The Lubin Files

New databases available for trial period

The David Lubin Memorial Library has a trial subscription, through June 22, 2010, for two citation and abstract databases: Africa-Wide Information and Waters and Oceans Worldwide.  From the publisher:

Africa-Wide Information, produced by NISC South Africa, combines bibliographic databases from around the world to form a multidisciplinary aggregation offering unique and extensive coverage of all facets of Africa and African studies. This includes content from South African Studies, African Studies, and African HealthLine, which focuses on all aspects of health relating to Africa and other developing nations. The database includes over 3.5 million citations and abstracts dating back to the 16th century.

Waters and Oceans Worldwide combines databases on all facets of international water research. With excellent world coverage, this database includes research ranging from coastal and offshore engineering to pollution and water treatment.  It covers over 1,854,600 citations and abstracts dating back to the 1970s.

Both databases are accessible through Ebscohost.  For more information, contact us at fao-library-reference@fao.org.

IMF Balance of Payments database

One of the library's statistical resources on economics is the Balance of Payments database from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). 

From the IMF's description:

Balance of Payments Statistics summarizes, for a specific period, the economic transactions of an economy with the rest of the world. It reports total goods, services, factor income, and current transfers an economy receives from or provides to the rest of the world as well as capital transfers and changes in each economy's external financial claims and liabilities.

The BOP database contains time series data from 1948. The Web interface allows subscribers to browse the database, select series of interest, display the selected series in a spreadsheet format, and save the selected series for transfer to other software systems such as Microsoft Excel^®.

Related previous Lubin Files post:

International Financial Statistics database (IMF)

Geographical indications guide

A few days ago, a library user requested access to a FAO document on geographical indications.  One catch: the title of the document was unknown.

In the end, we discovered that the item in question was "Linking people, places and products: a guide for promoting quality linked to geographical origin and sustainable Geographical Indications."  It was jointly produced in 2009 by FAO and SINER-GI.

The publication came from a program on origin-linked quality launched by FAO in 2007.  The program's goal is to contribute to rural development by assisting member countries and stakeholders in the implementation of origin-based quality schemes, at institutional and producer level that are tailored to individual economic, social and cultural contexts.

Our friends at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog provide an in-depth description of geographical indications, aka "appellations of origin" here.

93-year-old article answers current question

A recent reference question led to a series of searches and ultimately was answered by a journal published nearly a century ago.

The requester sought information about the "Walker inversion method for sucrose apparent determination."  He was under the impression that the method was originally published in a FAO manual from 1979, for which he had only a partial citation.

It turned out that the manual in question was no. 14/3 of the serial entitled FAO Food and Nutrition Paper.  That issue, "Manuals of food quality control: 3. Commodities," was indeed published in 1979.  According to the foreword, it provides "methods useful for the examination of foods and for their chemical analysis."  It is divided by type of food, with most food items having several different methods of analysis.

The requester's incomplete citation indicated page 150, which was within the chapter about honey.  The heading reads "Apparent Sucrose Content in Honey."  Under Principle, it says "Based on the Walker (1917) inversion method."  At the bottom of the page appears a brief reference: Walker, H.S. (1917), J. Ind. Eng. Chem. 2, 490.

The Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry is the current name of a Korean publication and the former name (from 1909 to 1922) of a journal currently called Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, published by the American Chemical Society.  (Our library does not have a subscription to either one.)

The older journal was the one we wanted.  Amazingly, all of the articles from 1909 to 1922 are available online (at a cost) in pdf. The one our requester needed is here.

The full citation follows:

Walker, Herbert S. "A simplified inversion process for the determination of sucrose by double polarization." Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry 9.5 (May 1917): 490-492.