November 18, 2009
Category: publishing • scholarly communication
It seems like there was nothing new from the established publishers for a while - nothing with their core business. Some experimented with ways to communicate and most updated content management systems, but it seemed like most weren't touching their standard models. PLOS' experiments met with raised eyebrows and skepticism, but now, looks like others are taking notice and finally starting to experiment in their core business.
I already commented on Nature starting up a quick turnaround journal - ok, new product offerings aren't that exciting except for this is new for Nature.
What seems much more cool is ASM (the microbiology people, not the materials science people) are now introducing a quick turnaround journal and encouraging open access. This post on Jonathan Eisen's blog has some back and forth with the editors.
EOS from AGU is experimenting with open peer review (not the first in their field)
All this is pretty healthy, I think. Let's see where it goes.
In light of giving people credit - EMBO is decreasing their 2010 prices to take into account the percentage of articles that are published open access. Springer promised to do this when the % of OA was at a certain level, but I think this is the first one I've heard that is actually doing it
Posted by Christina Pikas at 10:15 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: librarians
Let me start by quoting an e-mail Dawn Pointer McCleskey sent to the SLA-DC listserv today (I have her permission). This is in reply to an e-mail from a younger member who mentioned how teachers and nurses have reclaimed their place and have formed very active and well-respected communities without giving up their identities. (I paraphrase - unfortunately, the listserv requires you to login to see the thread)
...the younger members of SLA are definitely here, though I wasn't able to make it to the town hall meeting because I was at ASIS&T that week.
Your point about nurses and teachers are important, and it prompts me to offer a personal testimonial on the pros and cons of using the librar* words that have been put forth.
When, eight years ago, I realized I am hard-wired to be a librarian, friends of mine were distressed. "You're going to be a LIBRARIAN?" one asked, with obvious disdain in her voice. Another friend consulted her mother, asking why her closest friends, cool, smart, and forward-looking young women, were all selling themselves so short in their career choices. I was choosing librarianship, another nursing, and the other teaching - pink collar jobs, all around.
The response of my friend's mother was,
'the real question needs to be, why are professions that have been traditionally chosen by women valued so little?'
I feel there's a significant measure of second-wave/third-wave-feminism conflict at play in this name-change debate. In the 70's and 80's, second-wave feminists preached that in order to be considered the equals of men, women should put away un/under-valued feminine and womanly traits and choices. But now that we've lived with 30+ years of trying to be both men and women at the same time, we see more women saying "don't tell me what I can't do" to both men and older feminists - including making choices that are viewed as traditionally feminine, while asserting the inherent worth of those choices.
I see the librar* term debate through this lens. There were several arguments from leadership, made to the Solos list and elsewhere, that essentially stated we must think narrowly of ourselves to be unexcited about ditching our heritage. I have every right to choose librarianship as a career worthy of my energy, time, and brain power - it's the right one for me, it's how I think, and I don't even really work with a physical collection (though I have one). But here I've got second-wave era association leaders telling me that c-suite (i.e., their same age group) people think we still need to hide or deny the under-valued option, "the L word", and that they agree; that it's no use trying to redefine and revalue the field in decision-makers' eyes.
What?
What's an early-career feminist librarian to do? As [..] pointed out, we've seen significant success in the other pink collar fields of teaching and nursing. I'm also thinking about the 100th monkey - we won't have to do the major campaigning forever, because eventually it will be the common perception. There's no easy answer, but in the meantime, I can't wait to see how the vote turns out.
Best regards,
Dawn
Responses to this trotted out anecdotes about how librarians who were managers of big divisions were paid less if their titles included libr* than their marketing and IT counterparts. How women are paid less than men. Um. Yeah. The gender gap... heard of it? Men make more than women in the same jobs. IT people make more than librarians in similar roles, even if the librarians (male or female) have multiple graduate degrees. (hey all I have to do is look around the house to find evidence for this rule).
However, will changing the name of our professional association send the message that we want equal pay for equal work? Will it tell "the man" that we are valuable and that we make great contributions to the organization? Yes, it does help that the association markets on our behalf and sponsors studies and surveys. It's even more helpful when the association helps us learn how to add more value and to communicate that value.
I don't agree that changing the name of our profession or of our society addresses any of these issues. I'm proud to be a librarian, one of thousands of amazing men and women who connect people of all ages to information. I want to associate with other librarians.
Posted by Christina Pikas at 8:32 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 17, 2009
Category: Off Topic
I got back from the SLA conference last June to the whole lab in a crisis. It passed and in e-mail, I got a notice that my SLA renewal was over due. Which is funny because I routed all the paperwork at the same time as my conference registration paperwork (we have an office that processes all of our society memberships). So then I dug, and dug, and dug, and dug... and didn't find that I still had a print/signed copy of my registration renewal form. I found it saved on my hard drive and printed it out and put it on the pile... closed the library down... moved offices... thought about it...
So, heh, embarrassingly, I can't renew now and vote in the name election. I could renew now anyway, but I think I'll wait and see what the outcome is. If the new name passes, I'm not going to renew. If it fails to pass, I'll renew.
I just hate paperwork!
If you can vote, and haven't yet, you might want to read David Shumaker's comments. I think they're right on. I'm EXTREMELY tired of this conversation and will be so happy when it's over. That is, if the new name doesn't pass.
If it does, well, I'll have to see which divisions will let me stay on their listservs anyway.
Posted by Christina Pikas at 7:06 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 15, 2009
Category: Off Topic
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/2009/11/sunday-secrets_15.html
via Andrew on FriendFeed.
(don't sue me, I'm just the messenger!)
Even if it isn't true, it's sort of funny and now all I can see is my kitchen sink strainer (not a toilet).
Posted by Christina Pikas at 11:19 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 14, 2009
Category: Conferences
Thursday was a half day covering first the cyberinfrastructure and then some discussions of another system that can provide lessons learned to the RSN (reminder: regional scale nodes, the long cabled sensors).
My notes are (of course) at work, but I'll reconstruct some of what I heard. I would recommend interested folks consult the final design document (oh no! it isn't where I found it the other day).
The CI is pretty complicated - in many places it's closer to the cutting edge of science than other parts of the enterprise. The complications include: openness, interactivity, quantities of lots of different types of data, desired latency (or lack thereof), etc. It has to support operation and maintenance of the physical equipment (marine operations), interactive control of some of the devices (particularly gliders and AUVs but other things, too), serving up the data which may include HD video in real time, maintaining provenance in several ways including by keeping level 0 and level 1 data, long term archiving of data, creating a social community around the data to support collaboration among scientists from lots of different disciplines, and finally, supporting education and public engagement.
Their slides will be up in the next week, so you'll see more about the various packages, how they are going to use messaging and cloud computing and more about their network from those.
I'm pasting their topology below, I hope this isn't a problem, if it is, I'll pull it down immediately (e-mail me).
There was a presentation after that by a member of the MARS (Monterey Accelerated Research System) team at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). MARS is a testbed that supports projects coming out and hooking into a node that is very similar to the ones that will be on the RSN and testing everything from staging to deployment to getting data. They don't have the full cyber infrastructure set up, though. They do have a test tank to practice in before you go out to the site. They have a lot of lessons learned for anyone who is designing sensors for this type of application.
So this was a pretty neat workshop. I'm not sure I got out of it what I was supposed to for work, but I enjoyed it anyway.
Posted by Christina Pikas at 10:36 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 11, 2009
Category: Conferences
And now for something completely different :) I am attending the Ocean Observatories Initiative Science Workshop in Baltimore. Today was the first day and there's a half day tomorrow. OOI is big science in its purest form. It's multi-decade, multi-hundred million dollar facility for studying the ocean. In Europe, they have ESONET and in Japan, they have lots of similar projects, but DONET is probably the most similar. Canada has NEPTUNE.
There are several parts to this thing: regional scale nodes (RSN), global scale nodes (GSN), coastal nodes, cyberinfrastructure (CI), and education/public engagement (EPE). The next 5 years are about building the infrastructure, and then the implementing organizations will operate and maintain the system for 2 years after that. The system is expected to be in service for 25-30 years. Some data might start coming out in 2012 or 2013, but the actual commissioning dates are later. All the data will be freely available in real time or as soon as possible. The implementing organizations are all selected with the exception of EPE. There will be an intent to intend to intend to intend something or other in December, and then a bidders' conference, and then an award next spring.
The workshop has been pretty cool so far. They started with some program overviews, info about the NSF, and program management stuff. You'd think the program management stuff would be boring, but holy cow look at all of the moving parts! The science requirements for this thing have been developed over the past 10 years and then there are regular programmatic requirements as well as special ones since they applied recovery act money. So it's a big deal to make sure the design and build all meet the requirements and that they get done on time and on budget.
Next, they talked about research opportunities (in very general terms) and education/public engagement. Since the EPE thing hasn't been awarded yet, and at this stage it's infrastructure, not specific education programs that was somewhat short. Interestingly, the audiences they've identified are not the typical "k to gray" but only post-secondary and what the speaker called "free choice learning." I guess that's because of the types of data that will be coming out.
The sessions the rest of the day were even neater. They were on "science drivers and design" - one on coastal, one on regional, one on high latitude, and then the final on linking global to local science. Of course some of these were better than others - the best were like the best NOVA or Discovery channel show, but with more meat! The regional scale node is up off of Washington state on the Juan de Fuca plate. It will be cabled, so there will be lots of power and lots of bandwidth lots of kilometers from the shore and maybe as deep as a few thousand meters at the end. The speakers mentioned some things that can be done there with that.
Coastal was also kind of cool. They'll have these moored buoys that can make their own power at the top using wind and solar as well as communicate via satellite and acoustically to AUVs and to gliders. The speaker spent some time talking about the coastal shelf and why it's a neat place to study. Fascinating.
High latitude (someone in the audience complained that it's not really all that high and that there's a program issue at NSF with handoffs between Polar programs and Ocean programs - but anyway) gave a lot of really good reasons these spots were selected. I had wondered because I didn't know what Irminger Sea and the Argentinean Basin had in common. Now's the time when I should tell you some really good science. Alas, I've probably forgotten most of it. Sediment deposits. Wild currents. Um....
One of the PIs made a big deal about how their field was all expeditionary, then satellite was accepted gradually, but that this is a whole new way of doing this type of science. Interesting.
Tomorrow there's more on the cyber bit. If you're thinking about asking for money it seems like their answer was to do workshops first. So do workshops.
Posted by Christina Pikas at 7:12 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 8, 2009
Category: Information Science
How do you balance robust enterprise IT services with computer science as a research area?
This post has been floating around in my head for a while - I even had this started but lost the draft in a tragic overnight OIT loaner laptop reboot. I can't actually answer this question, and trying to has left this draft in my queue for way too long. So this is really some thoughts and more questions.
In a research organization that does CS research, you'll still have an IT department to keep the lights on, so to speak. They run the network, set up new machines, and all of the other typical things. So you have a series of conflicts at lots of different levels. The CS researchers know how to administrate their own machines and also don't like a lot of imposed security things even if they are needed to keep the organization as a whole safe and, well, manageable. Uniformity is much easier to manage.
IT is inherently conservative. The culture of 'no' and all that. For any new thing, there's a matter of deciding it's worth attention, then gathering requirements, then laying out a project plan, doing the project, testing, etc. Everything must have a return on investment. Have to baseline this, compare to peers, see what Gartner/Forrester/Burton Group thinks, talk to 3 different vendors. Then maybe in a couple of years a decision happens. It's easier for the CS people do things themselves, but they're supposed to be working on other things.
The CS folks are more inclined to just build it themselves, but once they've built it, they're not necessarily about the mundane maintenance. According to some of the things I've heard in some of the discussions of software tools for scientists, they often develop these elaborate tools without considering usability and then stop developing them at the prototype stage when the money runs out.
some of the issues:
- proof of concept vs. robust enterprise
- functional vs. standards compliant
- something cool and then move on vs. ongoing support and development
I give up trying to perfect this post, maybe I'll add more later.
Posted by Christina Pikas at 8:01 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category:
There's a nice rebuttal of the Sirsi Dynix anti-open source white paper done by Mark Leggott that just came out (I found it via Jason Griffey). More thoughtful than some.
There are so many misconceptions on both sides of this. First, open source is not free. You do need people to install and maintain it and maybe customize it. Some open source projects have less documentation than others.
On the other hand, what's worse is when you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a large software product only to then have to pay more and more and more and more to buy additional modules, customizations, training, support, upgrades....
At least if you have some good programmers on staff you can fix the open source yourself.
Migrating a large database or content management system to another is always a hassle. That has nothing to do with whether its open source or not.
Posted by Christina Pikas at 7:35 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 3, 2009
Category: Information Science • finding information
One of the great things about my interests overlapping computer science is that computer scientists believe in self archiving and making their work freely available on the web. The scientometric parts of IS are that way, too, but the L of the LIS... well, that's just sad (except for Dorothea, her stuff is available). I still hope to write a review of one of these books because I'm really enjoying it. Here are a few:
- Hearst, Marti (2009). Search User Interfaces. Cambridge University Press. Available from: http://searchuserinterfaces.com/book/.
Sure there are lots of books on information retrieval, search engines, interface design, and information architecture. This book is about designing the interaction required for good searching. There is more to it. I'm about a third the way through reading this book and it's excellent so far. She cites references for each point she makes and that makes me happy. I actually plan to buy a print copy at some point although it's really cool how you can mouseover the citations in the online version and it shows you the whole citation - you don't have to click to the bottom of the page or click through. - Easley, David and Kleinberg, Jon (in press) Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World. Cambridge University Press. Available from: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/ (in pdf per chapter or entire book).
You might say, oh another book on networks, sigh, but Kleinberg is a leader in that area and this book grew out of a course he's taught up there. I'm not as familiar with the markets part so I plan to browse those sections. - Manning,Christopher D., Raghavan, Prabhakar, and Schütze,Hinrich(2008) Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge University Press. Available from: http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/information-retrieval-book.html
One kind of cool thing about this site is that the authors have continued to update the book as they go. In that way, it might even be better than the print book.This is sort of a standard book on information retrieval. I've read maybe 6 chapters from it. Some are easier to understand than others. - Allen, Robert B. (in press) Information: A Fundamental Construct. Available from http://www.cis.drexel.edu/faculty/ballen/ISS/index.html
This book is new to me, but I enjoyed my class with Dr. Allen and I think there's a need for a general intro to LIS book.
Note: I had this post 90% done a few weeks ago - but my computer died.
Posted by Christina Pikas at 8:49 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Christina K. Pikas is a science and engineering librarian in a special library as well as a doctoral student in information studies.
