Week 6: the last

We've looked at a lot of different ways to find information on topics and we've had occasion to look at ways to explore literatures, to conceptualize the day-to-day work of science, to develop personal comprehension. The process will change in its details as new databases become available and new search tools evolve, but it's always fundamentally a mental activity.

Today I want to tie up a few loose ends and explore a few areas that aren't necessarily of use for your topics but might be worth knowing about for other work that you do at W&L and after.

Some efforts to organize web resources:

Biosciences (from the WWW Virtual Library)

Journals, Conferences, and Current Awareness Services
Pedro's Biomolecular Research Tools
Presenting the tip of the journal iceberg: we've seen that many scientific journals have electronic editions, and that's clearly the wave of the future. What problems does this solve? And what problems does it create?

Electronic Journals

USENET: still relevant?

BioSci --access to many newsgroups
(this interactive medium seems to be in decline. Interesting to speculate about why) (need to look at FAQs) (searchable archive)

Virtual courses on the web
MIT Biology Hypertextbook
Some more specifically medical sites:
Search the Virtual Hospital

Diseases, Disorders and Related Topics from the Karolinska Institute (worth the wait)

Emerging Infectious Diseases from CDC

Alzheimer Web

Ebola Virus

my own exploration of prions (Winter 1997), and some additions in November 1997

Another thing we could look at is a real-life problem from Bio182: one person is working on "somatic cell cloning" and has had difficulty finding primary literature. What can we do about that?