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.

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.

• 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.

Monitoring, Modeling, and Memory (II): Methods for the Study of Cyberinfrastructure (and Other Large Distributed Phenomena)

This is a pretty big project that stretches over maybe about 10 schools. Christine Borgman is a/the lead for it. David Ribes talked about his work with a large hydrology project. It was interesting how the technical support folks had to negotiate the needs of both engineers and scientists who had overlapping information sources but really had different goals fundamentally (typical engineering/science split).  David Fearon talked about how this distributed qualitative work is managed using nVivo (ew!). I've run across Andrea Wiggins' stuff before. She's using Taverna and myExperiment to manage cleaning and analysis of social science data on how free/open source software communities work. I guess she's also helping manage datasets and providing DOIs. S.L. Star talked in pretty abstract terms about how standards outsource morality. hm. There are value choices that are made in the development of standards, and then the standards are applied without explicitly revisiting these choices, I guess.

Kerk Kee's stuff was quite different - he's really pulling from a different literature: organizational communication. So his dissertation is on the development of these cyberinfrastructure projects and how structure develops through communication. Seems like the literature he cites is quite distinct from what the other folks cite.  His work and David Ribes' both point to some of the issues the computer scientists have. They must do what counts as research for their own career, they must do requirements engineering for multiple distinct and competing paradigms, and they must learn enough about the area of science to be able to talk to the other parties. Reminds me of some of what I read in Hine, C. (2006). Databases as scientific instruments and their role in the ordering of scientific work. Social Studies of Science, 36(2), 269-298. DOI:10.1177/0306312706054047 (see discussion here)

Some questions from the audience were even more interesting. One person complained that they need to go back to the tradition of ethnography by going and immersing yourself in a strange culture for months or a year before understanding it. The problem, as the panel answered, is that there is no "there" in physical space. There is no physical place to go in order to immerse yourself and find the culture. That's why there are lots of site visits, and meeting attendance, but there are also reviews of documents and online traces.

Another person asked about the role of the researcher and what if any quid pro quo can be offered? One panel member said that his participants/informants sort of had strange expectations of him: he was supposed to be telling them about their culture and be the representative social scientist. He thought that was weird, because he didn't really feel like it was his place. Borgman described lots of ways the information scientists on her team are actually contributing to the science projects by developing data sharing policies and helping to organize and provide access to project data and information. (Of course, folks in the audience without a LIS background might not be able to provide that same service)

I'm glad I went to the conference. It was nice to see some of these famous people in person and also to get some fabulous feedback on my presentation. It's in Tokyo next year so I don't plan to go.

I started out in: Scientific Practices in Research and in Learning: Cyberinfrastructure Meets Cyberlearning chaired by Christine Borgman from UCLA.  I came in a little late, during Curtis Wong’s demo of Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope – that thing is super cool. Seriously. It can display all sorts of data in layers and then link out to external information including stuff from ADS. After him, Alyssa Goodman of ADS talked more about how scientists use this. She made quite a few good points. She said something that came up in my talk: the fancy tools created specifically for scientists are totally unusable – as in usability-wise/hci-type, so the general purpose tools with good usability are pretty attractive. ADS helps astronomers find articles, and there are other tools to help with the data, so I guess her thing is that this will help link the data to other data and to the literature.

Next, I went to hear the NSF STS program managers talk. They gave out a lot of advice and tips, so if I’m ever in that boat, it might be useful.

The last regular session I went to was: Expanding the Vocabulary of Science Policy. This was pretty interesting, but clearly not about “vocabularies” per se. There were things on measuring intangibles and on the RAE and how it has caused adaptation in the departments – but not the same in the life sciences as the arts and humanities. Two other of the talks were on ethics and teaching ethics. Schienke from the Rock Institute (not, apparently, about geology) had this ethics framework that divided them into procedural, extrinsic (broader benefit to society), and intrinsic.

The day ended with a plenary, which was basically speeches read by some famous STS folks.

There were some real highlights of the day.  A couple of these were in talks in my session.

First:  Distributing Science: Architecture, Participation, and Boundary Work in Online Citizen Science Projects, presented by Ayse G. Buyuktur, University of Michigan.  This was pretty neat. They are looking at Galaxy Zoo, a protein folding game, and a weather thing and how these projects train the participants to view things like a scientist and how the participants form a community in the forums.

Second: Scientific Communication Cultures in Chemistry, presented by Theresa Velden, Cornell University. This presentation just covered the first analysis of their data, but it was pretty interesting.  They have done a bunch of interviews and field work at some physical chemistry and chemical physics labs involved in clusters and (... forget the other stuff). It turns out that the PIs of the labs involved in the creation of new materials are instructing the lab members not to share *any* details of their work for fear of getting scooped. That's not healthy.

My slides are below. I had some great comments from the audience.  This presentation is not my best work, but I've been a bit of a basket case in organizing any thoughts recently.

Siva Vaidhyanathan didn't show up to give the talk on Google and privacy. Someone read his paper, but that was less than satisfying.

A final highlight was: Where Are the Missing Wikipedians? The Sociology of a Bot by R. Stuart Geiger, Georgetown. Geiger is a Wikipedian and he looks at the work of the editors and administrators as well as the bots that are used by editors or that are somewhat autonomous. It's really pretty fascinating.

I'm going to show up way late this morning - it took me about an hour and a half to get there yesterday and then I was there from 8:20a-6:30p so I'm a bit tired. I'll probably get there for the second set of talks. I hope.

I hope to make it to the 8am session tomorrow because the session on quantitative applications of actor-network theory (ANT) has another speaker from Maryland's iSchool as well as N. Contractor from Northwestern (I discussed his book a few times in my comps preps posts) as well as L. Leydesdorff from Amsterdam (scientometrics person - I have discussed quite a few of his papers here).  Of course this session is up against one on analytic cultures in defense and intelligence and another on peer review with PM Edwards of North Carolina. (crap! why are there so many good concurrent sessions??). Nothing in the next time period looks like a must-attend, but we'll see. Then there's a session after that on: Practicing STS in the Federal Civilian and Military Sectors... hmmm. The end of tomorrow is my session, and I'm sure I'll be wiped out by then.

Friday also has a lot of good sessions, including one on LIS by a librarian from Virginia Tech: "Coping: Library Science, Information Science, and the Modal Transformation of Scholarship". That's competing with one on terrorism/counter-terrorism and one on using information technologies.

Saturday has sessions at the same time on datasets and on public engagement. Later, there are competing sessions on piracy and re-thinking military stuff given netcentricity (I'm paraphrasing). In the afternoon there's a session on electronic records - I probably should be interested in that, but probably won't attend.

The "dominant model" of popularization developed over the 20th century (maybe starting in the 19th), but it has become obvious from SSS research that it no longer adequately models reality, if it ever did [2,3, 4]. Some of the proponents of the dominant model are the scientists themselves. The dominant models makes some very large assumptions. Namely:

• scientists produce genuine knowledge and then it is dumbed down, translated, distorted, simplified, and polluted
• the public is ignorant -- essentially a blank slate
• the information flows one way -- scientist to public [5]
• scientists don't want to talk to the public, but they will if they have to to get funding [4].

But we understand now from Paul's study [4] and others cited by her that:

• popularization is a continuum
  • writing journal articles in general scholarly publications is a form a popularization
  • textbooks are a form of popularization
  • can be children's books, to heavy duty journal articles that require a high level of more general science knowledge
• science is so very specialized now, that anyone outside of the exact area needs a popularized view
  • science professors need textbooks outside their particular field (more to come out of my current research project)
  • scientists are big consumers of popularizations to get ideas from adjacent and disparate research areas for their own work as well as for their own popularizations or teaching
• popularizations are used by scientists to gain the support for their revolutionary ideas (in the Kuhnian sense) from other scientists

But they have to be the right popularizations. There exist book reviews written by scientists of popular science books. How do librarians tell if this popularization is more on the sciencey end of the continuum? Probably from reviews in science magazines and journals as well as by the publisher. Maybe by browsing within the pages? Looking at the footnotes and citations. Hey, how about looking in the science blogosphere (hm, oh that's another post there...)!

Here's my point: research science libraries should make more effort to collect and market popular science materials. These materials should be an important part of the service we do -- plus they're cheap. Compare $25 for a popular book and minimum $125 for a specialized science book (yep, really).

Notes (in some strange half apa half other format):

[1] Garvey, W. D., & Griffith, B. C. (1967). Scientific communication as a social system. Science, 157(3792), 1011-1016.

[2] Whitley, R. (1985). Knowledge producers and knowledge acquirers: Popularisation as a relation between scientific fields and their publics. In T. Shinn, & R. Whitley (Eds.), Expository science: Forms and functions of popularisation (pp. 3-28). Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Pub. Co.

[3] Hilgartner, S. (1990). The dominant view of popularization: Conceptual problems, political uses. Social Studies of Science, 20(3), 519-539. (or actually probably Whitley in 1985, but I don't have e- access to this to check it)

[4] Paul, D. (2004). Spreading chaos: The role of popularizations in the diffusion of scientific ideas. Written Communication, 21(1), 32-68. DOI:10.1177/0741088303261035

[5] Myers, G. (2003). Discourse studies of scientific popularization: Questioning the boundaries. Discourse Studies, 5(2), 265-279. DOI:10.1177/1461445603005002006

Yesterday I read a really interesting article on establishing or altercasting intellectual identity through questioning in intellectual discussions (Tracy & Naughton, 1994). The article was specifically about brown bags or colloquia in a university communications department, but I think there's something of use here for public services librarians in research settings. The authors break down the facets of intellectual identity that are "made visible through questioning practices" into three parts 1) knowledgeability 2) originality (are you just reiterating everything that's been done) 3) intellectual sophistication ("recognize the intellectual tradition within which they work, to grant its limitations while articulating its advantages, and to reveal awareness of what is entailed by and inconsistent with their framework") (Tracy & Naughton, 1994). The lexical choices of the questioner and question recipient place them in a framework (these are smaller than disciplines -- these are what methodologies are used, what schools, what invisible colleges...)

My thought is that while the reference librarian is trying to find out what the scientist needs, the scientist is questioning the librarian's awareness of the appropriate framework. Also, the questions the librarian asks can be taken as challenges to the intellectual identity -- after all, the scientist has built this up over their career.

So -- if you come from the same intellectual tradition as the scientist (are homophilous) then you probably won't have as much to share because you'll know what they know. OTOH, if you aren't sophisticated enough to understand their tradition, you won't get to the heart of the problem. Hmmm... have to stop this wandering now -- homework to do!

Thoughts?

Acknowledgments: Thanks again to Pengyi for assigning the article and to Lois for thoughtful comments via personal communication. Also, to a senior chemistry librarian and a library student at Maryland who provided food for thought.

References
Tracy, K., & Naughton, J. (1994). The identity work of questioning in intellectual discussion. Communication Monographs, 61(4), 281-302.

• No longer within the scope of the collection
• Duplicate copies
• Low circulation (therefore low interest)
• Poor condition (replacement copies may be added)
• No circulation within x time period
• Information is out of date or superseded

How the time period is determined, or if the book can be repaired, or any of these other things are determined by the library mission and policies and by the professional judgment of the librarian responsible for managing the collection.

Research collections are rarely, if ever, weeded. Books are repaired and/or moved to off site storage. If they are weeded, the circ period may be within 10 years.

Public libraries, on the other hand, especially branch collections, usually will weed more aggressively. First, the books are handled much more roughly and so can be in much poorer shape. Second, the mission of the library is for the local citizen's person information needs like health information (should be rigorously and continuously weeded), legal information (should be rigorously and continuously weeded), self-help, hobby related, entertainment, and educational materials for both children and adult learners. Libraries that fail to weed will have out of date and possibly harmful materials. Sections like travel books where there are new copies every year should also be weeded -- who wants a restaurant guide from 1999?

Weeding is continuous in many libraries and it's part of the job description for the librarians. In other libraries, it's only done when necessary to free up space.

All libraries should have a policy that is agreed upon by the highest levels of library management. The policies should be different for different communities with different needs and should be different for different subject areas. Public libraries may have this policy approved by the library board.

One of the books I always keep near to hand and reference quite regularly here is F.W. Lancaster's If You Want to Evaluate Your Library... 2nd ed. (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, 1993). Chapter 6 is on "Obsolescence, Weeding, and the Use of Space." I like his method because in journal selection, too, he comes up with a set of measures and then has you weigh each and score the total for each item. For weeding he has last recorded circ date, date of publication, on "recommended" list, physical condition. He has these weighted so circ date is most important. Finally a quote from him (p.116)

Weeding can improve the quality of a collection. When old and unused books are removed, the shelves appear more attractive to users and it is easier for them to find the newer or more popular items they are likely to be looking for. An effective weeding program has been known to increase circulation (Slote, 1989), although no evidence of this was detected by Roy (1990).

We've also just heard that the very generous folks at HP will be donating even more to the cause. This is what they've told us:

HP wants to make yet another contribution to your Giving Page. The more you raise by this Sunday, October 25, the more HP will contribute!

Next week, we will distribute $200,000, the rest of HP's contribution, to all Social Media Challenge Giving Pages. But this time, your share will be calculated on a pro-rata basis based on the amount you've raised by Sunday. What does that mean? Now is the time to motivate your readers, followers, friends, fam and fans to donate to your page, so you can claim a larger share of the funds!

And there's yet another bonus: after the Challenge is over, everyone who donated to your Giving Page will get a DonorsChoose.org Giving Card, courtesy of HP. Those donors will get to decide which projects are supported with HP's $200,000 in funds.

Actually, I've heard from folks from research labs (gov't, private, and corporate) really who really hate the name, too. My take: it's business researchers vs. science researchers. I think there are more fingers in the pot and more competition for competitive intelligence and market research than honest to goodness science and engineering work like you'd have at a pharmaceutical or communications technology company. (these companies also have business researchers, but I've heard more from the chemistry and pharmaceutical types).

What doesn't help is when we're told to shut up because we might buffalo the easily led and because "people who count" like the name. That's right, the membership doesn't count, only CxOs of large for-profit corporations. Nice.

I usually go back to Mortensen, Torill and Walker, Jill. (2002). Blogging thoughts: Personal publication as an online research tool. In A. Morrison ed. (Ed.), Researching ICTs in context (1 ed.) (pp. 249). Oslo, Norway: InterMedia University of Oslo, Norway. pdf online. That's where I got the "reverse chronologically arranged collection of discrete posts" idea that I use (actually, I can't check to make sure that quote is exact because M's computer can't open pdfs!)

Here are some others culled from articles i've linked in my meta science blogging tag:
From John Baez' draft article for mathematicians.

A "web log", or "blog" for short, lets you write about whatever
you want and make it visible online. Your entries are displayed in reverse-chronological order, people reading them can post comments, and you can reply to those comments. I could describe how to set up a blog, but that would make it seem harder than it is. Any idiot can do it, and many do. Websites like Wordpress and Blogger will lead you through the process step by step-- and they're free.

Bonetta in Cell just says:

Blogs provide an online discussion forum for issues of current interest and are updated regularly with new short articles on which readers can comment.

Boulos, Maramba, and Wheeler in BMC Medical Education:

A related Web information sharing technology is the 'blog'. A blog (WeBLOG) is a Web site that contains dated entries in reverse chronological order (most recent first) about a particular topic [28]. Functioning as an online journal, blogs can be written by one person or a group of contributors. Entries contain commentary and links to other Web sites, and images as well as a search facility may also be included.
Because blogs engage people in knowledge sharing, reflection, and debate, they often attract a large and dedicated readership [29]. They can also engender the drawing together of small virtual groupings of individuals interested in co-constructing knowledge around a common topic within a community of practice.
Standard blog features include easy posting, archives of previous posts, and a standalone Web page for each post to the blog with a unique URL. The latter feature facilitates linking to and organising content within the same blog and from external sites [13].

Most people searching won't really have the support of the fancy specialized tools. I've approximated some of this searching for years using various basic search engine language tools. Luckily, recently they've added a lot more Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Russian translation options in addition to the Western or Romanized languages. They've also become a lot more sophisticated.

Typically these sites offer to translate a word, a passage, or the page at a URL. Google now offers alternate meanings for a word (cool!) and also will translate a search.

For alternate meanings here's an example:

Translating the search is even cooler:

Update: you can find this stuff on the main page of google next to the search box. Here's a direct link: http://translate.google.com/

rrrrright. So now people know exactly what we do. Oh I am *so* tired of people thinking that renaming their position or the place in which they work will make people love them. We are the most pathetic crowd.

Some of the comments from my colleagues on listservs, friendfeed, and on twitter are hilarious. I pointed out out that most people in my part of the country kind of swallow the k when saying ask. But anyhoo.