Are humans addicted to searching? Is the quest to seek information online irresistable?

A recent article in Slate suggests that we are hard-wired to love online searching:

Seeking. You can’t stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble.

The reason? Information seeking, especially online, stimulates the production of dopamine and gives us a feeling of eager curiosity and purpose.The author even compares the joy of searching to the joys of drugs, sex and food. It sounds to me like the library, with all of our options for online searches, offers a pretty rewarding neuro experience!

What about your seeking habits?  Do you get caught up in the search and keep clicking for more long after your needs should be satisfied?

WYOMING UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH DAY
MAY 2, 2009

Undergraduate students are invited to participate in the Tenth Annual Wyoming Undergraduate Research Day which will take place on the University of Wyoming campus, Saturday, May 2, 2009. Last year around 230 students presented their research, and this year we anticipate an even richer display of undergraduate curiosity and creativity. Abstracts of all presentations will be published, and the day will conclude with a dinner honoring the presenters and their families.

Concurrent oral presentations will be held in the Classroom Building beginning at 1:00 pm and concluding at 5:30 p.m. Poster presentations will take place in the Family Room of the Wyoming Union from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.

The University of Wyoming and Wyoming’s community colleges provide many opportunities for undergraduates to participate in independent research projects across many disciplines. The purpose of Undergraduate Research Day is to recognize and to celebrate the accomplishments of undergraduate student researchers. The topics will include research in the areas of agriculture, business, education, engineering, health sciences, biological and physical sciences, mathematical sciences, social sciences, and the arts and humanities.

Each oral presentation is to be 15 minutes long with a five-minute question/answer session following.

Students can access instructions and forms for participation on the Wyoming EPSCoR web site: http://epscor-wise.uwyo.edu/.

Students must submit their Information Forms and their abstracts by March 27, 2009, in order to participate in Research Day. Late materials will not be accepted.

Students are also required to provide an electronic copy of their presentation or poster to the EPSCoR Office within two weeks after Research Day. The UW Libraries will provide a repository for electronic copies of the student presentations, and will make them available electronically through the UW Libraries Digital Initiative at http://digital.uwyo.edu/. You can see last year’s presentations and posters at http://uwlib5.uwyo.edu/omeka/collections/show/4.

Families and friends, UW / Community College / High School students and faculty, and the public are invited to attend the presentations.

Presenters are expected to attend other presentations throughout the afternoon. Please be prepared to stay from 1:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Research Day is sponsored by the UW Offices of Research and Economic Development, Student Affairs, and Academic Affairs; and also, by the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Agriculture, the College of Engineering and Applied Science, the College of Health Sciences, Wyoming INBRE, UW Honors Program, the McNair Scholars Program, Wyoming EPSCoR, and the Wyoming NASA Space Grant Consortium.

For further information, please contact Rick Matlock (307) 766-3545 (rixdogs@uwyo.edu) or Barbara Kissack, (307)766-2033 (bkissack@uwyo.edu).

Did you miss the 2008 Undergraduate Research Day? Or perhaps you want to revisit the more compelling student projects? Good news! Research Day projects are now archived online by the UW Libraries. Visit them and learn more.

Undergraduate Research Day 2008 is our newest digital collection. We are also adding a collection entitled Architecture of Saratov, Russia that was translated from Russian. Eventually we will add content from the Annals of Wyoming, first as digital PDFs (digital microfiche), then as full text readable and searchable content.

Further details can be found at: http://digital.uwyo.edu/

Those of you interested in Medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts will be happy to learn that you can now view over 24,000 digital images of manuscript drawings and paintings from the Bodleian Library’s collection via ARTStor. According to the ARTStor database:

With more than 10,000 volumes, the Bodleian Library’s Department of Special Collections and Western Manuscripts has one of the greatest collections of Western Medieval manuscripts in the world… ARTstor has digitized virtually all of the illuminated manuscript leaves from Bodleian manuscripts through the 16th century, as well as selected 19th- and 20th- century manuscripts in the Medieval tradition. The collection also includes significant bindings, illuminated initials, and text pages. The present collaboration has made this rich body of visual material and related scholarship available online and at high resolution for the first time.

If you are on campus or logged into the library’s proxy server from off campus, you have full access to the ARTStor collection.

Facebook fans can create high quality citations in MLA, APA and more styles with one click. Simply add the new CiteMe app, tell it what you want to cite and it will generate the citation for you. Easy!

You can also find the CiteMe app, instant message a librarian and catch up on the latest news on the Coe Library Facebook page.

If you are anything like me, you know the pain of losing points on your Works Cited page after all the hard work you put into writing a good paper.

Let the library blog help you keep all those citation points this semester, my little grasshoppers! Cass’s favorite tools for good (usually) and easy (certainly) citations:

BibMe creates citations for you. The clear interface will create MLA or APA citations for articles, newspapers, books, websites, films. The ISBN search option for books is so slick!

EbscoHost creates citations directly from your search results! Whether you’re using Academic Search Premier or any of the other fine Ebsco databases, just select “Email” and for the article you want, select the appropriate format (e.g. MLA, APA) and it will send you the citation. Amazing!

Reference Librarians know all about citations, just ask!

In too deep? An appointment at the Writing Center might be the right move.

What are your favorite citation helpers?

Professors and scholars can now expect their unpublished articles to be tested for plagiarism via software commonly used to check student work, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Students may be familiar with the turnitin software which scans papers for familiar turns of phrase and known published material. Now professors can expect their papers to be subjected to a very similar process.

In the past, peer review prior to publication ensured the quality of research articles, but now journal publishers are utilizing technology to ensure original content. Additional methods of detecting plagiarism include Google Alerts and database searches.

This article reminded me that while technological advances can make plagiarism easy and appealing, they also make it a heck of a lot easier to get caught. It also reminded me that setting up permanent searches in your favorite databases and on Google is a great idea!

Do you have questions about the new NIH public access policy? Wondering how it will affect UW researchers and authors?

Librarian David Kruger explains what University of Wyoming folks need to know about the recent announcement that NIH-funded research must be made publicly available after one year via the PubMed database.

According to Kruger:

What is the NIH Public Access Policy, in plain English?

A law-enforced requirement that any peer-reviewed article supported by NIH funding be made freely available to the public via PubMed Central, no later than 12 months after the official publication date.

What is the impact of the NIH Public Access Policy on UW Investigators and Authors?

The NIH public access policy goes into effect April 7, 2008. Journal articles resulting from NIH-funded activities submitted for publication on or after this date must be deposited in the publicly accessible PubMed Central within 12 months after the journal article is published. Authors submitting articles for journal publication must retain the right to make the article publicly available. The UW Research Office has provided both a UW copyright agreement letter and a UW copyright amendment to the publication agreement. Both of these documents should be sent to the publisher.