November 2009

Midnight hours start Dec 1

The Library's midnight hours start on Tuesday, December 1st, with the Library open until MIDNIGHT on the evenings it would normally close at 10 p.m. The Fall 2009 end-of-semester extended hours are in effect from Tuesday, December 1st through Wednesday, December 16th. Midnight days/dates are:

Tuesday-Thursday | December 1 - December 3 | 8a.m.-midnight

Sunday | December 6 | 2p.m.-midnight

Monday-Thursday | December 7 - December 10 | 8a.m.-midnight

Sunday | December 13 | 2p.m.-midnight

Monday-Wednesday | December 14- December 16 | 8a.m.-midnight

Household products safety

The Household Products Database provides health effects and safe handling information about common household products -- for consumers. What about that shampoo you're using? or the ink for your printer? the flea/tick control for your dog? This free database, provided by the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, can be searched or browsed by product, manufacturer, ingredient, or health effect. For each product, the database lists/describes any acute health effects, chronic health effects, and carcinogenicity (potential to cause cancer); provides handling/disposal information; and gives a list of ingredients with each ingredient linked to additional chemical and related information.

The information in the database comes from Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) that companies are required to compile so that employees know the hazards to which they are regularly exposed, so that employers can assure safe handling and storage, and so that emergency personnel can control and respond to hazardous situations.

However, consumers are not always exposed to the same risk as employees. Some products, especially personal care products like shampoo and deodorant, ARE used daily by consumers. However, the consumer who is painting a room once a year is not affected by risk in the same way as someone who paints every day at work or who works in a factory that makes paint. While this needs to be kept in mind while using the database, the Household Products Database is a great way to be informed about safety and handling of the products we take for granted and often handle carelessly.

Google Scholar goofiness

Google Scholar is not a research database but people use it because it appears to provide the ease of "one-box" searching while producing scholarly results. Unfortunately, it lacks the most basic quality control found in research databases, so do be aware of its limitations when you use it.

To see it's goofiness revealed, go to the advanced search screen in Google Scholar, enter search term(s), and then set date limits of 2011-2025. Of course, there shouldn't be any items for those dates yet, but you will get results. Browsing your results will reveal several problems:

1. Google searchbots look for numbers that look like years, but the searchbots will select numbers that have nothing to do with the date the item was published. These date mistakes are obvious when using the ridiculous publication dates as search limits, but the ridiculous results demonstrate that date range limiting in Google Scholar is hazardous.

2. Author names are frequently incorrect, because the searchbots can't truly recognize names and Google doesn't provide quality control to find and correct the errors. For example, do a search for bullying and limit to 2011-2025. Scan down the results and see Google's attempt to identify the authors names -- K. Theme, GI Procedures, D Learning, P Steer, etc. Among the first 10 results, only one correctly identifies an author.

3. Only one of the results in the search on bullying is scholarly.

Most of the time, you won't be aware of these problematic results, because Google Scholar will display at the top of its results list the items from known scholarly publishers such as Science Direct, etc., where the quality and consistency of publisher data makes it possible for Google to mine the data more accurately. Given that most people scan the early screens and never reach item 15,000 or item 30,000, they will see more accurate authorship and mostly scholarly items.

Library research databases structure the information about articles. That makes it possible to refine searching accurately by date, author, title, source, etc. in order to produce more focused search results than are possible in Google or Google Scholar.