Chemistry Behind Bars -- While balancing equations, inmates at San Quentin learn to balance their lives.

This week's cover story in C&E News (October 22, 2007) is about a chemistry class taught at San Quentin by four UC Berkeley grad students: Charles (Chip) Crawford (chemistry), Michael Rousseas (physics), Alex Fabrikant (computer science), and Erik Douglas (bioengineering). From the article: "The grad students say that these prisoners are some of the most motivated and hard-working students they have ever taught. The prisioners, in turn, say that these volunteers have inspired them to work hard and seek a better life for themselves." Other members of the UCB Chemistry department mentioned in the article include Lonnie Martin and Michelle Douskey. Kudos to everyone involved!

Teaching Team UC Berkeley grad students Douglas (from left), Crawford, Rousseas, and Fabrikant share the teaching load.

Both the Engineering Library and the Teaching Library will be offering workshops on EndNote over the next few weeks:

• Thursday, October 25, 3:00-5:00 (350C Moffitt Library)
• Thursday, November 8, 2:00-3:00 (120C Bechtel)
• Wednesday, November 14, 10:00-12:00 (350C Moffitt)

EndNote is a powerful, full-featured program that works with many databases to organize references, format a bibliography, and insert citations. EndNote may be purchased from The Scholar's Workstation and other vendors. Recommended to those managing extensive bibliographies.

Many of the science and engineering libraries will offer additional workshops on EndNote, RefWorks, and article databases in the Spring semester. Check our instruction schedules in the Spring for more information.

The Internet Archive has just released a short video, Libraries Going Open, about the goals and progress of the Open Content Alliance (OCA).

The Open Content Alliance "represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organzations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content." The project focuses on public domain works that can be made freely available online.

The University of California Libraries are a major contributor to the OCA efforts. As of today, the UC Libraries have contributed 106,132 items to the Text Archive - including many classic texts in mathematics. Books can be read in PDF or Flip Book (example), among other formats.

Contributed books include:

• A course of pure mathematics (1921)
• Journal of researches into the natural history and geology of the countries visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round the world (1898)
• Newton's Principia: the mathematical principles of natural philosophy (1846)
• The principles of chemistry (1897)
• A short course on differential equations (1907)
  
• A treatise on electricity and magnetism (1873)

Are you interested in learning more about the work of the Nobel Prize winners? Here is some information about the Nobel Laureates 2007 along with some of their most highly-cited articles from Web of Science.

Physiology or Medicine
Mario R. Capecchi (University of Utah), Sir Martin J. Evans (Cardiff University), and Oliver Smithies (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) "for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells”

Advanced Information from the Nobel Prize site

• Slightorn J.L., Blechl A.E., Smithies O. Human fetal Gγ and Aγ globin genes: complete nucleotide sequences suggest that DNA can be exchanged between these duplicated genes. Cell 21: 627-638 (1980).
• Evans M.J., Kaufman M.H. Establishment in culture of pluripotential cells from mouse embryos. Nature. 292: 154-156 (1981).
• Bradley A., Evans M., Kaufman M.H., et al. Formation of germ-line chimaeras from embryo-derived teratocarcinoma cell lines. Nature 309: 255-256 (1984).
• Smithies O., Gregg R.G., Boggs S.S., et al. Insertion of DNA sequences into the human chromosomal β-globin locus by homologous recombination. Nature 317: 230-234 (1985).
• Thomas K.R., Capecchi M.R. Site-directed mutagenesis by gene targeting in mouse embryo-derived stem cells. Cell 51: 503-512 (1987).
• Mansour S.L., Thomas K.R., Capecchi M.R. Disruption of the proto-oncogene int-2 in mouse embryo-derived stem cells: a general strategy for targeting mutations to non-selectable genes. Nature 336: 348-352 (1988).

Physics
Albert Fert (Université Paris-Sud) and Peter Grünberg (Forschungszentrum Jülich) “for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance”

Scientific Background (pdf) from the Nobel Prize site

• Grünberg P., Schreiber R., Pang Y., et al. Layered magnetic structures: evidence for antiferromagnetic coupling of Fe layers across Cr interlayers. Physical Review Letters 57: 2442-2445 (1986).
• Baibich M.N., Broto J.M., Fert A., et al. Giant magnetoresistance of (001)Fe/(001)Cr magnetic superlattices. Physical Review Letters 61: 2472-2475 (1988).
• Binasch G., Grünberg P., Saurenbach F., et al. Enhanced magnetoresistance in layered magnetic structures with antiferromagnetic interlayer exchange. Physical Review B 39: 4828-4830 (1989).

Chemistry
Gerhard Ertl (Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft) "for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces"

Scientific Background (pdf) from the Nobel Prize site

• Christmann K., Schober O., Ertl G., et al. Adsorption of hydrogen on nickel single-crystal surfaces. Journal of Chemical Physics 60: 4528-4540 (1974).
• Conrad H., Ertl G., Latta E.E. Adsorption of hydrogen on palladium single-crystal surfaces. Surface Science 41: 435-446 (1974).
• Christmann K., Ertl G., Pignet T. Adsorption of hydrogen on a Pt(111) surface. Surface Science 54: 365-392 (1976).

Online access to these articles is provided through library subscriptions. Access is available from all campus computers. UC Berkeley faculty, staff, and students can also access these resources from off campus via the Library Proxy Server.

The Sheldon Margen Public Health Library is now open in our new location, 1 University Hall, ground floor level on the north side of the building. There is an interior and exterior entrance to the library. The book drop is located just outside the exterior entrance.

Course reserves have returned to the Public Health Library and are available for use. The library's hours are:

Mon-Thu 8am to 8pm

Fri 8am to 5pm

Sat 12pm to 5pm

Sun 1pm to 5pm

Reference service is available 10am to 12pm and 2pm to 5pm, Monday to Friday.

Please come visit us in our new location!

Faculty Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Scholarly Communication: Survey Findings from the University of California. UC Office of Scholarly Communication, August 2007.

The Influence of Academic Values on Scholarly Publication and Communication Practices. D. Harley, et al. JEP, Spring 2007.

These two recent research reports illuminate faculty attitudes and behavior with respect to scholarly communication practices. Both studies identify various drivers for change in scholarly publication and communication. These include finding systems that are economically sustainable and that use the capabilities of new technologies to support innovation in scholarship.

The first article reports on 2006 data from 37 interviews and 1,118 surveys from ladder-rank faculty from the 10 campuses of the University of California system. In the second paper, the authors prepared five disciplinary case studies at UC Berkeley. They interviewed faculty, advancement reviewers, librarians and editors in 2005/2006.

The strongest finding of both studies is that the current peer review process for tenure and promotion is highly valued and is the biggest barrier to faculty making changes in their publishing patterns. Faculty are interested in scholarly communication issues and their attitudes are changing; however tenure and promotion policies will have to evolve before faculty will be comfortable with making real changes.

Keep up with the changing scholarly publishing landscape by reviewing the Library's Scholarly Communication pages.

UC Berkeley is currently looking at three different vendors that provide access to electronic books. We'd like to get feedback from students and faculty on what you think about each vendor, or comments about any past experiences you may have had with them. Here are the links:

Ebrary: http://site.ebrary.com/lib/berkeley

EBL: http://www.berkeley.eblib.com/EBLWeb/patron.html

EBL requires a user name and password for login. Please email lngo at address below for info.

MyiLibrary: http://www.myilibrary.com/browse/open.asp

Some things to keep in mind when you're evaluating:

• Ease of access and use
• Display readability, search tools
• Quality of titles in your subject area

Our trials will continue until October 31, 2007. Please send comments/questions to lngo (at) library (dot) berkeley (dot) edu.

Angry researchers, scientists and editors have called for action against the Association of American Publishers (AAP), one of the prime movers behind the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine, a campaign group that has denounced open access (OA) publishing as “junk science” that is destroying the foundations of peer review.

Read the full article from Information World Review.

The UC Berkeley libraries continue to expand their collection of online books. We recently purchased electronic versions of the following books in chemistry, engineering, physics, and statistics:

Congdon. Bayesian models for categorical data. 2005.

Roat-Malone. Bioinorganic chemistry: a short course. 2002.

Koch & Holthausen. A chemist's guide to density functional theory, 2nd ed. 2001.

Ersoy. Diffraction, fourier optics, and imaging. 2007.

Dowrick. Earthquake risk reduction. 2003.

Barnett. Environmental statistics: methods and applications. 2004.

Billo. Excel for chemists: a comprehensive guide, 2nd ed. 2001.

May & Spanos. Fundamentals of semiconductor manufacturing and process control. 2006.

Schuster (ed.). Handbook of chaos control. 1999.

Hedeker & Gibbons. Longitudinal data analysis. 2006.

Loveland, Morrissey & Seaborg. Modern nuclear chemistry. 2006.

Li (ed.). Name reactions in heterocyclic chemistry. 2005.

Theodore. Nanotechnology: basic calculations for engineers and scientists. 2006.

Trebin (ed.). Quasicrystals: structure and physical properties. 2003.

McCutcheon & Schnoor (eds.). Phytoremediation: transformation and control of contaminants. 2003.

Krainov, Reiss & Smirnov. Radiative processes in atomic physics. 1997.

Chatterjee & Hadi. Regression analysis by example, 4th ed. 2006.

Rebeiz. RF MEMS: theory, design, and technology. 2003.

Fayngold. Special relativity and motions faster than light. 2002.

D'Orazio, Di Zio & Scanu. Statistical matching: theory and practice. 2006.

All of these electronic books and more can be found along side our print books in Melvyl and Pathfinder.