Confessions of a Science Librarian

Here I am on ScienceBlogs, moved from the comfortable confines of my old blog, where I've been active since October 2002.

The opportunity to come here was never anything I really expected or pursued, but now that I'm here I'm really excited to start this new chapter in my blogging existence.

How did it happen, you ask? Well, it all started last week with a post I did about the "Are You a Librarian" survey that Seed was running on the site at the time. Basically, the survey was a marketing tool trying to encourage librarians to subscribe to Seed Magazine for their institutions. I was totally ok with that (we subscribe to Seed at MPOW), but at the same time I'd been kind of hoping for a deeper engagement with the library community on Seed's part.

Well, I guess I got my wish. Sarah Glasser from Seed contacted me a few days later, asking about what I'd been hoping for, and, oh, by the way, how about being part of engaging the librarian community on a deeper level. The next thing you know, I'm in touch with Erin Johnson and the next thing you know after that, here I am typing into the rather unfamiliar (for me) Movable Type interface.

So, who exactly am I anyways? Well, I have a B.Comp.Sci. (1986) from Concordia University in Montreal. After that, I worked as a software developer for a big insurance broker for twelve years, mostly working in dBase, FoxPro, Wang Pace, Cobol and at the end, PowerBuilder. Tiring of the life of the developer, I changed careers and went back to school to become a librarian, taking the Masters of Library and Information Studies program at McGill University. That brings us to 2000, when I graduated and, along with my family, moved to Toronto to take a science librarian job at York University. (More history here and here.)

Now, I'm about a year and half into a five year term as head of the Steacie Science & Engineering Library.

What do I blog about? Mostly about what it's like to be a science librarian at the beginning of the 21st century: science, computer science, online community building, blogging, open access, open science, science 2.0, collections, databases, ebooks, science books. The whole shooting match. Let's just say, I was at SciBarCamp last weekend and everyone I talked to basically wanted to know where libraries are going these days and how we'll stay relevant to the born digital generation. So, yes, I'm obsessed with that stuff too.

What do I bring to the ScienceBlogs table? I hope a greater appreciation amongst scientists what their local science librarians have to offer, both in terms of their teaching and research. I also hope to be able to bring to the librarians that visit me here a greater appreciation of what it's like to be a scientist in the 21st century, too.

So, to all of you encountering my blog here for the first time, welcome! My best known posts so far have been the My Job in 10 Years series, some book reviews as well as my series of interviews with people in the scitech world.

• My Job in 10 Years posts, and pdf version of whole series for printing.
  
  
• Recent book reviews: The Trouble with Physics, Dreaming in Code, Everything is Miscellaneous, Balanced Libraries, Groundswell, The Quantum Ten, Here Comes Everybody.
  
  
• Recent interviews: Timo Hannay of Nature, Michael Morgan of Morgan & Claypool, Jane of See Jane Compute, Christopher Leonard of PhysMathCentral, Dorothea Salo of Caveat Lector, Bora Zivkovic of A Blog Around the Clock.
  
  
• Some conferences I've blogged: WILU 2007. Computers in Libraries 2007. Ontario Library Association 2007. 2008, 2009. Science Online 2008, 2009. Science in the 21st Century. SciBarCamp 2008.

Enjoy! I hope that will be enough to get to know me a little bit. I'll be back with a bunch of new posts this week and beyond, including another announcement.