There are few sources that critically evaluate the ways of reviewing the literature on scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). We use an academic literacies perspective as a lens with which to explore the ways that literature reviews may be undertaken. While reviewing the literature is often presented as a scientific, objective process, the…

There are few references that critically evaluate the different ways of searching the literature on scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), or how these are related to researchers' goals. We use an academic literacies perspective as a lens with which to explore the different ways that literature searches may be undertaken. While searching the…

We have updated a version of the coordination geometry table of the d-block elements and their ions that Moore and co-workers presented in 1997. This table is constructed by searching and analyzing the data in the Cambridge Structural Database. In this updated version, we have also analyzed impact of ligands on the coordination geometry and…

When searching for scholarly documents, researchers often stick with the same familiar handful of databases. Yet, just beyond these limited horizons lie dozens of alternatives with which they could search more effectively, whether for quick lookups or thorough searches in systematic reviews or meta-analyses. Searchsmart.org is a free website that…

Mass spectrometry is essential for large-scale protein identification in proteomics. By database searching of mass spectrometry data, it is possible to identify proteins without the need to interpret MS/MS spectra (de novo sequencing), which is time-consuming and not feasible as a systematic tool in proteomic analysis. Many authors have reported…

Extension educators, staff, and specialists need to use surveys and other measurement instruments to assess their programming and conduct other research. Challenges in locating tests and measurement tools, however, include lack of time and lack of familiarity with techniques that can be used to find them. This article discusses library resources…

As it provides a firm foundation for advancing knowledge, a solid literature review is a critical feature of any academic investigation. Yet, there are several challenges in performing literature reviews including: (1) lack of access to the literature because of costs, (2) fracturing of the literature into many sources, lack of access and…

Cheminformatics is a widely used interdisciplinary field that is important for many chemistry areas. Cheminformatics skills are necessary for dealing with a large amount of chemical information and are considered essential for various tasks such as data analysis, visualization, storage, etc. This paper presents the basic cheminformatics chemistry…

For decades, academia has been hampered by what appears to be preference for opacity and obfuscation. In an article published in this magazine three years ago, "The Vocabularies of Higher Education" (Gaston, 2014), the author lamented the welter of terms and acronyms that has accumulated over many decades, particularly within the current…

Introduction: In the big data age, we have to deal with a tremendous amount of information, which can be collected from various types of sources. For information search systems such as Web search engines or online digital libraries, the collection of documents becomes larger and larger. For some queries, an information search system needs to…

In 2008, the Digital Humanities Observatory was charged with creating an all-island gateway to Irish digital collections and resources. A key factor in the achievement of this goal was the development of the web application, "DHO: Discovery." This chapter will describe what "DHO: Discovery" was intended to be and to what extent…

Purpose: Linking Open Data (LOD) provides a vast amount of well structured semantic information, but many inconsistencies may occur, especially if the data are generated with the help of automated methods. Data cleansing approaches enable detection of inconsistencies and overhauling of affected data sets, but they are difficult to apply…

Proteomics is an emerging area of systems biology that allows simultaneous study of thousands of proteins expressed in cells, tissues, or whole organisms. We have developed this activity to enable high school or college students to explore proteomic databases using mass spectrometry data files generated from yeast proteins in a college laboratory…

The ubiquity and familiarity of the world wide web means that students regularly turn to it as a source of information. In doing so, they "are said to rely heavily on simple search engines, such as Google to find what they want." Researchers have also investigated how students use search engines, concluding that "the young web users tended to…

The year 2011 was the PALNI (Private Academic Library Network of Indiana) consortium's "rookie season" for the implementation of Primo, the 2010 Discovery Layer 500 race winner. In this article, the authors report on their transition to the cloud within Ex Libris Ltd.'s Primo TotalCare environment: their preparation, the steps involved…