New Resources

• New search tool  Finding library resources just got easier with BartonPlus. It brings together many library collections in one search interface–searching most MIT-licensed e-resources like e-books and full-text articles, as well as collections in the classic Barton catalog like books, theses, music, DVDs, and more. 

• More options for borrowing  Borrow Direct, a partnership that allows library materials to be shared between member institutions, has expanded to include the University of Chicago. MIT users can search over 50 million volumes owned by Borrow Direct libraries through MIT’s WorldCat.

• New guide to APIs for scholarly resources  Many scholarly publishers, databases, and products offer APIs to allow users with programming skills to more powerfully extract data to serve a variety of research purposes. With an API, users might create programmatic searches of a citation database, extract statistical data, or dynamically query and post blog content. Learn more in the APIs for Scholarly Resources guide.

• Music Oral History Project  For over 100 years music has been a vibrant part of MIT’s culture. A new website features in-depth interviews with faculty, staff, and former students about their musical experiences at the Institute, as well as their professional careers in music or other fields.

• New e-resources  Find a number of new online resources including: the National Geographic Archive, Smithsonian Global Sound, several new titles in the Gale Virtual Reference Library, the Encyclopedia of Environmetrics, and Encyclopedia of Hydrological Sciences in the Wiley Online Library, and more.

Improved study spaces

• Upgrades to Hayden Library  The window bays in Hayden have gotten a facelift! The windows have been cleaned, frames painted, and new shades have replaced the curtains. Also check out the  new artwork by Dennis Oppenheim that adorns the first floor wall. Additionally, a number of tables and study carrels in Hayden were refinished this summer. Coming up – we hope to reupholster some of the comfy seating on the 1st floor.

• Finding locations, hours, and study spaces  New and improved webpages make it easier to locate current and future library hours with a date-picker option. Also find and reserve study spaces online and learn about what each location has to offer.
  

Upcoming events

• Music & Theater Arts Composer Forums  During the fall term the Lewis Music Library will host MTA Composer Forums. Stop by the library at 5pm on Oct. 9, Oct. 23, Nov. 6, Nov. 20 to hear from featured musicians.

•  Fall workshops Throughout the month of October the Libraries will offer a series of workshops on subject-specific resources. See the event calendar for details.
  

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Explore OneMine, “an innovative collaboration among societies that serve the mining and minerals community.” Gathering documents from groups like SME, (Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration), TMS (The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society), and AIME and SAIMM (for those in the know), OneMine wants to provide materials online that previously have been in print only. We are very interested in your feedback on OneMine, so try a search on “rare earth oxide extraction”, and Tell Us what you unearth!

Need to compare data on energy production and use across countries over time?  Try the United Nations Energy Statistics Database, available for download from the Harvard-MIT Data Center.  This new dataset covers the historical period of 1990-2005 and provides comprehensive energy statistics on more than 215 countries on topics such as:

• production
• trade
• transformation
• consumption

Note: this dataset comes as a fixed-field dataset that can be understood utilizing the accompanying documentation.  For questions about using this or other research datasets in the social sciences, contact Katherine McNeill, Social Science Data Services Librarian, at mcneillh@mit.edu.

For updated data covering more recent years, see the Energy Statistics Database via UNdata.

Looking for more energy statistics or other available datasets? See:

• The statistics page on the Libraries’ guide to Energy resources.
• All data available via the Harvard-MIT Data Center

“We are confident that the improvements unveiled today will enhance the SciFinder user experience and enable new and faster scientific breakthroughs.”

For more information contact Erja Kajosalo, kajosalo@mit.edu, Librarian for Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. She knows tips like ‘Chrome on the Mac is not usable with SciFinder and Substance or Reaction Explores due to Java not being compatible.’  Or, use  Ask Us!

MIT Libraries has subscribed to The American Society of Mechanical Engineers digital library for several years. Now it has a new interface!

ASME Digital Collections is the place to search for full text articles in ASME journals (all years) or for conference papers from 2002 – present.

AND…if you need a conference paper prior to 2002?  The Barker Engineering Library has thousands of ASME technical papers in its collections. Use the ASME Papers & Publications guide to locate them.  Or just Ask Us!

Move over ACME….Beep Beep!

This 2012 Oscar nominated documentary follows photographer James Balog and his crew as they as they conduct the Extreme Ice Survey, deploying time lapse cameras to capture a multi-year record of the world’s changing glaciers. Register for the MIT Sustainability Summit to see a talk by Chasing Ice photographer James Balog on Saturday evening!

Refreshments at 4 PM in lobby outside 6-120; Film starts at 4:30 in 6-120. Free and open to the public.

For more information, contact: Heather McCann; hmccann(at) mit.edu 617.253.7098

Web site: http://web.mit.edu/earthday

Sponsored by MIT Libraries, Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, EHS, MITEI, and the MIT Earth Day Committee

Looking for corporate social responsibility data?  ASSET4 ESG (“Environmental, Social, and Governance”) provides company-level data on 3,400 public companies worldwide, including some of the largest companies in the US. There is a minimum of 4 years of data for most companies and up to 1,000 datatypes are available across the following categories:

ASSET 4 ESG is available via the Thomson Reuters Datastream workstation located in Dewey Library. From within Datastream, ESG is included as a Datatype option under the Equities category. See the Libraries’ Sustainable Business Research Guide or Thomson Reuters’ ASSET4 ESG fact sheet (PDF).

Explore Professor Moniz’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

Thousands of research reports from national and international labs and other universities or contracting companies were sent to MIT and are kept in our Annex. The collection is particularly strong in energy, including the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and all its successor agencies (ERDA, DOE).  The research guide will help you find them. And because they are often the sources behind published journal articles or conference papers, they can provide fuller accounts of the research, including designs, experimental details or other practical information.

Bottom line?  As more literature gets digitized, more citations to technical reports are discovered. Dive into this world yourself, or Ask Us!

Statista provides statistics on a wide range of topics, including industries, markets, demography, countries & economies.  It harvests data from market researchers, trade associations, scientific publications, and government sources, and compiles it in a central place for you to search.  Download data in tabular or graphical form and link to original data sources and related reports.  Find statistics such as:

• Global market share held by the leading smartphone operating systems in sales to end users from 1st quarter 2009 to 4th quarter 2012
• Percentage of U.S. population who has (or ever had) cancer, 1999-2011, by age
• U.S. organic food sales growth forecast from 2010 to 2014
• Monthly unemployment rate in the U.S. from January 2012 to January 2013 (seasonally-adjusted)
• and more…

Access Statista at: http://libraries.mit.edu/get/statista.

Researching local areas in the United States?  Govistics provides spending, revenue, employment and crime data for state and local governments and school districts across the U.S., pulling together data from different sources.  Find data such as the following for the City of Cambridge:

• Government spending and number of employees in all areas, including social services, education, and public safety
• Number of violent and property crimes
• Investment portfolio of the city’s retirement system, with data on membership and contributions
• and more…

Access Govistics at: http://libraries.mit.edu/get/govistics.

Need data on your research topic but have no idea who collects it?  Try the Statistical Abstract of the United States!  This online reference source provides summary statistical tables of everything under the sun, and detailed citations to the original source for you to find more detailed data.  Search not only by subject but also filter your results to those available at certain demographic (e.g., age, sex, race, education, marital status), geographic (e.g., state, smsa), and economic (e.g., industry, occupation) breakdowns.  Find data such as:

• Nonfatal occupational injury and illness cases in private industry by type of injury or illness and days away from work: 2010
• Coastline counties most frequently hit by hurricanes: 1960 To 2008
• Municipal solid waste generation, materials recovery, combustion with energy recovery, and discards: 1980 to 2010
• Research and development expenditures in science and engineering at universities and colleges: 2000 to 2010

Access the Statistical Abstract at: http://libraries.mit.edu/get/stat-abstract.

Want further information on statistics and data resources?  Try Social Science Data Services or other data resources listed on our subject-oriented research guides.

Within Desal Data you will find desalination plant listings, incorporating the IDA Inventory (a catalogue of desalination facilities contracted and under construction since 1945, based on over 25 years of annual industry surveys), market analysis and economic forecasting from Global Water Intelligence, company profiles and desalination news from countries worldwide.

You can find DesalData in VERA or use this URL http://libraries.mit.edu/get/desaldata

We welcome your feedback and hope this product supports the desalination work on campus!

Researching energy industries?  Need statistics, market analysis, news, company information, and financial deals?  Try our suite of eTrack databases:

• Alternative Energy eTrack
• eTrack Nuclear
• eTrack Oil and Gas
• eTrack Smart Grid
• Petrochemicals eTrack
• Power eTrack

eTrack provides data and reports on energy industry sectors worldwide. Each database contains numerous statistical databases; detailed information on companies, deals, and key events; plus in-depth industry research.   Find detailed statistics and generate lists such as:

• Wind farms in Argentina (showing the generation capacity of each)
• Planned oil exploration blocks, showing the country, area, operator, and acreage
• Nuclear power reactors to be decommissioned (including shutdown year and decommissioning cost)

Note: To download tables, copy and paste them into Excel page by page.

Want further information about energy?  Attend one of our energy IAP workshops and try the other resources on our Energy Research Guide.

Photo Courtesy of the National Science Foundation

Energy Sci/Tech Information: Where to Go, What to Do
Mon Jan 14, 3-4:00pm, 14N-132
Contact: Chris Sherratt, gcsherra@mit.edu

Energy Information: Industries and Statistics
Mon Jan 14, 4-5:00pm, 14N-132
Contact: Katherine McNeill, mcneillh@mit.edu

Energy Information: Maps and Data to use with GIS
Tue Jan 22, 3-4:00pm, 14N-132
Contact: Jennie Murack, murack@mit.edu

Finding the Energy in E-Books!
Thu Jan 24, 11:00am-12:00pm, 14N-132
Contact: Chris Sherratt, gcsherra@mit.edu

For a complete list of IAP classes offered by the Libraries on other topics, please see our Calendar of Events.

Each year Knovel invites engineering students worldwide to enter a competition designed to show the content and powerful search functions of this collection of sci/tech handbooks. One example is Patrick’s favorite feature, the Equation Plotter. “[This] … is a great way to quickly get property information without having to dig through the text to figure out the functional form used for a specific correlation,” he writes. Users can also input names of properties and ranges of data values to search for compounds that fit these bounds. At your fingertips is a digital library that, thanks to the MIT Libraries, will bring you specific answers as well as full texts to use in coursework or research.

The stories and headlines in Energywire can be searched by keyword or delivered to you through its alerting service. The top story in one recent alert highlighted MIT’s research on methane emissions and natural gas. Updates on oil shale, energy in the Arctic, geopolitics, water and energy, and business developments are all popular topics, along with many others.

As it says at the bottom of each daily alert, “Get all of the stories in today’s Energywire!”

Find it here: http://libraries.mit.edu/get/ew

Collier, A.J. 167. Williams coal mine 90 miles below Nulato, on Yukon River.