Seminaire Bourbaki

The Séminaire Nicolas Bourbaki (Bourbaki Seminar) is a series of seminars  (in fact public lectures with printed notes distributed) that has been held in Paris since 1948. It is one of the major institutions of contemporary mathematics, and a barometer of mathematical achievement, fashion, and reputation. It is named after Nicolas Bourbaki, a group of French and other mathematicians of variable membership. (Wikipedia)

The proceedings of the Séminaire have been published by four different publishers over the years.
1948/49 through 1964/65 were published as Textes des conférences / Séminaire Bourbaki  by the Secrétariat Mathématique, Université Paris. Call number is QA1 .P325  Fondren owns all of these volumes, from V. 1(1948/1949) -v. 19 (1966/1967) They are all housed in the Library Service Center.
In 1966, W. A. Benjamin, Inc. issued a special twelve-volume facsimile reproduction of the Séminaire Bourbaki, 1948-1965. Review: JSTOR. W.A. Benjamin, Inc. continued to publish the proceedings for three more years, 1965/66 through 1967/68. Call number is QA1 .P32.

1968/69 through 1980/81 were published by Springer-Verlag as part of Lecture Notes in Mathematics series.
Call number is QA3 .L38.  We have 1964 to present in SpringerLINK Lecture Notes in Mathematics Shelved under: QA3.L28.

1981/82 to date are published by the Société Mathématique de France as part of Astérisque. Call number is QA1 .S47. You must SEARCH UNDER INDIVIDUAL AUTHOR/TITLE FOR SOME ITEMS IN THIS SERIES.

The series is also available online from Numdam from V.11-V. 44. Fondren Library has ordered online access for the earlier years, which are slated to become available in 2010.

INDEXES:
There is a cumulative author index in the back of some volumes of the proceedings.  The index gives reference to the year and the Exposé number. There is a nice table available from the Ohio State Library.

Google Books

I am not going to discuss the settlement, but do want to think about how GoogleBooks changes the process for telephone reference. I got a telephone reference call today, and the user wanted to know if we had a certain book. My usual process is to check the library catalog, and then, if we don’t have the book, to look into Worldcat to see if another local library owns it. In this case, it was owned by a local library, and that was the end of the search. But is it? If I’m looking for an article, I often continue on to Google, and search, just to see if we might find a copy lingering out on the web on someone’s cv or institutional repository. But I don’t do that with books. Until now.  My interlibrary loan director had talked recently about a soon to be published article by Barbara Coopey, Assistant Head of Access Services, Penn State University built upon the poster session, “Utilizing Google Books to Fulfill Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Requests.”  So, this popped into my mind–I NEED to check Googlebooks. And it was there, or at least almost all of it, except the first 38 pages.  It is really quite extraordinary. And lifechanging.

Libguides

Fondren Library has been hard at work doing new Libguides: one stop for finding resources about a certain topic. Study Abroad is the latest one. Also, take a look at Mobile Resources, Astronomy, and Rice Ph.D. Students & Post Docs. We are working on a new one for Student Leadership resources. Have an idea for one? Let me know!

ipadio

ipadio “allows you to broadcast from any phone to the Internet live.  Phone blog, collect audio data, record and update the world, or simply let your mates know what you’re doing – ipadio is integrated with Social Media & Blogging platforms. (pat pend GB0820862.1)” This is currently a free tool.  You can place a call to the iPadio number from your cell or desktop phone, record an audio post, and have it immediately show up on your blog, wiki, or other website (without having to copy and paste embed code.) I see tremendous classroom applications for this–students could call and leave posts for other students. Professors could post research questions. What else?

Librarian of the future…

Dave Winer (father of the RSS feed), wrote over on Rebooting the News “In the future everyone can be a journalist, and the people who will be most valuable are those who are experts in areas outside journalism. That means, to me, that everyone should get a basic journalism education, in the same way it’s a good idea for us to take a semester of math, English lit, chemistry or physics. ”

I was the editor of my school paper long ago, and that taught me to be able to go to the school principal and ask him questions, and expect answers.  Students and faculty need to nurture their  inner librarian: Understand the role of information in a society. Organize and tag information in such a way that retrieval for you and others is easy in the future. Understand how to find, evaluate and use information effectively.
I do think higher education is going through a huge assessment period right now–I can’t wait to see how it evolves on a global scale.

Rankings of University Departments

With budgets being watched, everyone is starting to look at rankings, and department spending, etc. I had the occasion to do a little work on looking at rankings the last couple of weeks, and got some great feedback from the Physics, Math, Astronomy Librarians of SLA. Thought I would share.

U.S. News and World Reports,  2011 edition is doing new peer-assessment-only rankings for Ph.D. programs in biology, chemistry, computer science, earth sciences (geosciences), mathematics, physics, and statistics.

The last big U.S. News and World ranking of doctoral programs in the sciences are based on the results of surveys sent to academics in computer science, mathematics, and physics. It was done during the fall of 2007. It is unfortunate that the rankings do not seem to be available in any vendor databases–they are on the microfilm for U.S. News, if you know when to look. (Kind of like knowing that the new Journal of Citation Reports comes out in June!) The methodology is explained here. Response rates ranged from 21% to 48%.

AMS also publishes an annual survey: 
http://www.ams.org/employment/surveyreports.html

http://www.arwu.org/#
2009 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). The rankings identify the leading 500 universities around the world and are widely referenced by the global university community. Since its first release in June 2003, ARWU has generated a global following for its transparent and consistent ranking methodology.

Another source for world-view rankings:
http://www.globaluniversitiesranking.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontpage&Itemid=65
(K.K.)

I will be doing a search of the literature to find more rankings systems.

Thanks to Garrett Eastman, Carol Hutchins, and Molly White.