Smithsonian Libraries

Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Smithsonian Research Online

During the week of January 16-19th, I visited the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) to discuss several matters relating to the Smithsonian Research Online (SRO) program and to offer technical support and training to STRI library staff. I was accompanied from Washington by Digital Services Head, Martin Kalfatovic, who was to attend a three-day Encyclopedia-of-Life meeting at Barro-Colorado Island during the same week.

Together we met with Oris Sanjur (STRI Associate Director for Science Administration), Vielka Chang-Yau (STRI head librarian), Angel Aguirre (librarian), Klaus Winter (STRI scientist) and Eldredge Bermingham (STRI Director). Everyone was in agreement that STRI-authored publication data ought to be collected in one place and that the SIL is doing a good job of coordinating this program across all Institution units. The Director and Associate Director will discuss the specific needs of their unit and report back to SIL, who will propose a workflow to accomplish this.

Meanwhile, I held a brief introduction to the bibliographic tools, EndNote and Zotero for STRI library staff and volunteers. While we had a training room available to us, unfortunately there was not a copy of these programs available to all participants. But they were still able to see the possibilities of using these tools in day-to-day library services.

Alvin and Vielka review the SRO website and list of Smithsonian-authored publications using the newly-installed LCD screen in the STRI library. Photo courtesy of martin_kalfatovic via Flickr.

Finally, I met with Fernando Bouché (Head, Office of Information Technology) and STRI programmer, Carlos Caballero, to discuss the management of publication data, its re-use on the STRI web page and inclusion in the SI Collections search system (EDAN).

STRI scientists publish over 300 scholarly papers every year. Approximately 70% of them are captured automatically by the SRO via websites and associated tools. This circumvents the need for manual data entry. The inclusion of the complete corpus of work being done there is an essential part of representing the research being conducted at the Institution and the cooperation between the SI Libraries and STRI will bring the project to fruition.

 

 

 

Celebrating the Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Over the past few years, we have had the opportunity to share many of the items in our collection about Martin Luther King, Jr.  and his legacy. Below are a few relevant links that you might find of interest on this day, as we remember King's place in American history.

 

• Martin Luther King and the American Civil Rights Movement in Visual Culture Monographs>
• Some MLK Reading Choices
• Some More MLK Reading Choices

 

Many other museums and research units in the Smithsonian hold fascinating items related to Dr. King in their collections.  Click on the links below to learn more.

• Martin Luther King Jr. , through the Scurlock lens (National Museum of American History)
• Remember Martin Luther King, Jr. (Smithsonian Institution Archives)
• Let Your Motto Be Resistance (National Museum of African American History and Culture)
• Martin Luther King and other Civil Rights activists in the Time Collection (National Portrait Gallery)

Opening of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on August 22nd, 2011. Photo by Liz O'Brien, via SIL Facebook page.

Open Access Conference Notes

 

 

At the recent Berlin 9 Open Access meeting, a pre-conference session on open access publishing featured speakers who detailed the required innovations in publishing business models necessary to both make scholarship freely available and to ensure sustainability. Among the speakers was Dr. Neil M. Thakur of the National Institutes of Health. His presentation centered on an aspect of open access that I have not seen discussed before. Thakur opened with a central question of how to do more with less and he listed three options: work longer, work cheaper or create efficiencies in productivity. It was the latter (and only realistic) option that he concentrated on. Making scientific publishing more efficient requires open access to the literature but for reasons that have previously been overlooked.

In the past, advocates for the open access to scholarly literature have emphasized two audiences which suffer for lack of access to literature: scientists who work at under-funded organizations and who are unable to afford increasingly high subscriptions to scholarly journals, and motivated citizen-scientists (sometimes patients with debilitating diseases) who take it upon themselves to learn the technical language of their area of interest but who are locked out of a large body of literature due to a lack of resources to pay.

 

But Thakur brings in a third and until now ignored audience: machines. The development of natural-language computer processing and text-mining services is going to be increasingly useful in science in the near future. Because most researchers now face an information-glut rather than an information-scarcity, it is more and more important for them to be able to scan and review large bodies of publications which cannot be covered by simple linear readings. So this time-scarcity problem can be addressed by making the text of scientific publications open to machine processing and interpretation in order to allow scholars to quickly review publications both past and current based on the frequency of certain terms, their proximity to one another and other algorithms. This machine-to-machine access to scholarly literature is a productivity multiplier, Thakur said in his presentation.

A second presentation was by Peter Binfield from the Public Library of Science (PLoS). This is one of the most accomplished open access publishers using the business model where the author pays an article processing charge. In addition to this new way of doing the business of publishing, in recent years a new journal, PLoS One has become the largest journal, publishing over 6000 papers in 2010*. (Binfield expects to publish more than 15,000 in 2011). Despite the high volume, this journal publishes only papers of sound scientific quality and all manuscripts are peer- reviewed as with any other scientific journal. The key difference is that there is no editorial oversight filtering submissions based on popularity or widespread appeal of the subject matter; no matter the topic, if the science is done properly and it passes review by other scientists, it can be published in PLoS One. This model has become so popular that it has spawned a number of imitators from both commercial and non-profit publishers and Binfield pointed out that most of them have article processing charges nearly identical to PLoS One ($1350)

Interestingly, PLoS One was assigned an Impact Factor^® by Thomson Reuters in 2010 and although the Binfield says that PLoS doesn’t particularly care for the Impact Factor^® as a useful measure of scientific achievement, the inclusion of the journal in this popular metric probably explains the spike in submissions during 2011.

 

*According to Smithsonian Research Online data, Institution scholars have published more than 65 items in PLoS One including 25+ in 2011.

Researching Your Treasures: How Our Trade Literature Collection Can Help

This is the first post in a new ongoing series, Library Hacks. It will feature library and online resources we think you will find useful, interesting, or just plain cool.

Your grandmother left you an antique sewing machine that she used to make her own clothes when she was a girl. You treasure it, but you don’t know much about it -– just that it has the name Norwood on it and that it’s pretty old. You ask yourself, “Who knows about old stuff like this?” The Smithsonian comes to mind immediately! But what resource does this venerable institution offer to help you research Granny’s sewing machine?

As with so many questions, the library is a great place to start finding answers. The Smithsonian Institution Libraries (SIL) has a “hidden gem” in its vaults -– a vast collection of trade literature with more than 500,000 catalogs, technical manuals, advertising brochures, price lists, company histories and related materials representing more than 30,000 U.S. companies. It is a valuable source to learn about products that were “made in America,” primarily covering the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. We have highlighted items from this collection previously here in the SIL blog.

To begin a search for information on Granny’s sewing machine, you’ll find a link for Trade Catalogs on the left side of the SIL homepage, which will take you to the screen shown below. Type “norwood sewing machine” in the search box you find there.

This search taps into the Smithsonian’s Collections Search Center, which provides information on items not only in the Smithsonian Libraries but also in the museums and archives located within the institution –- a really powerful resource! Since we started from the Trade Literature search page, our search is already narrowed to only trade materials. And we find two items that mention Norwood sewing machines.

The first item (framed in red) is a 1904 catalog of Norwood sewing machines, manufactured by the Standard Sewing Machine Company. This looks promising! To learn more about this item, click on the Expand link on the right side of the screen to view the full record.

This expanded record tells us in the Notes field that this catalog has both images and text, and that it has information on two different styles of Norwood machines. We also see that there appears to be a related Electronic Resource. By clicking on the grey box “Click to see other media,” we find an interesting online exhibit produced by SIL about historical trade literature on sewing machines from the Smithsonian Collections.

 
SIL is in the process of scanning and digitizing items from its extensive collections, including trade literature materials. If you are interested in seeing a trade catalog that is not yet available online, like this Norwood catalog, you are welcome to submit a question via our free Ask a Librarian service. The friendly and knowledgeable Smithsonian librarians will be happy to help you learn more about your family treasures!

-- Trina Brown, Instructional/Reference Librarian, National Museum of American History