What are standards?
Standards are guidelines or rules for products, processes, test methods, or materials.
These are created to produce a level of uniformity, interchangeability, reliability, or means of comparison.
Standards influence daily life including our method of communication, the products we use, how we travel to work, and what we eat.
Searching patent information is a challenge for most librarians on a good day whether it is on Google Patents, ESPACEnet, or the USPTO. A rather new site, Lens, has entered the landscape. Lens is a self-described “open public resource for innovation cartography.” Aside from the rather quirky byline on the site’s home page, this open resource searches “nearly all of the patent documents in the world as open, annotatable digital public goods that are integrated with scholarly and technical literature along with regulatory and business data” (https://www.lens.org/about/what/).
What is the DOE Data Explorer?
To gain familiarity with real examples of research data take a look at the DOE Data Explorer. This resource provides a place to discover a huge variety of scientific research data generated from projects funded wholly or in part by the US Department of Energy. Continue reading “Finding Data with DOE Data Explorer”
What are microstructures?
A microstructure is the small-scale structure of a material. Microstructures can only be viewed using at 25x magnification. Microstructures can have an influence on the physical properties of a material such as corrosion, ductility, strength, and toughness; and are useful when analyzing ceramics, composites, polymers, and metals.
Continue reading “Alloy Microstructure Images in ASM Alloy Center Database”
National Academies Press with Academy Scope
National Academies Press publishes reports produced by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. These institutions provide leadership on challenging scientific issues by presenting information that informs and educates.
What do they publish?
The collection of over 5500 publications includes brief reports of less than 10 pages and comprehensive books of over 400 pages. Continue reading “National Academies Press”
What is a figures and tables search?
Proquest indexes figures, tables, charts, and graphs of publications separately from the articles in which they are published. In other words, you can search the captions, geographic information, and any other metadata attached to an image. It’s not a feature for every article, and not every object is indexed, but it’s a useful feature in many of its scientific databases.
What is Georef?
Continue reading “Figures and Tables Search in Georef via Proquest”
What is NTRL?
The National Technical Reports Library (NTRL) is the new public search database of the National Technical Information Service (NTIS). It offers free public access to a database of over three million federal science and technology reports.
NTIS created NTRL to solve the inconsistencies in access to many of their documents. The same documents could have been available for a fee through NTIS while free access was given at the agency’s website.
Continue reading “National Technical Reports Library (NTRL)”
Search hints for Google Patents
First, in case you don’t know about Google Patents, it is an easy way to start searching the patent literature. The familiar Google interface, powerful keyword searching, and easy accessibility make Google Patents an appealing supplement to options from patent agencies such as the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Patent records link to citing (and cited) documents; subject classifications connect to explanatory materials; and links are provided for patent-family documents.
The goal of this blog is to share insights and tips related to discovery of and access to science and technology information. The audience for these insights is science and technology librarians.
Science and technology librarianship spans many subject areas from engineering to natural sciences to environmental and health sciences but all posts will have science and technology as their common connection.
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