Christina K. Pikas is a science and engineering librarian in a special library as well as a doctoral student in information studies.
I haven't been a great team player recently, so this post catches up on some things going on in the world recently. These are in no particular order.
- The USA Science and Engineering Festival is coming up in the Fall. ScienceBlogs is the official blogging partner and there’s a blog here to talk about the preparations. This is one reason why it’s cool to live near DC – I get to go and wave the flag. (hm. mpow should have some representation, too)
- 3/14 is fast approaching and there will be a pie bake off. My pies are notoriously tasty but ugly. Unfortunately, you’ll be judging them on looks not taste so I’ll see what I can do.
- Elsewhere, Nature Blogs has updated their platform – and it’s gorgeous!
- The National Academies have a communication award with serious cash as a prize. People interested in communicating science with the public should make some nominations.
- A couple of excellent conferences lately with video and slides posted on line. In particular, check out the Science Commons Symposium which was held in Redmond, Washington on February 20th.
- The new version of Mendeley is out with lots of cool updates. One of the neatest things is the collaborative pdf annotation with highlighting and sticky notes.
- There is a lot of discussion about ebooks now – this requires a post of its own – it’s not clear if there’s really anything new at all or if it’s just more of the same bemoaning discovery, use, DRM, platforms, etc. The Highwire survey(pdf) is an example. The CrossRef discussion on The Scholarly Kitchen is another.
