by Robin Dasler

It’s 2012, and as always with SLA, a new year means new faces. Willow Dressel has completed her term as PAM Bulletin Editor, and I am left to try to fill her shoes. I would like to extend my thanks to Willow for getting me on my feet and for putting up with all my crazy ideas for making the Bulletin work with PAM’s new website.

I would also like to welcome Lauren Gala aboard as Assistant Editor. Lauren is keen to get her graphic design on, and I’m sure she’ll be able to work some magic with the Bulletin.

by Anne Doherty

Resources for College Libraries is currently seeking a dynamic and discerning bibliographer to serve as subject editor for Astronomy.

Resources for College Libraries (RCL) is a bibliography of essential print and electronic works spanning the college curriculum and comprising a recommended core collection for all academic libraries. Available as an online database at http://rclweb.net, RCL covers 61 curriculum-specific subjects and identifies approximately 75,000 titles most necessary for teaching undergraduates. Subject editors are responsible for selecting and maintaining resources most critical to the undergraduate curriculum.

RCL subject editors oversee the continuous revision of a subject area, with particular responsibilities including:

• Regularly selecting new titles essential to study in Astronomy
• Maintaining and developing the subject taxonomy
• Updating current selections
• Managing, if necessary, bibliographers to aid in selection
• Remaining aware of current trends in teaching, research, and academic resources related to the subject area

RCL is revised regularly and has a variety of uses: it is consulted by colleges and faculty adapting to new curricula, by student researchers, by librarians for collection development purposes, and by accrediting agencies. As successor to Books for College Libraries, RCL is a collaborative project between ACRL’s Choice magazine editorial staff and R.R. Bowker, a division of ProQuest.

RCL subject editors must balance in-depth subject knowledge with the mission of establishing a core collection for the liberal arts and sciences college library. This volunteer role involves limited time commitment (approximately 40 hrs/year), flexible deadlines and workflow, and all work can be completed remotely. This is a professional service opportunity to participate in a project with international reach. Subject editors also receive an honorarium for service.

To join RCL’s editorial roster, interested applicants should submit a CV/résumé, along with a brief description of qualifications related to managing a core collection in the discipline. If you are interested or would like more information, please contact Anne Doherty, RCL Project Editor, at adoherty@ala-choice.org. Learn more about Resources for College Libraries at http://www.bowker.com/RCL.

by Kim Hukill and Julie Arendt

Final Call for Suggestions for SLA 2012

Thank you to those who have submitted suggestions for SLA 2012’s Vendor Update so far!  In addition to the quick feedback we had from last year’s surveys, we’ve had 5 responses to our call in November for possible topics.  The topics so far have been varied, but concerns include:

• Changes in the publishing industry such as: company mergers, changes in products, the changing costs of publishing, and the cost of Open Access
• Practical journal access issues surrounding DRM, eBooks, and “pay-per-view” journal content
• How publishers are dealing with datasets and author addenda for articles

We see a wide variety of topics and would love to hear more, but it would, of course, be difficult to cover all issues in a small session.  To help narrow the sessions and get an idea of your ‘must-haves’, please send us the top one or two vendors that you would most like to hear from this year!  We will begin contacting vendors for possible presentations soon, so please send us your feedback ASAP.

Please send your suggestions to the co-moderators: khukill@aip.org and jarendt@lib.siu.edu

I, Narendar Kumar Wadhwa working as Scientist-in-Charge, Knowledge Resource Centre (KRC), National Physical Laboratory (NPL), New Delhi, a premier research laboratory in India under CSIR in the field of physical sciences. I have ample experience in serving of the R&D pursuits working in the field of Physical Sciences and other related streams. In NPL, my job responsibilities are not only limited with the KRC, as I am also responsible for development & maintenance of the NPL Website. I have also been part of a number of Committees constituted in present as well as in the past in the regarding various initiatives both for NPL and CSIR.

Besides my job responsibilities at NPL, I am one of the executive members (as Secretary) of “Society for Information Science” (SIS), India. This was established in 1976 with the aim of promoting interchange of information in the discipline of information science, to encourage and assist the professionals in maintaining the integrity and competence of the profession, and to foster a sense of partnership amongst the professionals engaged in this field. Further, I have quite a good research experience and this fact is supported by the publications added by me to the spectrum of Information Science stream.

I was the member of the organizing team of the first International Conference of the SLA – Asian Chapter, International Conference of Asian Special Libraries on “Shaping the Future of Special Libraries: Beyond Boundaries” (ICoASL 2008) by SLA Asian Chapter which was successfully organized during 26-28 November 2008 at New Delhi, India. I was also a member of the Organizing Committee for Second ICoASL 2011, which was held during 10-12 February, 2011 in Tokyo, Japan. Apart from these I was associated/member for organizing many Conferences, Seminars, Workshops and Training Programmes for Library and Information Professionals in India as well as in Asia.
I am also member of COLLNET and was part of its conference organizing team at Berlin, Germany (2008); Dalian, China (2009); Istanbul, Turkey (2011) and the upcoming conference at Seoul, South Korea (2012).

In addition to above mentioned job responsibilities, recent indispensable initiatives taken at NPL-KRC are as follows:
1. Automation of KRC activities and services delivered to the users
2. Digitization of valuable information stored by the KRC in print format under the Universal Digital Library Project
3. Creation of NPL Institutional Repository on CSIR central server (npl.csircentral.net)
4. Establish Wi-Fi hotspot in the KRC to offer freedom to the scientists/researchers to use their personal devices within the KRC premise
5. Facilitate access to valuable E-content from around 22 renowned publishers in the field of Physical Sciences, Engineering & Technology
6. Set up network access to CD-ROMs/DVDs available in the KRC
7. Added number of value added services through KRC site on the NPL intranet like e-News service, content alert service, user guide for E-resources accessible in the KRC etc.
8. Organize User awareness programs/workshops for subscribed E-resources on regular basis
9. Undertook revamping of NPL website (www.nplindia.org)
10. To support the concept of paper less society, commenced switching from printed resources to electronic format.

by Alison Verbeck

Brenda Corbin (U.S. Naval Observatory, retired) attended the January meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin TX, January 8-11. She presented an oral paper during one of the Historical Astronomy Division sessions titled “George William Hill, the Great but Unknown 19th Century Celestial Mechanician.” Fellow PAM member Molly White (UT) was in the audience for this session. The full abstract is available here.

Carol Hutchins, Head Librarian, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, is the first librarian highlighted in the new Information for Librarians page on the American Mathematical Society’s webpage. If you would like to be highlighted in a future issue, please contact Beth Ayer, AMS Web editor, to volunteer.

Arlene Paschel, Assistant Librarian (Sciences) at Texas Tech University Libraries, has been honored to be accepted into the brand new TTU Transdisciplinary Research Academy.

Donna Thompson, Technical Information Specialist, NASA, Astrophysics Data System (ADS), was interviewed and was the December Member Profile for the SLA baseball caucus.

Shirley Zhao has been a student member of SLA for about 2 years and recently was hired into her first professional position as the Physical Sciences Librarian at Dartmouth College starting February 21.

by Cunera Buys

Happy New Year!

The PAM membership directory has been sent to AMS for printing. The directory should be ready by the end of February so look for your copy in March. I’ll put a post on PAMnet when they are in the mail. I would like to take this opportunity to thank AMS for its continuing support in producing and sponsoring this directory.

Please remember to renew your PAM membership when you renew your SLA membership. You can check your information on the SLA website by looking yourself up in the SLA membership directory (login required) under “SLA Community” on the menu bar. Make sure your PAM membership expiration date matches your SLA membership expiration date.

PAM currently is currently 202 members.

Please join me in welcoming new or returning PAM members since the last PAM Bulletin. If you are new and not on this list, drop me a line and I will update my list and make sure you are included next time.

Rebeca Befus
rcbefus@yahoo.com

Benjamin Constantineau
benjamin.constantineau@usherbrooke.ca

Yasmeen Shorish
Science Librarian
James Madison University
shorisyl@jmu.edu

by Willow Dressel

November:

1. Cancelled:
OSTI federated search products EnergyFiles and Federal R&D Project Summaries as of October 1st, 2011.
National Biological Information Infrastructure as of January 15th, 2012. See http://www.nbii.gov/termination/index.html for more details including an FAQ about the termination.
Scitopia Federated Search tool as of December 31st, 2011.

2. University of California announced a new data management plan tool created in a partnership with the California Digital Library, the Smithsonian Institute, the University of Virginia, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, DataONE, and the UK’s Digital Curation Centre.

3. AIP Refocusing Scitation: There was discussion of AIP’s decision to discontinue agreements with non-member societies. Non-member societies will move to other platforms over the coming months. The list of societies affected is available at http://scitation.aip.org/journals/doc/LIBSVC-home/nms_list.jsp

4. Liz Bryson announced that she would be retiring as the CFHT librarian at the end of November 2012 and will not be replaced. Members of PAMNet responded with well wishes and gratitude. As Debra Kolah put it “Thank you Liz, for being you.”

5. An update about the arXiv sustainability initiative was posted and several conference calls were held during November 2011.

6. The new edition of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics came out in November 2011.
New Tables in the 92nd edition include:

Abbreviations Used in Analytical Chemistry
Basic Instrumental Techniques of Analytical Chemistry
Correlation Table for Ultraviolet Active Functionalities
Detection of Outliers in Measurements
Second Virial Coefficients of Polymer Solutions

Revised tables include:

Thermophysical Properties of Selected Fluids at Saturation
Properties of Cryogenic Fluids
Characteristic Bond Lengths in Free Molecules
Atomic Radii of the Elements
Bond Dissociation Energies
Electron Affinities
Atomic and Molecular Polarizabilities
Electron Inelastic Mean Free Paths
Threshold Limits for Airborne Contaminants
Physical Constants of Organic Compounds
Viscosity of Liquid Metals
Viscosity of Gases
Thermal Conductivity of Gases

December:

1. Randy Reichardt sent a link to Beall’s List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers on Jeffrey Beall’s blog.
Some pointed out that the list was a bit biased and it is always best to evaluate each individual title.

2. Cambridge University released a digital library with over 4,000 pages of Isaac Newton’s work.

3. The December 2011 Issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter included an article, “Open access journals from society publishers,” with an update list of full open access journals.

4. From Martha Tucker: Former University of Washington faculty member, Richard Bass, released an open access text book to help graduate students study for qualifying exams.

5. David Willetts, UK Science Minister, announced that the results of UK funded research will be made open access.

January:

1. An article from Inside Higher Ed was posted regarding JSTOR’s announcement to make “Early Journal Content”, or pre-1923 for US content and pre-1870 for all other countries, open access.

2. In response to a query about a national translations item, Caroly Greenberg sent the following summary of the “collective wisdom” of the current state of the National Translations Center collection:

– CISTI has the NTC holdings for 1989-1993. Requests must be placed via InfoTrieve, they are able to check the CISTI collection.
– The British Library has 1979-1988, however, that section is unavailable until July 2012 because of asbestos remediation.
– The Library of Congress Technical Reports section has translations prior to 1979.
– The World Translations Index (Dialog File 295) is no longer available, although I used it in 2011.

Further open questions:
– The microform set – is it the entire collection? Who filmed it? Does anyone have the microforms? BRI, CISTI, LOC?

With thanks to Dana Roth’s column in the August 2010 issue of the PAM Bulletin.

3. Physics World released a report on scientists and online tools.

4. There was discussion of the recently proposed bill the Research Works Act which would, if passed, “prohibit federal agencies from unauthorized free public dissemination of journal articles that report on research which, to some degree, has been federally-funded but is produced and published by private sector publishers receiving no such funding.” Links to many different takes on the bill were sent to the list, including:

• A statement from the Association of American Publishers – http://www.publishers.org/press/56/
• An article from the Atlantc Wire – http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/01/darrell-issas-sopa-stance-doesnt-carry-over-public-access-research/47045/
• An article from Wired – http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/congress-considers-paywalling-science-you-already-paid-for/
• Federal Register open call for comments (both closed) http://federalregister.gov/a/2011-28623 http://federalregister.gov/a/2011-28621
• NSF comment period on open data – http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=122702&WT.mc_id=USNSF_62&WT.mc_ev=click
• Chronicle of Higher Education article – http://chronicle.com/article/Who-Gets-to-See-Published/130403/
• A blog post at Digitopoly – http://www.digitopoly.org/2012/01/26/elseviers-economic-case/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+digitopoly+%28Digitopoly%29
• A wiki post on the PolyMath site about journal publishing reform – http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Journal_publishing_reform
• Post on SLA’s Public Policy blog – CALL TO ACTION: Oppose H.R. 3699, a Bill to Block Public Access to Publicly Funded Research http://slaconnections.typepad.com/public_policy_blog/2012/01/call-to-action-oppose-hr-3699-a-bill-to-block-public-access-to-publicly-funded-research-.html

On a related note, Fields Medal winner Timothy Gowers put up a blog post titled “Elsevier, my part in its downfall.”

A website was put up where researchers can sign on to publicly declare that they will not support Elsevier. http://thecostofknowledge.com/

by Zari Kamarei

This year the PAM Wide Roundtable will be on July 16th from 10:00 to 11:30 am (1.5 hours). We will have a totally traditional roundtable! You will be talking about your institutions, cool projects, budget woes and whatever professional news that will help your colleagues in their institutions to move forward. We will limit ourselves by subjects. PAM members have shown interest in two topics so far:

1- Data Management
2- Public Policy issues

Please email me the topics that you think should be discussed in this roundtable. I look forward to your
emails.

by Michael Chesnes and Kathleen Lehman

AIP

As announced on PAMnet and elsewhere, AIP is sponsoring two Student Travel Grants for the Electronic Resources and Libraries (ER&L) conference in Austin, TX from April 2-4, 2012. Applications are due Wednesday, February 22, and winners will be notified by February 29, 2012. Note that some websites list the wrong year for the due date. Apply at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ERLTravelGrant

Also take a look at GradschoolShopper.com. This site can quickly narrow down grad school choices for many subdisciplines within physics and astronomy, although most programs listed are limited to the U.S. It includes convenient widgets for selecting locations, degrees, student/faculty ratios, budget, and research areas. The search results appear as both a list and a Google Map.

APS

Check out the the Top 11 Physics Headlines which APS put together for 2011. Developments in cloaking (acoustical, infrared, magnetic) weren’t on the list this time, but couldn’t have been far behind. If you browse the APS journal Physics for metamaterials you can read a number of articles on cloaking, including summaries from Physical Review.

IOP

The Institute of Physics has already released 3 reports for 2012. Of particular interest to librarians is “Collaborative yet independent: Information Practices in the Physical Sciences.” According to IOP’s website, “This report uses seven case studies to understand how researchers in the physical sciences find, access, use and share information.” Particle physicists and gamma-ray burst astrophysicists are among the communities of scientists whose research habits are studied, as well as chemists and Earth scientists.

SCOAP3

The tendering process for SCOAP3 is advancing, according to a recent news release on the cosortium’s website. A list including both for-profit and society publishers has agreed to SCOAP3′s key principles for open access publishing in high energy physics. Over the next year the consortium will send these publishers invitations to tender, and expects to sign contracts and publish through them by the beginning of 2013.

SPIE

There is a nice obituary on the SPIE website to Norman Edmund, founder of Edmund Scientific, which evolved into Edmund Optics. If you ever admired Edmund’s catalogs of scientific gadgets as a child (or an adult) you can appreciate his contributions to amateurs and professionals alike.

RT Reminder

Would you like to facilitate a brief discussion on a hot topic in physics librarianship at the 2012 SLA Conference? You don’t need to be a subject expert, only guide the discussion. Please contact Michael Chesnes or Kathleen Lehman if you are interested.

by Jane Holmquist and Andy Shimp

Report from the AMS Library Committee Meeting

The AMS Library Committee met at the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) in Boston on Wednesday, January 4, 2012, chaired by Linda Yamamoto. The members of the committee for 2011-12 were: Jonathan Borwein (co-chair, Univ. of Newcastle, Australia), Linda Yamamoto (co-chair, Stanford), Cunera Buys (Northwestern), Kris Fowler (Univ. of Minnesota), Joe Rosenblatt (Univ. of Illinois), Andrew Sills (Georgia Southern Univ.) and Smilka Zdravkovska (AMS).

The three librarian members of the committee (Cunera, Kris, and Linda) attended in person. Since the three faculty members (Jonathan, Joe, and Andrew) did not attend this year’s JMM, the room was set up so they could attend via Skype. Meeting via Skype was a first for the committee and despite some technical difficulties, a success. An additional 16 guests from libraries and publishers were in attendance. Smilka was unable to attend, but there were representatives from the AMS at the meeting.

The committee continued to explore the mandate and name of committee and whether or not they need to be revised. In the past, the work of the committee’s annual meetings focused around particular projects (e.g., surveys of math libraries). In order to carry on such projects in the future, the committee would need to set up mechanisms to collaborate outside the annual in-person meeting, such as meeting via Skype. The committee’s charge can be found at
http://www.ams.org/about-us/governance/committees/AMS_Library.pdf.

Beth Ayer (AMS) continues to invite comments from math librarians on the redesigned AMS.org. The website now includes a rotating librarian profile, for which more volunteers are wanted. Carol Hutchins is the first librarian profiled on the redesigned site. It was suggested that a link to the Library Committee’s membership and charge be added to the site.

Carol Hutchins (NYU Courant) encouraged promotion of and participation in IMU/ICIAM’s present effort (at http://blog.mathunion.org ) to elicit feedback about the proposal for a panel to rate math journals by quality, as an expert alternative to bibliometrics such as the Impact Factor.

MathSciNet update (Kathy Wolcott & Norman Richert):

• MathSciNet tutorials http://www.mathscinet.info/index.html;
• A short movie about Math Reviews on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUEOghB3MvM;
• All reference lists from all AMS publications are now in MathSciNet;
• Getting metadata from publishers to speed their preliminary entry into MathSciNet as they move through the regular Math Reviews process, improving current awareness;
• Rolling out an alerting service, tied to a log-in, which will allow saving searches that will run periodically and generate an alert; logged-in user will also be able to add info to own author profile, e.g., email address, URL, photo;
• Rolling out in first quarter: “pairing” to allow user at subscribing institution to register while on campus so they could use MathSciNet on their own device for a month without having to sign in again.

Project Euclid update (Mira Waller):

• Website upgrade will be implemented within 6-8 months, including the ability to export citations in BibTeX; new interface will also include alerting and pairing;
• Shibboleth being implemented.

arXiv update (David Ruddy):

• The transition to “community-supported” economic model is being finalized courtesy of an award from the Simons Foundation; it will be introduced in early 2013; user meetings in 2012 in U.S. and Europe will gather input;
• In an effort to connect pre-prints to the published literature, publishers can currently provide info so DOI shows on arXiv record.

The rest of the meeting was devoted to discussing a variety of issues:

• Increasing online availability of journal back issues;
• Increasing ebook availability of AMS Books;
• AMS is working on monographs (including the backfile) beyond Contemporary Mathematics, which is available now. Many AMS books are already currently indexed in Google Books;
• Funding models for math journals.

Afterwards, about 10 of us went out to a delicious dinner at Legal Seafoods – Copley Place, where a good time was had by all (thanks to Michael Noga (MIT) for coming up with dining options).

Many thanks to Kris Fowler for taking the minutes of the meeting from which I cribbed liberally for this report. The plan is to make the minutes publicly available in future.
One final note: Fellow PAM member Cunera Buys (c-buys@northwestern.edu) and Joe Rosenblatt will be taking over as co-chairs of the committee as of February 1, 2012. Other committee members for 2012-13 are Smilka Zdravkovska (AMS), Andrew Sills (Georgia Southern Univ.), Kristine Fowler – (Univ. of Minnesota), J. Parker Ladwig – (Univ. of Notre Dame) and Bob Noel – (Indiana Univ.) JMM 2013 will be held January 9-12 in San Diego, CA.

Submitted by
Linda Yamamoto
AMS Library Committee co-chair, 2011-12
linday@stanford.edu

Free Texts Available Online

In postings to PAMNET, Thurston Miller and Carol Hutchins noted the availability of two textbooks that can be downloaded for free:

Real Analysis for Graduate Students: Measure and Integration Theory by Richard F. Bass
http://homepages.uconn.edu/~rib02005/real.html
A soft cover version is available from Amazon.com for $16.95

Introduction to Real Analysis by William Trench
http://ramanujan.math.trinity.edu/wtrench/misc/index.shtml
Previously published by Pearson in 2003, the online version has been updated in January 2012.

New AMS Librarian page

The American Mathematical Society has revised ams.org‘s “Information for Librarians” page to make it more useful and interesting to math librarians. The new page includes tools, resources, news, and a math librarian highlight. Carol Hutchins is the first librarian highlighted on the new page. We invite all math librarians to be highlighted in this monthly feature. To volunteer or to recognize a fellow librarian, contact Beth Ayer, the AMS Web Editor: eda@ams.org.

Mathematicians’ Views on Current Publishing Issues: A Survey of Researchers

At the 2011 Math Roundtable, Kristine Fowler, University of Minnesota, presented findings of a survey she conducted of mathematics faculty on current publishing issues. The refereed article now appears in the Fall 2011 issue of Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship:

Mathematicians’ Views on Current Publishing Issues: A Survey of Researchers
http://www.istl.org/11-fall/refereed4.html

Backlog of Mathematics Research Journals

The AMS published its annual journal backlog report in the November 2011 issue of the Notices of American Mathematical Society. The report covers the median time from acceptance of an article to publication in electronic posting and the print version as well as the editor’s current estimate of waiting time between submission and publication.

IMU Mathematics Library Assistance for Developing Countries

The International Mathematical Union’s Commission for Developing Countries (CDC) announced a program to match donors of mathematical materials with libraries in universities/research institutions in developing countries where there is a need for mathematical research literature. CDC offers limited financial support for shipment costs for individual scientists or institutions wishing to donate books in the mathematical sciences to libraries in developing countries. For additional information, go to http://www.mathunion.org/?id=1009 or contact Library Assistant Scheme, IMU Secretariat Berlin, at icmi.cdc.administrator@mathunion.org.

What is MathJax?

MathJax is an open-source JavaScript display engine that produces high-quality math in all modern browsers without plugins. AIP recently announced that it has partnered with MathJax to render mathematics in its online journals, as have MathSciNet and Project Euclid. An article appears in the February 2012 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society describing the technology.

Call for Roundtable Discussion Topics

The Mathematics Roundtable is scheduled to be held at the annual conference in Chicago on Wednesday, July 18 at 10am. We would like to devote this session to group discussion about topics of current interest. We are looking for your ideas as we plan this session. Please contact Jane Holmquist at jane@princeton.edu or Andy Shimp at andy.shimp@yale.edu.