UNT briefs

Conference speaker to discuss transportation

The University of North Texas is holding the 50th annual Alumni and Student Conference for the Master of Public Administration program at Apogee Stadium at noon Friday.

Bill Meadows, member of the Texas Transportation Commission, will be speaking about past and future transportation projects and challenges across North Texas.

Mean Green go green for national program

RecycleMania, an eight-week competition among colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and Canada, is in full swing at the University of North Texas.

Each week during the competition, which runs Feb. 5 to March 31, the amount of recyclable materials that has been collected is reported and a new ranking is released. Overall winners will be announced at the end of the contest.

Students, faculty and staff are invited to participate. UNT has taken part in the program for the past four years. This year, the university is competing in the categories of Grand Champion (largest recycling rate), Per Capita Classic (largest amount recycled per person), Waste Minimization (lowest amount of total waste per person), Gorilla Prize (highest tonnage of recycled waste) and Targeted Materials (paper, aluminum, cardboard and plastic).

Last year, 630 schools participated to divert 91 million pounds of waste from landfills. This year, 552 schools are competing.

For more information, visit www.sustainable.unt.edu .

Emerald Ball focuses on sustainable options

The sold-out 2012 Emerald Ball will celebrate UNT’s commitment to sustainability by working with local vendors, using recycled materials and serving seasonal cuisine in the Platinum LEED-certified Apogee Stadium.

“The Emerald Ball Goes Green” is set for Saturday at the new stadium, which opened last fall at 1251 S. Bonnie Brae St. The event will include cocktails at 6 p.m. and a seated dinner at 7 p.m.

The annual event supports UNT’s Emerald Eagle Scholars program, which provides tuition and fees, as well as mentoring, to academically talented students with high financial need. The students come from families with annual incomes of $40,000 or less. Since its inception, the program has allowed more than 2,400 students to realize their dream of attending college.

Sustainable aspects to this year’s event will include the recycling of all waste generated at the event; the use of local vendors and caterers preparing seasonal cuisine; reusable glass, silverware and centerpieces; recyclable table linens; and invitations printed on biodegradable, recyclable paper containing no metals.

More than 30 individuals, organizations and corporations are sponsoring this year’s ball.

For more information, contact Meredith Dickenson at 940-369-7361 or meredith.dickenson@unt.edu .

UNT Libraries achieves top-20 ranking on list

UNT Libraries has been ranked among the top 20 institutional digital repositories in the world in the latest “Ranking Web of World Depositories” list released by the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group of the Spanish National Research Council.

The list includes universities as well as repositories maintained by laboratories and centers that are not part of a college or university.

UNT Libraries is also ranked ninth among 100 repositories in Canada and the U.S. The highest-ranked Texas university after UNT is Texas A&M University, which is ranked 29th.

The Spanish National Research Council’s main objective is to develop and promote research that will help bring about scientific and technological progress. The purpose of the ranking is to support open access initiatives — the free access to scientific publications in an electronic format and to other academic material.

The Cybermetrics Lab staff ranks only repositories with autonomous Web domains or subdomains, and excludes repositories consisting of only a few electronic journals, as well as repositories devoted only to non-scientific papers and archival material. The biannual rankings in January and July measure the global visibility and impact of digital repositories worldwide.

Repositories that fit the criteria for ranking, including those at universities in the U.S. and worldwide, are ranked according to the number of pages recorded from the four largest online search engines, the total number unique external links received by a site, the number of text files in Acrobat format extracted from Google and Yahoo, and the mean numbers of the total number of papers and more recently published papers.

The UNT Libraries’ Digital Library currently totals more than 60,765 unique items comprising 3.8 million files. The digital collections include the CyberCemetery, which houses accumulated information from defunct agency websites. The Digital Library also includes theses and dissertations, artwork, musical scores, government documents, journals and historical posters.

Because of its role in creating the CyberCemetery and other vital government-related digital collections, the UNT Libraries was named one of 10 affiliated archives of the National Archives and Records Administration.