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

...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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.