Q:"I have searched and searched for the site you call "Biological
Abstracts" but I can't find anything. Could you please help me out with
an address?"
A: An address without a map is like the CaCaLand Fishing Gestapo Agent
without a clue. Both are absolutely worthless.
Sorry, I should have been more specific about some of these references. It
is not a website but a set of books listing scientific literature. Nearly
all universities and colleges, and most major public libraries, have housed
within their massive structures a "reference section," which includes books
such as Biological Abstracts, Current Contents, Medline, Dissertation
Abstracts, Science Citation Index, Zoological Abstracts, etc. These are
books that complile the references from current scientific literature and
arrange them in categories for easy searching, similar to the periodial
indexes you might have used back in high school. When I say "books," I'm
referring to thousands of them, some dating back to the turn of the
century. Lucky for us, some of these (at least the last 10 years or so)
are on CD, and you can use a computer to search for your stuff.
Some of these data bases can be accessed with your home computer, and if
you are a university student, you can ask your librarian how to do it.
Undoubtedly, you will have to use a password to get in. Your public
library may have a program, such as COIN, which also allows you access to
some of these reference search engines. Ask them how to do it. However,
I have found a cheat to search some of the data bases from home without
needing to use a password system to get it. It always doesn't work, but
sometimes it does, you just have to try and see for yourself. What you do
is go to the Library of Congress, at:
http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/gateway.html#lc
and search their archives. Since they house books and periodicals, you can
find almost anything that was in print, or is in print (they also have
music, photos, etc. A GREAT PLACE!!). However, on the same webpage, there
is a long list of university libraries from all over the world. These all
allow free access, and once there, many offer access to Medline or Science
Index type search engines. The ones that do seem to change each time I
try, so, no promises and you have to find it out for yourself.
Finally, I want to say that if research was easy, everyone would do it.
Its exhausting, frustrating, and time consuming. You can go to all the
computer disks you want, but some are not on disk, and most do not offer
the early stuff on disk, so you have to crack open lots of dusty old books
to find the references the old fashioned way. Once you *FIND* a reference,
that's only the easy half of the problem. Next you have to *GET* the
reference. Most libraries, even extremely good ones, only carry a small
number of the books and journals available, so you will have to get them
from the Interlibrary Loan people. Ask your librarian how to do that.
Remember to get a complete reference before asking, including the names of
the author(s), year of publication, name of book or journal, page numbers,
and titles. For books, add the publisher's name and place of publication.
As for photocopies and copyrights; you can pretty much copy any government
or state publication because it is in the public domain. You can copy book
sections and journal articles for personal schoolastic or research use,
but entire books still in copyright, or entire journals. Be careful; just
because it doesn't have a copyright mark doesn't mean it isn't copyrighted;
anything I publish on the FML is automatically copyrighted to me, and no
one can use it without my express permission. Same for you. As for
finding something cool, and wanting to let other people know, you cannot
redistribute copies to other people, sell them or include more than just
quoted passages in your own work, so stapling a paper into your newsletter
would violate copyright law. I forget which conservative Christian leader
got himself into deep caca when he photocopied an offensive cartoon from a
girlie magazine and sent it (I assume with appropirate censor marks) to
people, asking for contributions to an anti-porn fund. OOOOPS! He had to
pay big time on that one.
Regardless of what you might have been told, or even what you might
believe, excluding top secret weapon-type research, virtually ANYTHING ever
published in the scientific domain is available for reading and review.
And I mean anything, although you may have to travel to specific libraries
to view rare volumes. But it is there for the taking, mostly free of
charge or the cost of photocopies, for anyone who desires to learn from it.
Use it, and make your furbutt's lives better.
Bob C and 19 Mo' Referenced Polehounds
[Posted in FML issue 2618]
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