most important jobs.”

The full article can be read online at http://grad.uc.edu/student-life/news/scholaratuc.html.

Available at https://scholar.uc.edu/, 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 their papers, presentations, publications, datasets, or other scholarly creations. Students, through an approved 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 inspire derivative works, and to enhance discoverability and access to these resources.

A Few Alembics : Notes from the Oesper Collections, No. 45, July/August 2017

A reproduction of a circa 17th-century alembic with an “ostrich”-necked cucubert, clay luting, various receiving flasks, charcoal furnace, bellows, tongs, and poker

A reproduction of a circa 17th-century alembic
with an “ostrich”-necked cucubert, clay luting, various
receiving flasks, charcoal furnace, bellows, tongs, and poker

The 45th issue of Museum Notes gives a brief history of the oldest known distillation apparatus as illustrated by various reproductions found in the Oesper Collections.

 

Click here for all other issues of Notes from the Oesper Collections and to explore the Jensen-Thomas Apparatus Collection.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two Chemical Slide Rules : Notes from the Oesper Collections, No. 44, May/June 2017

Closeup of part of the Ch scale for the circa 1960 Hemmi 257 chemical slide rule.

Closeup of part of the Ch scale for the circa 1960 Hemmi 257 chemical slide rule.

Issue 44 gives a glimpse of two classic chemical slide rules found in the Oesper Collections, one dating from 1814 and the other from 1960.

Click here for all other issues of Notes from the Oesper Collections and to explore the Jensen-Thomas Apparatus Collection.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Few Calculators : Notes from the Oesper Collections, No. 43, March/April 2017

“Comptometer” hand-cranked mechanical calculator.

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.

 

 

 

 

A Zeiss Butter Refractometer : Notes from the Oesper Collections, No. 42, January/February 2017

The circa 1920 Zeiss butter refractometer recently acquired by the Oesper Collections.

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.

 

 

 

 

Smoking Permitted and No Tipping Allowed!?! Hospital Information for Overnight Patients, 1958

The following post was written by Winkler Center assistant archivist, Nina Herzog.   All images courtesy of the Henry R. Winkler Center for the History of the Health Professions

CGH  Informational Booklet, 1958.

 

Without a doubt, checking into and staying at hospitals is a lot different today than it was over a half century ago.  Computerized check-ins, televisions in rooms and bans on smoking, etc. have all improved the patient experience. The images below were taken from an informational booklet given to patients at the Cincinnati General Hospital (CGH) in 1958.

The instructive pamphlet titled, “Well Here I Am,” provides the incoming patient with information on subjects ranging from check in, dining hours, and visitor information to hospital maps, directions, and much more.

 

 

 

 

 

Continue reading

A Varian E-4 EPR Spectrometer : Notes from the Oesper Collections, No. 41, November/December 2016

The Varian E-4 EPR instrument as it appeared while still in use in Dr. Bobst’s laboratory.

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.

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

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.

Behind the Scenes with UC’s Digital Archivist: Finding the Needle in the Haystack

By Eira Tansey, Digital Archivist/Records Manager

A constant challenge for digital archivists is identifying potentially sensitive material within born-digital archives. This content may be information that fits a known pattern (for example, a 3-2-4 number that likely indicates the presence of a social security number), or sensitive keywords that indicate the presence of a larger body of sensitive information (for example, the keywords “evaluation” and “candidate” in close proximity to each other may indicate the presence of an evaluation form for a possible job applicant).

Digital archivists use a number of tools to screen for potentially sensitive information. When this information is found, depending on the type of information, institutional policy, legal restrictions, and ethical issues, archivists may redact the information, destroy it, or limit access to it (either by user, or according to a certain period of time). Continue reading

Paper featuring Scholar@UC Gets Best Research Paper Award!

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!!