Parrish Library’s database of the week (1/25/13): AGRICOLA

January 25th, 2013

Welcome to Database of the Week, a feature from the Roland G. Parrish Library of Management & Economics.  These weekly snapshots will give you basic information about our most relevant and beneficial online resources.

This Week’s Featured Database:  AGRICOLA, from the National Agricultural Library.

Link: www.lib.purdue.edu/libraries/mgmt, under Collections (on the left), click on the List of Business Databases.

Description/focus: AGRICOLA gives access to the material in the National Agricultural Library.

Start with this hint:  Begin a basic search by entering a keyword into the search field, then narrow the results with related keywords, or by using one of the limits offered below the search field.   You can select language, type of publication, and years of publication.  AGRICOLA has few full text articles but it presents a good opportunity to try out the FIND IT at Purdue Libraries  service.  If the title you want is available in another database, FIND IT at Purdue Libraries will do the search and show you where it is.  See here for a short video tutorial on the basics of searching AGRICOLA.

Why you should know this database:  AGRICOLA  topics cover a wide range including agricultural regulations, training, animal science, nutrition, natural resources management, environmental pollution, food science, forestry, energy, and others.  AGRICOLA coverage goes back to 1970.

How this database can be integrated into the curriculum: The AGRICOLA list of results includes an option called Find Similar.  The filters and other tools simplify  the search process.

Cost: Paid annually by Purdue University Libraries.

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Database of the Week comes to you from the Management & Economics Library (MEL). Our intent is to give you a brief introduction to a database that you may not know.  If you would like more information about this database, or if you would like a demonstration of it for a class, contact parrlib@purdue.edu.  Database of the Week is archived  at http://guides.lib.purdue.edu/dbow .  For more Purdue Libraries news, follow us on Twitter (@PurdueLibraries).

If you would like us to promote your favorite database, send an email to mdugan@purdue.edu.

PURR provides a campus hub for research data management

January 15th, 2013

In January 2011, the National Science Foundation began requiring that all grant proposals include two-page plans that describe what data will be generated in the research and how the data will be managed and shared.  Other funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, NASA, and the National Endowment for the Humanities soon followed suit with their own requirements.

The Purdue University Research Repository (PURR) was created to support researchers in meeting these requirements by creating a platform for collaborating on research and publishing and archiving datasets.

Examples of research data include software source code, output from sensors and instruments, interview transcripts, observation logs, spreadsheets, databases, scientific images and video, and more.

Purdue faculty, graduate students, and staff can create projects on the PURR website, invite others to join their projects, and receive a free allocation of storage and tools for helping them collaborate and manage their research data.

“Scholars often publish their findings in conference and journal papers, but without the supporting data, the research can’t be reproduced and verified by others”, says Courtney Matthews, Digital Data Repository Specialist at the Purdue Libraries. “PURR gives Purdue researchers a platform for managing and publishing their datasets in a way that meets funder requirements and enables the reuse of data that gives credit to the researcher.”

It also provides boilerplate text that can be pasted into grant proposals as well as tutorials and support for developing effective data management plans.

Since its launch, PURR has been included in over 500 grants proposals that have originated from Purdue.

Datasets that are published and archived in PURR are assigned Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) that uniquely identify them and make them more easily tracked and cited.  David Gleich, an assistant professor of Computer Science, recently used PURR to publish a dataset for testing algorithms in social network analysis. “DOIs make it easy to track citations, usage, and other metrics”, says Gleich. “It’s always important to be able to demonstrate [research] impact.”

For eight years agronomy Professor Jeffrey Volenec and colleagues collected data from ninety-six farm plots to better understand how potassium and phosphorus levels influence the growth of alfalfa.  With the study over, the question became what to do with all that data.

That concern prompted Volenec to be one of the first users of PURR.  “It’s unlikely to be done anytime soon by anyone else so we thought this type of data ought to be preserved,” Volenec says. “It was bought mainly with tax dollars. The data, the numbers, belong to the people.”

Datasets are archived for a minimum of ten years, after which time they are managed as a collection of the university’s libraries.  PURR was designed to implement open standards and best practices such as the ISO 16363 certification of trustworthy digital repositories, for which an audit process is currently underway.

PURR was jointly developed by the Purdue Libraries, the Office of the Vice President for Research, and Information Technology at Purdue.  The service is based on HUBzero™, which was also developed at Purdue.

For more information about PURR, contact Matthews at 49-62770 or courtneyearlmatthews@purdue.edu, or visit http://purr.purdue.edu.

Libraries launches redesigned website

January 8th, 2013

A Better Way to Build Celebrates the Legacy of Charles Pankow

January 3rd, 2013

As a pioneer in innovative uses of concrete, Purdue civil engineer Charles Pankow shaped the development of the modern construction industry and the landscape of 20^th century America. His philanthropy also continues to advance Purdue, impacting professors and students throughout the university via the support of the Charles Pankow Foundation. 2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the Pankow Companies and the Libraries are marking this with an online exhibition that showcases the donation of Pankow papers and oral histories to the growing civil engineering collection and a companion book, A Better Way to Build, published under the Purdue University Press imprint as a hardback print and e-book edition.