Library of Congress

About: Library of Congress is a archive organization based out in Washington D.C., District of Columbia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Cataloging & Metadata. The organization has 550 authors who have published 698 publications receiving 7114 citations. The organization is also known as: loc.gov & LC.

LSST: From Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

Abstract: We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the solar system, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a large, wide-field ground-based system designed to obtain repeated images covering the sky visible from Cerro Pachon in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg2 field of view, a 3.2-gigapixel camera, and six filters (ugrizy) covering the wavelength range 320–1050 nm. The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. About 90% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode that will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg2 region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 yr of operations and will yield a co-added map to r ~ 27.5. These data will result in databases including about 32 trillion observations of 20 billion galaxies and a similar number of stars, and they will serve the majority of the primary science programs. The remaining 10% of the observing time will be allocated to special projects such as Very Deep and Very Fast time domain surveys, whose details are currently under discussion. We illustrate how the LSST science drivers led to these choices of system parameters, and we describe the expected data products and their characteristics.

Disaster resilience: A national imperative

Abstract: Escalating disaster losses coupled with the increasing frequency of billion-dollar disaster events, such as the recent Hurricane Sandy, highlight some of the challenges to hazards and disaster poli...

Behind the Curve: Globalization and International Terrorism

Abstract: tween the evolving changes of globalization, the inherent weaknesses of the Arab region, and the inadequate American response to both ensures that terrorism will continue to be the most serious threat to U.S. and Western interests in the twenty-arst century. There has been little creative thinking, however, about how to confront the growing terrorist backlash that has been unleashed. Terrorism is a complicated, eclectic phenomenon, requiring a sophisticated strategy oriented toward inouencing its means and ends over the long term. Few members of the U.S. policymaking and academic communities, however, have the political capital, intellectual background, or inclination to work together to forge an effective, sustained response. Instead, the tendency has been to fall back on established bureaucratic mind-sets and prevailing theoretical paradigms that have little relevance for the changes in international security that became obvious after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. The current wave of international terrorism, characterized by unpredictable and unprecedented threats from nonstate actors, not only is a reaction to globalization but is facilitated by it; the U.S. response to this reality has been reactive and anachronistic. The combined focus of the United States on statecentric threats and its attempt to cast twenty-arst-century terrorism into familiar strategic terms avoids and often undermines effective responses to this nonstate phenomenon. The increasing threat of globalized terrorism must be met with oexible, multifaceted responses that deliberately and effectively exploit avenues of globalization in return; this, however, is not happening. Behind the Curve

A circulation analysis of print books and E-books in an academic research library

Abstract: In order for collection development librarians to justify the adoption of electronic books (e-books), they need to determine if e-books satisfy the information needs of patrons. One method to determine this is to measure e-book usage. This study compared the usage of 7,880 titles that were available in both print and e-book format at the Duke University Libraries. Although the results of this study cannot be generalized, it does provide information on the use of e-books in one academic research library and implications for e-book collection development.