Congratulations go to Nature, which has been named the ‘journal of the century’ by the BioMedical & Life Sciences Division (DBIO) of the Special Libraries Association (SLA). The award was presented last month at the SLA’s Centennial Conference in Washington D.C.

To coincide with the centenary, DBIO also conducted a poll of its members to find the 100 most influential Biology and Medicine journals over the last 100 years. Click on this link to see if your favourite journal is among them!

Please see the attached lists for new books received at the Central Library in July.

Just click on the book title to go straight to the library catalogue record to see if the item is on the shelves, if it isn’t, you can place a hold on the item. 

Biology and Biochemistry New Books July 2009

Haldane Collection New Material 0709

Please do let Elizabeth know if you have any suggestions for titles to be purchased for the library.

Please see the attached list for new books received at the Michael Way Library, Silwood in July.

Just click on the book title to go straight to the library catalogue record to see if the item is on the shelves, if it isn’t, you can place a hold on the item.

Silwood New Books July 2009

Please do let Elizabeth know if you have any suggestions for titles to be purchased for the library.

A BBC news story reports that the Harlequin ladybird, the fastest spreading alien species on record, is now putting over 1,000 species at threat. Over the last 4 years the ladybird has spread to most parts of the UK and is preying on many other insects. Click here to read the full BBC story and listen to a short piece by Dr Helen Roy of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology descibing the appetite of the Harlequin Ladybird.

Please note: the image shown here is not that of a Harlequin Ladybird.

Freeze Frame is a website which provides access to historic polar images taken between 1845 – 1982 from the Scott Polar Research Institute.

They say: “As part of the preservation programme, negatives, daguerreotypes and lantern slides, which form part of a rich but fragile archive held by the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, are now available to scientists, researchers, scholars and members of the public.”

Alongside the gallery of images including areas on Air Transport, Ice and Icebergs, and Wildlife, there are other resources such as Survival in Extreme Environments and Expedition Summaries. A resource area currently under development is that of Environmental Change – so one to keep an eye on.

A fascinating website that is interesting for both academic and non-academic purposes.

Identify the most influential journals and papers in your field by searching Web of Knowledge’s Journal Citation Reports, still the only journal evalulation resource that provides quantifiable, statistical information based on citation data. The data for 2008 has now been released bringing the reports fully up to date.

New features added to the latest release of JCR data allow you to:

- View a journal’s impact with a five year Impact Factor trend graph.

- See how journal self citations affect Imapct Factor.

- Rank journals in multiple categories.

Find out more on the Journal Citation Reports site.

From Monday 29th June, the Silwood Library’s opening hours will change to their summer opening times:

Open: 10am – 1pm

Closed: 1pm – 2pm

Open: 2pm – 5pm

Normal opening hours will resume with the autumn term on Monday 5th October 2009.

If you want to borrow books from the Library over the Summer, then you may be interested to know vacation loans are available from Saturday 20th June. Full details are available on the library website.

There are special arrangements at the Central Library where the following conditions apply:

• from 20 June, Short and Standard loans may be borrowed on request by all borrowers until 3 October, providing there are still 4 copies in the library
• you must ask if you want any books issued for the vacation, otherwise the usual loan periods will apply

The Journal of Chemoinformatics is an open access, peer-reviewed, online journal encompassing all aspects of cheminformatics and molecular modelling including:

• chemical information systems, software and databases, and molecular modelling
• chemical structure representations and their use in structure, substructure, and similarity searching of chemical substance and chemical reaction databases
• computer and molecular graphics, computer-aided molecular design, expert systems, QSAR, and data mining techniques

The journal website also allows  for searches to be stored, and new results emailed to you. It lists the 10 most accessed articles so you can see what everyone else is reading. You can also set up an RSS feed and add your own comments on articles. All making this a great example of how open access publishing is developing and allowing you to interact with the information you find. Well worth a visit!

Following a period of closure owing to lighting failure in the Central Library basement, we are pleased to say that the store service for collection of theses, Science Museum journals, and our special collections is now fully operational again. For further information on the service please click here.