PolyThinkers Pad

A wide selection of e-books at SpringerLink is now available for the Poly community to use on a trial basis through May 31st. SpringerLink offers journals and books in a variety of disciplines such as biomedicine, chemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics, computer science, humanities, and economics. Free access to tables of contents, detailed abstracts and editorial […]

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Do you ever need to find quick and comprehensive statistical data on a country?  Ever interested in comparing lesser known quantitative data from two or more countries?  Have a look at the Britannica Online World Data Analyst.  “Country Snapshots” provide the basic  data on a country.  “Ranked Statistics”  lets you view the countries with the […]

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Although the library focuses on science and technology resources, it has much more to offer eager readers: a selection of international literature, notable biographies, core classics of literature, works of genre fiction, and even contemporary international fiction. If you are in the mood to dabble in some short works of genre fiction, you may be […]

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You might be aware that there are thousands of copyright free books available online for reading. (If not, see this recent post.) There are even many open source journal sites (as mentioned in an earlier post) and open courseware pages  (mentioned in yet another another post). But did you know that there are some sites that allow you to read the full text of […]

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The movement towards Open Access (free, online access to scholarly works) received a big boost this week. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard voted unanimously to make their scholarly articles available online for free. The library will oversee a newly created Office of Scholarly Communication that will handle the project.
Visit […]

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Most people who know that the “Manhattan Project” was the code name for top secret US government efforts to develop the atomic bomb, probably associate the program solely with the Los Alamos desert facility.  In fact the name accurately identifies the location where much of the work was done.  There are many buildings in New York City that held […]

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In Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Professor Myles Jackson delves into a time when scientists were committed to understanding the world of music. In the nineteenth century, physicists, musical instrument makers, and performers tried to understand the nature of musical genius, the underlying physics of acoustics, and the instruments themselves. […]

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Open Access publishing continues to rise at an astronomical rate as researchers hope to maximize their impact by providing free access to their scholarly articles online. But all this newly available material does little good if you don’t know where to find it. Fortunately the good folks at Lund University in Sweden have […]

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Has the recent presentation by Dr. Jill Jonnes roused your curiosity about the author’s work? In addition to Conquering Gotham: A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels, mentioned in a prior post, the library owns:
South Bronx Rising: The rise, fall, and resurrection of an American city
Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, […]

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