I'm also leaving ScienceBlogs, but it's not for the reasons some others have given. I don't think Pepsi's blog will hurt my real life reputation and besides, it's been pulled, there have been apologies - it's time to forgive. July was the first month I've gotten enough hits to get a paycheck - and that's completely due to the BYU video - no one is more shocked than I about that. It's also not about the technical support - I mean, look at my old blog. Does it look like I use fancy tricks? Some of the tech support things are related to getting thousands of comments, which I don't. Of course I…
This APS rocks! Here's the press release from PAMnet: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE APS ONLINE JOURNALS AVAILABLE FREE IN U.S. PUBLIC LIBRARIES Ridge, NY, 28 July 2010: The American Physical Society (APS) announces a new public access initiative that will give readers and researchers in public libraries in the United States full use of all online APS journals, from the most recent articles back to the first issue in 1893, a collection including over 400,000 scientific research papers. APS will provide this access at no cost to participating public libraries, as a contribution to public engagement…
He was also my husband's uncle. I only found two of his images online, the remainder are photographs of prints we have on our walls - intentionally poor quality for those. He was a member of the Lyme Art Association, so there may be more information on their site.  The Courant (Hartford, CT) had this bit about him announcing a showing: The LAA Elected Artist first studied art in Hanover, Germany, while in the Lysenko refugee camp from 1945 to 1949 with Ivan Kubarsky (Armashevsky), Vasyl Perebyinis, Volodymyr Balas, Anatol Jabonsky and others. In 1949, Pater immigrated to the United States.…
The authors thesis is that the only mandatory communication of results is in peer reviewed journal articles. Scientists aren't required to do other communicating and often leave communication to the public to the media. They ask if is this is adequate given the very low percentage of scientific articles that ever make it into the press, particularly in areas outside of health and medicine, and also given the fact that for everyone out of formal education, the media is their primary source of science education. Recent studies do show that scientists often don't mind talking to reporters and do…
So there I was, try all kinds of librarian ninja tricks on the fanciest, most expensive research databases money can buy (SciFinder, Reaxys, Inspec...) and no joy. Couldn't find what I needed. I'm perfectly willing to admit that I don't know all that much chemistry, but usually I do ok since I work with one chemist quite a bit. Finally I gave up and googled it. After a few tries, I found way down in the results an article about something else (like I needed a chemical in an aqueous solution and it had the chemical in alcohol), but the snippet drew my eye. Sure enough - had a table with my…
in Geneva. This is the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval. Besides the academic types, this huge conference pulls a lot from the search engine industry and thereâs a lot of interesting stuff. The twitter tag is #sigir2010 and thereâs some bloggy coverage. (heh, todayâs keynote â is the Cranfield paradigm outdated â um, yes, if it was ever dated!). Danield Tunkelang is blogging (I think heâs at Google now).  A search on Google blog search yields a few more.
This article is in early view at JASIST. It looks like it comes from the author's dissertation. It isn't terribly earth-shattering, but it's well done, it provides more evidence, and there are definitely some implications for library/IR manager practice. Here's the citation: Kim, J. (2010). Faculty self-archiving: Motivations and barriers Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology DOI: 10.1002/asi.21336 The author went through a complicated process to identify 1,500 faculty members at 17 research institutions with DSpace IRs (not immediately clear why only DSpace…
The comments made last night weren't showing up - I think I've fixed that now. Sorry for any inconvenience!
And why we should care. Gary Price of the Resource Shelf pointed to a news story today, that Ebsco has acquired two more research databases: Criminal Justice Abstracts and Communications Abstracts. For those of you who haven't been following, Ebsco has recently acquired Ageline (it is now not available for free), NetLibrary, research databases from OCLC, The Music Index Online, World Textiles, ExPub (ChemExpert)... oh and exclusive rights to some magazines. What we can expect from this is that those other databases will no longer be available on multiple platforms. Folks who aren't librarians…
Via Jason P on friendfeed BTW - the Old Spice videos over the last couple of days were an amazing marketing feat. To create that kind of buzz. See more on Read/Write Web.
The announcement is dated January 6, 2010, but the report itself is dated July 2010. In any case it's new to me, so I thought I would run through some interesting points. Here's the citation (as much as I can tell): Proctor,R., Williams,R. & Stewart, J. (2010). If you build it, will they come? How researchers perceive and use web 2.0. London: Research Information Network. Retrieved July 6, 2010 from http://www.rin.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/web_2.0_screen.pdf It often seems like people are very negative about the adoption of web 2.0 stuff in science; that is, when they're not hyping…
One of the anti-PLOSone arguments is that its acceptance rate is too high at about 70%. Since I had my RK Merton compendium open to this article, I thought I would quote some bits to backup my argument that the anti-PLOSone folks are completely full of crap on this point.  Here's the citation: Zuckerman, H., & Merton, R. K. (1971). Patterns of Evaluation in Science: Institutionalization, Structure and Functions of the Referee System. Minerva, 9(1), 66-100. (I believe this might be in JSTOR if you're at an academic institution, but it's also reprinted in Merton, R. K. (1973). The sociology…
  How do zombies seek and use information?  What are their information needs? Their information needs primarily consist of finding brains. They pretty much search by geographic proximity and pattern matching. The type of browsing they do doesn't seem to be well supported by information systems.   How should a reference interview with a Zombie go?  No studies have been published on walk-up reference, but there are some ideas on doing phone or virtual reference. The zombies aren't really good with a mouse, so in virtual reference it's best to send images. In telephone reference, screaming doesn…
Iâm very late in reviewing this book and there are a lot of very detailed reviews, but I thought I could add bit about the recording. I have my own signed copy of the print, but with work and school stuff, I donât have time for personal reading.  I was very happy to notice that the audiobook had been added to my public libraryâs digital library. The book: Skloot, R. (2010). The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown Publishers. Find in your library: http://www.worldcat.org/title/immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks/oclc/326529053 The audio version is available on CD and also via…
Nick Carr, quoted by the Readablity folks here, talks about hyperlinks as distractions - part of how the web screws up our brains. I was just browsing (couldn't possibly read this one from cover to cover) Nentwich (2003) and ran across the section, "Better match of traditional reading habits". In this portion of the book, the author is talking about the impacts of ICTs, specifically hyperlinked texts, in how scientists deal with information. I'll now quote directly from page 297: It is a truism that academics seldom read articles (not to speak about books from the first to the last paragraph…
Yet again someone said to me in a meeting: librarians don't like web 2.0, they always push back against it. Ok, so this clearly doesn't describe all of the librarians I hang out with online or any of the ones I work with. My guess is that there are two things that really spawned this. The whole don't-use-wikipedia thing and the whole controlled vocabulary rules thing. I've described well-meant but overly simplistic heuristics some educators used to teach about evaluating web sites. Along with those, there's typically and outright ban on Wikipedia. The truth is that there is a lot of good and…
New book club, sounds really coolâ¦. but most importantly, the author has an MLS from Simmons!
Another brief observation. I was just reading a popular cooking/recipe magazine and they mentioned that the New York Board of Health did an "academic study" of the new nutrition labeling laws. ARGH. I don't like calling scientific research "academic study" because to me that implies: 1) it's academic - it's a pursuit for it's own sake or for increased knowledge, not for evaluation or application, 2) only scientists in academe do studies, 3) the results might not be accessible for the public. I ran into this at work and I tried to stamp it out because the vast majority of the work we support…
Just about everyone coming back from the business meeting commented on the dire shape of the association's financials. First, times are tough everywhere and association memberships are down across the board. Librarians are being furloughed so there's no extra money there to pay for expenses if their organizations can't. Second, there's an elephant in the room that no one is mentioning in regards to membership renewals and meeting attendance: some of us haven't gotten over the name change vote and how disaffected we feel as a result of the entire mess. This isn't the reason I didn't go. I did…
Besides watching this like the finals of Olympic hockey, I've been seriously impressed with the thoughtful and insightful commentary from a huge bunch of my libr* online contacts. Interesting stuff, too, from scientists and other folks interested in scholarly communication. About the confidentiality of the discussions.... Walt Crawford reminds us of various freedom of information requests and state laws in California that essentially mean that the terms of the final agreement won't be confidential Beth Brown thinks that this can only help with transparency in the future - which would be a…