Blog hiatus

As May draws to a close, the students are gone, and many of the faculty are leaving as well. I, myself, will be gone part of June and all of July. Therefore, the NAS Library News blog will be on hiatus for the next two months. I will return in August with news for Autumn Term. Have a wonderful summer!

Time to vote for Eckerd

It is time for The Scientist's survey on the Best Places to Work in Academia. Click here to take part. You may have to register (it's free) to reach the article. Sometimes, I am asked to log in and sometimes I am not.

Mars library a gift to future explorers

Mars as taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Photo Credit: NASA, Dr. Nicholas Short's Remote Sensing Tutorial.

When I was in library school, an administration class had us creating our own libraries, that is, collection development, writing position descriptions, working with budgets, describing mission, etc. A friend and fellow graduate assistant created a library in space. It was generally known as the most far out (no pun intended) and clever library planned in the class, at least in my time at USF. However, it was also considered by some to be the least likely to ever exist. As of today, though, Mars will play host to a library of earthly creations. The Planetary Society has created the Vision of Mars library on DVD, which traveled to the planet on the rover Phoenix. The press release from the Planetary Society has information about the contents and purpose of the library.

Chemistry on your MP3 player

The Chemistry Heritage Foundation produces weekly podcasts on the past, present and future of Chemistry. The show, Distillations, in production for about half a year, is hosted by a historian and former naval officer Robert Hicks. Episodes are just over ten minutes long and cover a wide range of topics, such as entropy, pharmaceuticals, color, nutrition, and more. The podcasts are accessible to laypeople with an interest in chemistry and a basic upper middle school science education. Every topic features a related element, and references are provided for each week's topic to permit further study on topics of interest.

Tutorials for Gene Research

Through a collaboration between MIT Engineering and Science Libraries and Harvard's Countway Library, brief video tutorials of UCSC Genome Browser and NCBI BLAST are now available. The UCSC Genome browser provide access to reference sequences for a number of genomes. Tutorials provided for this browser are as follows:

• Getting DNA Sequence
• Using Annotation Tracks
• Intron-Exon Boundaries
• Searching with BLAT

NCBI's BLAST is a tool for nucleotide or protein comparisons. The tutorials related to BLAST are as follows:

• BLAST Link
• Do I Need BLAST? The Use of the Related Sequences Tool
• Nucleotide BLAST
• Nucleotide BLAST: Algorithm Comparison