From the Virtual Desk of … Michelle McKinney

Posted on by

The next From the Virtual Desk Of… tour brings you to my home office. I’m Michelle McKinney, Reference and Web Services Librarian, and I share an office with my husband, Keith, and two sons, Kam and Jameson. I’m usually stationed at the desk throughout the day while my coworkers come and go. It’s been really nice to get time back that was lost to commuting so our days get off to a much smoother start. It’s also nice to have windows and sunlight in the office (although I do daydream a bit more as I’m often watching squirrels, rabbits and neighbors moving about outside).

Digital Scholarship Center Receives Grant to Develop Text Mining and Summarization Methods to Aid in COVID-19 Research

Posted on by

The Digital Scholarship Center’s James Lee, PhD, and Danny Wu, PhD, MSI, Department of Biomedical Informatics, are one of 11 recipients of the College of Medicine’s Special Coronavirus (COVID-19) Research Pilot Grant Program. An opportunity open to all UC colleges in the Academic Health Center, the program was established to rapidly support the development of innovative studies that will contribute significantly to knowledge of COVID-19 in hopes to have significant impact on treatment, diagnosis and management of the infection or its prevention. With financial support from the UC Office of Research directed by Dr. Pat Limbach, and the College of Medicine Office of Research, the Special Coronavirus (COVID-19) Research Pilot Grant Program awarded a total of $425,000 to recipients.

The Digital Scholarship Center’s proposal, “Using Intelligent Text Mining and Summarization Methods to Address COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge,” received a grant totaling $25,000 to develop a text mining pipeline and web-based intelligent query system to extract and summarize relevant COVID-19 related literature. The long-term research objective of the project is to create a usable and generalizable information resource to search scientific literature and generate knowledge through human-centered AI approaches.

“We anticipate the project to have important impacts within our research group, the university and the research community as a whole,” said James Lee, associate vice provost for digital scholarship, associate dean of libraries and director of the Digital Scholarship Center. “In building the intelligent query system, a broader impact will be made in the greater research community as we will develop a tool that can take any Coronavirus related question and summarize the literature.”

The intelligent query system will be evaluated on its usability and released to all researchers at the university as a self-service tool to support their COVID-19 research projects. Therefore, the system will likely have a great impact on the research productivity at the university, especially when many COVID-19 related grants have been or will be released in the next few months. “We anticipate that the intelligent query system could be a valuable tool to help understand and defeat this novel Coronavirus,” said Lee.

The Digital Scholarship Center is a catalyst for collaborative, trans-disciplinary forms of research and teaching, bringing together humanistic methods with technical innovations. For more information, visit their website https://dsc.uc.edu/.

Faculty Research Lightning Talks: Meet Chris Gulgas

Posted on by

The UCBA Library’s 3rd Annual Faculty Research Lightning Talks on March 10, 2020 featured four presenters and their discipline-based research projects via short, 15 minute presentations. In our Meet the Presenters series, each presenter shares some insights into their research project.  

Chris Gulgas| Associate Professor of Chemistry| Chemistry Department
Presentation: A Student Discovery Involving a Chemical that Changes Color Leads to a New Organic Laboratory Experiment 

Chris Gulgas giving a presentation

Chris Gulgas discusses his research.

   

Research Project 
A new organic laboratory experiment was designed and developed based upon the independent research of two undergraduate students investigating solvatochromism.  Bromothymol blue was found to exhibit a significant red shift across a series of solvents.  An organic laboratory experiment was then created to allow students to discover this effect as a class using UV-Vis absorption spectroscopy.  Students built skills in recognizing functional groups and intermolecular interactions as well as analyzing data trends.  The undergraduate research process, design of the experiment and results from the first year of implementation into the curriculum were presented.  

Gulgas powerpoint slide

A slide from Chris’ A Student Discovery Involving a Chemical that Changes Color Leads to a New Organic Laboratory Experiment presentation. 

What excites you most about your research? 
I am most excited about student-driven discovery that can be developed into something useful for learning.  Students were able to identify an unpublished property of a substance we had on hand, using equipment on hand.  This discovery turned into an experiment for all organic laboratory students to benefit from in learning about solvent properties and the nature of light.  

What are your next steps with your research?  
I’d like to identify another compound that exhibits similar behavior for comparison and reinforcement.  

Additional Resources  

Reichardt, Christian (1994). Solvatochromic Dyes as Solvent Polarity Indicators. Chemical Reviews. 94 (8). 2319-2358. 

 

 by Lauren Wahman

Temporary Clermont Library Helpers (with fur)

Posted on by

With all of the library faculty and staff working remotely, we’ve added a few temporary library helpers to our staff. These staff members are usually at our homes, but since work is at home, Clermont College Library wanted you to meet them before they introduce themselves on a video call:

Continue reading →

Documenting COVID-19 in University Archives

Posted on by

At the Archives and Rare Books Library, we recently began using Archive-It to preserve important university websites. The average life span of a webpage is between 44 and 100 days. Web pages are notoriously fragile documents, and many of the web resources we take for granted are at risk of disappearing.

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, we are using Archive-It to capture various UC domain webpages dedicated to the pandemic’s impact on the university community. This kind of rapid response web archiving will ensure we preserve a historical record of this monumental event at UC for future researchers. You can currently view the UC COVID-19 website archive, which is being updated on a daily basis.

So far, we have collected several gigabytes of data, and over 20 websites, including each college’s COVID-19 page. Since some pages update more frequently than other, we schedule crawls (i.e. the process of archiving a webpage) of pages like https://www.uc.edu/publichealth.html on a more frequent basis in order to capture all of the changes.

The Archives and Rare Books Library is not the only archival repository documenting the experience of COVID-19. Dozens of other institutions, including many other Ohio college and university archives, are also collecting and preserving this fast-moving event. One of the largest COVID-19 collections so far is a collaboration between the International Internet Preservation Consortium and Archive-It, which has now collected more than 2,763 websites in 30 languages about the worldwide response to the pandemic.

There has been growing interest over the last several years in developing ethical frameworks around documenting crises within the archives profession. In response, the Society of American Archivists created a Tragedy Response Initiative Task Force that has developed a comprehensive set of guidelines based on archivists’ professional ethics and values. Previous examples of online archiving projects of crises and traumatic events include the September 11 Digital Archive, Hurricane Katrina Digital Memory Bank, and Documenting Ferguson. Given the global reach of COVID-19 and the advances in web archiving and digital projects, the pandemic is likely to become one of the most well-documented global events in recent history.

Would you like to suggest a website that we should include in our COVID-19 UC web archive? Please email us to suggest new UC sites to preserve in our COVID-19 web archives. Please note that at this time, we are currently only crawling public-facing webpages directly related to the UC community of students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

Welcome to Clermont College Library, Kathy Ladell!

Posted on by

Kathy Ladell

Clermont College Library welcomes a new faculty member – Reference Librarian, Kathy Ladell! 

Kathy comes to UC Clermont from Northern Illinois University where she served as an Outreach Librarian. Kathy worked for many years with non-profits serving Spanish-speaking individuals before obtaining a master’s degree in Library Science and Latin American Studies from Indiana University. She worked in public libraries for 7 years before transitioning to an academic library. 

Kathy’s role at Clermont College Library will focus on reference and research services. She will work to develop online reference services while continuing to support our on-campus students, faculty, and staff.  

Please join me in welcoming Kathy to UC Clermont College! 

Emergency Online Access to Science and Engineering Books via HathiTrust Digital Library

Image

HathiTrust Logo

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the closure of physical library spaces, the HathiTrust Digital Library has opened up emergency temporary access to digitized materials usually protected by copyright. This Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS) is available for HathiTrust member institutions like UC and will remain available until regular access to UC libraries physical collections is restored.  The service allows UC users to “checkout” books that we have identified as owning in print that are also part of the HathiTrust digital collection.

Susan Hight, Technical and Public Services Specialist, did fantastic work tracking down science and engineering textbooks and highly circulating print books that are now available digitally under this Emergency Temporary Access Service.

  • Check here to browse newly available digitized textbooks.
  • Check here to browse  highly circulating print books.

The science and engineering libraries maintain access to many online textbooks for students which can be browsed here. As always, please check out our updated Sciences library and CEAS Library websites. For help, contact Ask-A-Librarian or Ted.Baldwin@uc.edu.

From the Virtual Desk of….Christian Boyles

Posted on by

Like all of us, the Librarians and Staff at the UCBA Library have settled into a new routine of working at home.  We invite you to see how we keep the (virtual) lights on at the Library while still providing support to our UCBA community.

I’m Christian Boyles, the Collection Services Manager at your UCBA Library.  Here’s a quick tour of my new workspace.

Thanks for stopping by my office and I hope you are doing well, staying healthy, and I hope to see you soon again in the Library.

by Christian Boyles

Temporary Online Resources from the UCBA Library

Posted on by

temporary access graphic

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to virtual instruction and learning, the UCBA Library has been able to move our services and many of our resources online as well.  In addition to our ebooks, databases, and electronic articles, we have noticed that a number of our vendors have been offering to provide complimentary short term access to their products.  These offerings include:

  • Streaming media from JoVE Science Education and Films on Demand
  • Ebook packages from Gale Cengage, HeinOnline, and the HathiTrust
  • Up-to-date COVID-19 research from ProQuest and the Royal Society

You can learn more about these resources in this ever evolving guide.  To access all the electronic resources and online services the Library has to offer, we encourage you to visit the UCBA Library homepage.

by Christian Boyles

Posted in UC

Freely-Available ISO Standards: Help with COVID19 Crisis

Posted on by

 

 

 

To speed response efforts for the COVID-19 global health crisis, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is providing free access to a group of key ISO international standards.

These 31 standards, from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), concern medical / PPE equipment and devices including ventilators and respiratory equipment; protective clothing used in health care settings; and business continuity management, security, and resilience.

To access these free ISO standards, you must accept the license agreement and register. Once registered, log in at https://asc.ansi.org. 

(Note: These standards are accessible in read-only format. Download/printing is not available.)

These free ISO standards build upon UC Libraries’ existing subscriptions to all standards from ASTM, IEEE, NFPA and other organizations.  Access all online sources at http://proxy.libraries.uc.edu/login?url=http://guides.libraries.uc.edu/ceasstandards .

For help accessing these or other standards, Ask a Science & Engineering Librarian.