Northeastern

Blue and Green Line Passengers: Can You Hear Me Now? Good!

It has happened to all of us: you’re talking on the phone when you go underground to the Copley T station and the call gets dropped, or you’re trying to send a friend a very important text message while on the Green Line when you realize you don’t have any service. Those few moments when you’re disconnected and isolated from civilization are excruciatingly frustrating. But there’s good news! The Boston Globe has just reported that by the end of the year, the MBTA’s Green and Blue lines will feature cell phone service. Underground cell service is already available on the entire Orange line and part of the Red line, so it was only natural that passengers on the Blue and Green lines would someday be able to gab on the phone while riding the T too. Unfortunately, the Prudential and Symphony stations on the Green line’s E branch will not be getting cell reception until the end of 2012, along with the still unserviced areas of the Red line. However, installation of cell reception on the rest of the Green line and all of the Blue line should be completed by the end of 2011. All of the MBTA’s 35 underground stations and 19 miles of tunnels are expected to feature cell phone service by the end of 2012. So Blue and Green line riders, get ready to talk, text, and check email while riding the T. You can even use the new cell service to Text a Librarian and get help from a librarian at Snell! But please, be courteous while talking on your cell phones. Just because nothing will be stopping you from chatting obnoxiously loud to your friend on your phone about what you did last weekend doesn’t mean you should do it. If you are respectful of others around you while using your phone, riding the T can be a pleasant experience for all. To find out more read the Boston Globe article and for research and books about the history of the MBTA, search NUCat, Northeastern’s library catalog.

Open Access Week: October 24-30, 2011

Open Access Week, a global event now entering its fifth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research. Open access to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole. During the week of October 24-30, the Northeastern University Libraries will host a series of events to celebrate Open Access. The events will cover a range of topics:
  • open collaboration in the sciences
  • the effects of Wikipedia and social networking on student research
  • open access works by Northeastern faculty
  • free and open college textbooks
  • data gathering and storage needs of grad students
⇒ Click here to view the full schedule of events for Open Access Week. The Library has supported Open Access in the Northeastern community since 2006 in the form of the University’s digital archive, IRis. The goal of IRis is to collect, manage, preserve, and share the intellectual output and historical record of Northeastern University. IRis provides open access to NU researchers who want to promote and preserve their materials, to NU students who require digital storage and promotion of their dissertations and theses, to NU administrators who need to save important university records, and to anyone who is seeking information on the intellectual productivity of the Northeastern community. Since its start, IRis has expanded to hold 531 faculty publications and approximately 600 dissertations and master’s theses. And since January 1, 2010, there have been over 230,000 downloads of full-text items from IRis, which include scholarly content as well as university archival content. Building upon the success of IRis, the Library will soon offer a robust digital repository and preservation service to the campus for digital collections, images, media, and data, as well as accompanying metadata and consulting help.

Extended back files of Web of Science now available

An article on a revision of the US Government’s socio-economic index, published in 1982 in the journal, Social Science Research, has been cited by other articles in a broad array of academic journals over 300 times, with the most recent citation being from an article published in June 2011. By extending our offering of Web of Science back files from 1975 through 1992, we are able to provide Northeastern researchers with these historical statistics, allowing them to identify the most important articles, journals, institutions, and authors in their field or subject area of study. When viewing any article in the Web of Science database, a list of citations from that article are provided as well as a list of other subsequent articles and conference proceedings that cite the original article. Links connect to the full text of the cited articles when the full text is available. And don’t be fooled by the title of this database.  As the above example illustrates, Web of Science covers scholarly articles in all types of sciences that include journals in the humanities and social sciences. Visit our News & Events page to read more about this collection or visit our full listing of online databases and trials.

New Summer Reading Suggestion!

Here is an additional summer reading suggestion to add to your lists. The Help written by Kathryn Stockett currently holds the number one spot on The New York Times Best Sellers List for combined print & e-book fiction. Publisher’s Weekly provides the following description: “What perfect timing for this optimistic, uplifting debut novel (and maiden publication of Amy Einhorn’s new imprint) set during the nascent civil rights movement in Jackson, Miss., where black women were trusted to raise white children but not to polish the household silver. Eugenia Skeeter Phelan is just home from college in 1962, and, anxious to become a writer, is advised to hone her chops by writing about what disturbs you. The budding social activist begins to collect the stories of the black women on whom the country club set relies and mistrusts enlisting the help of Aibileen, a maid who’s raised 17 children, and Aibileen’s best friend Minny, who’s found herself unemployed more than a few times after mouthing off to her white employers. The book Skeeter puts together based on their stories is scathing and shocking, bringing pride and hope to the black community, while giving Skeeter the courage to break down her personal boundaries and pursue her dreams. Assured and layered, full of heart and history, this one has bestseller written all over it.” This title may sound familiar, as it has just been made into a movie which stars Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard and Octavia L. Spencer and opens on August 10th.

Find out what all the fuss is about by reserving Snell Library’s copy today or get more information on Amazon.com.

Data Management and Curation at Northeastern

Northeastern University Libraries is embarking on a program to help researchers at the University write data management plans in grant applications, help people store and create metadata for their research, and, eventually, help them publish their datasets with all the appropriate metadata to the appropriate audiences. What is the use of this? In a lot of ways, it is a way to make research more efficient, and thus, in the long run, cheaper. Researchers regularly create data from experiments and observations. In an academic environment, they then use that data to test hypotheses and generate new ideas. The results are published, and humanity gains new knowledge. (I realize that I’m simplifying the process considerably.) But what happens to the data that had been collected? The researchers that create it obviously use it for further inquiries, but much of the time, the data is stored somewhere and forgotten. People have been slowly realizing that there may be more knowledge that can be combed out of the “old” data. Perhaps it can be combined with data from another source, or multiple other sources, and new questions can be answered using it. In fact, funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, are starting to require that grant applications include a Data Management Plan, which should explain how the researchers on the grant will:
share with other researchers, at no more than incremental cost and within a reasonable time, the primary data, samples, physical collections and other supporting materials created or gathered in the course of work under NSF grants.
I will be working with the staff at Northeastern University Libraries and the researchers at Northeastern to make sure that Northeastern can become a leader in data management and curation.