The Lubin Files

New easier access to full-text articles provided by the library.

Check out the library's new URL link resolver, which allows you to click directly on links to available full text of journal articles from databases like Scopus or CAB Abstracts. The icon has been rebranded to say "Check for full text" as seen here: http://bit.ly/A2FVOg . This service enables David Lubin Memorial Library(DLML) to deliver easy access to full text in any number of locations. It is a friendly and intuitive interface with language options and provides custom links to ILL forms, web resources and direct export to citation management tools as well as 1-click to article service that bypasses the results screen. The new link resolver and E-Journal Portal on the library's homepage make it easier and more efficient for FAO staff in HQ and in the Field offices to find full-text articles in the DLML collection.

World Bank data for free!

Great news!  The World Bank has just announced free access to databases that were previously only available by subscription.

Databases such as World Development Indicators, Global Development Finance, and Africa Development Indicators, plus many more-- are now freely available to anyone with an internet connection.

Read more about this initiative here...

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)

Digital journal preservation

An interesting article was published in the papers of the Second International Conference on The Future of Information Sciences (INFuture 2009).  The article, Trends in Preserving Scholarly Electronic Journals, discusses such issues as the differences between print and digital media, shift in the responsibility of archiving, copyright and intellectual property rights, cost of archiving, expertise, selection, redundancy, and organizational issues.

At a time of increasing interest in digital access to media, there is still a lack of understanding of technical and administrative requirements for the preservation of digital documents.  Preservation standards exist, but practical implementation plans don't necessarily follow.  Organizations lack technical knowledge of information required to support the digital preservation process. Nevertheless, digital preservation has received considerably more prominence in recent years, gaining the attention of entities such as national libraries, national archives and other organizations.  The article traces these trends.

[via ResourceShelf]

Education for Rural People website

Recently a library user requested the book Education for rural development: towards new policy responses.  We found some related resources as well, including a site called Education for Rural People (ERP), a joint effort between FAO and UNESCO.  ERP's publications page lists a variety of books on agriculture, food security, and development, most of which are available in full text online.  (Links provided.) 

African Economic Outlook

Those who work on issues pertaining to Africa may find the website African Economic Outlook to be useful.  The site includes data and statistics on such topics as economic indicators, aid flows, exports, public finances, civil tensions, and more.  In addition, there are analyses and reports on individual countries as well as overarching topics that touch all areas of the continent.  There are four versions of the site: English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

The site is the latest incarnation of an annual report previously available only in print.  Its contents come from the African Development Bank, the OECD Development Centre, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and a network of African think tanks and research centers.

CAB eBooks

The David Lubin Memorial Library has a subscription to CAB eBooks, a collection of over 430 titles.  The subjects covered include agriculture, animal and veterinary sciences, environmental sciences, human health, food and nutrition, leisure and tourism, and plant sciences.  The books are indexed and retrievable as chapters (over 7000 of them), and are presented in PDF format.

To see all of the library databases to which FAO staff members have access, click here.

Springer E-Books

David Lubin Memorial Library has procured free access to Springer E-Books until the 30th of September 2009. Springer provides access to more than 10,000 electronic books on subjects such as: Business and Economics, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Professional and Applied Computing, and more. It is accessible to all the FAO HQ and Field staff via IP recognition.

You can search by keyword or browse by topic or publication type.

What is a kelvin and how do I write it?

For all the science writers out there... take a look at the updated version of The New Oxford Dictionary for Scientific Writers and Editors. It calls itself a style guide for the presentation of scientific information. It’s great for a quick answer to those niggling questions, like how to write a floral formula or whether grasshoppers and cockroaches are in the same order of insects. It claims to reflect widely accepted usage and to follow the recommendations of international scientific bodies such as IUPAC and IUPAP, and give guidance on such matters as spellings (American English and British English), punctuation, abbreviations, prefixes and suffixes, units and quantities, and symbols. Can standardization exist in scientific writing? Will it facilitate communication? Is this the tool to help? I look forward to your comments!