Librarian socially disrupts Science 3.0

I'm always very happy to see a librarian blogger embedded in a science blogging network. It's very important to get the library message out beyond just the library echo chamber and to the faculty, students and researchers who are out patron community.

So I was very pleased to see Elizabeth Brown's new blog, Social Disruption, on the Science 3.0 blog network.

From her inauguaral post:

I've been able to found contacts and establish connections to quite a few people through Twitter, friendfeed, Linkedin, and Mendeley. This is/was an important resource as I'm the only person in the library with my job description and I don't have a lot of colleagues that I can share these issues with on a daily basis - for me these social tools are essential. I was also starting to see how easily research could be generated with 2.0 (and 3.0) tools. I had been doing this previously with chat and instant messaging in the library (a recent article is available at C&RL), and these tools were surprisingly easy to integrate into traditional experimental frameworks.

After some thought I realized part of the reason we're seeing some of the strange behavior is that these newer tools are socially disruptive, and this disruption causes anxiety and stress for both traditional and disruptive communicators. How do I tell my peers what I'm doing is important? How can I demonstrate its value? What if my peers think the work I'm doing is a complete waste of time? I noticed it's also hard to not be prejudiced when disruption occurs - everyone feels pressured to take a side. Part of the social side of research is convincing others that the work is worthwhile.

So that's the goal of Social Disruption - bringing policy and practice more closely aligned to help answer these questions. I know this will take more than this one blog to make it happen, and the current environment is undergoing a lot of disruption. I'm going to be looking farther afield than many of my colleagues blogging about scholarly communications and librarianship, and also looking at policy a bit more as I think this will show how disruption is becoming codified.

Some other posts:

• Tenure and all that, Part 1 and Part 2
• Library Day in the Life #6
• My 2011 Forecast

Definately run on over and say, "Hi!"

And if you're a scitech librarian blogger (or potential blogger), think about the benefits of blogging as part of a network. There are still some science blogging networks out there that don't have a librarian presence that would certainly benefit from one.

It's all about the stealth librarianship, that's what I say.