I'm still on this kick on recommender systems. I'm further encouraged by happening on a report on "discoverability" by the Minnesota librarians when looking for something else on JR's blog. The report agrees that recommender systems are a more important trend. In standard information retrieval stuff, you're going from whatever query the person puts in (which can be very, very different from their information need see Taylor [1]) and you're computing similarity between those terms and what ever representation you have of information in the system. Smarter systems do a lot more than that, but…
I'm here at The Informationist: Collaboration between scientists and librarians to support informatics research at the Embassy Suites in DC. It's sponsored by Elsevier as part of their Research Connect series. (stream of consciousness) Dr John L Schnase, NASA - Science and technology challenges of eco-informatics Workshop 10 years ago about research directions in biodiversity and ecosystem informatics. Summary and paper in Information Systems (maybe this: doi:10.1007/s10844-006-0027-7). Stream of logic: striking feature of planet is its life, striking feature of life is its biodiversity. More…
I'm here at The Informationist: Collaboration between scientists and librarians to support informatics research at the Embassy Suites in DC. It's sponsored by Elsevier as part of their Research Connect series. (stream of consciousness) Annette Williams, Vanderbilt U Med Ctr - Integrating best evidence into patient care Essentially seemed to be 3 pieces. Within their order set something or other, their internally developed electronic med records some messaging and stuff, and consumer health site linked to icd-9 codes and lab test explanations. Dr. Medha Bhagwat, Bioinformatics Trainer, NIH…
I'm here at The Informationist: Collaboration between scientists and librarians to support informatics research at the Embassy Suites in DC. It's sponsored by Elsevier as part of their Research Connect series. (these are stream of consciousness) Tonna - VP North Am, Academic & Gov't. Research productivity metrics more important for funding decisions. Data for institute and gov't research funding decisions. Their goals: increase productivity (doing science & getting grants), provide data for making funding decisions. Increased use of ejournals correlates with increased publication and…
let's hope i don't accidentally bring down the whole scienceblogs empire. \[ \begin{aligned} \nabla \times \vec{\mathbf{B}} -\, \frac1c\, \frac{\partial\vec{\mathbf{E}}}{\partial t} & = \frac{4\pi}{c}\vec{\mathbf{j}} \\ \nabla \cdot \vec{\mathbf{E}} & = 4 \pi \rho \\ \nabla \times \vec{\mathbf{E}}\, +\, \frac1c\, \frac{\partial\vec{\mathbf{B}}}{\partial t} & = \vec{\mathbf{0}} \\ \nabla \cdot \vec{\mathbf{B}} & = 0 \end{aligned} \] within text \(\sqrt{3x-1}+(1+x)^2\)
I'm on a sub-sub committee to evaluate evaluation of consideration of adding a new recommender system to our discovery tools across my parent institution's libraries. The system costs money and programmer time (which we're very short on), but more importantly, there's a real estate issue, we already offer some similar tools, and even if the recommendations are perfect we don't know if or where we could/should surface them, they'd be noticed and used. I'm trying to get my arms around at least the questions we should ask or things we should consider. I'm using this post to work through some…
Libraries and librarians connect people to information. That's what we do. So there's the information part and there's the connecting part. Librarians gather, collect, license, and purchase information in the form of books, scrolls, artifacts, journals, web pages. And there's a lot to selecting what to gather and keep and balancing competing demands to get ready for the connecting.  The connecting part has everything in it from organizing the information and listing it in a catalog, to negotiating the information need, to training users.. Libraries in the modern era have balanced spending on…
Myths abound about how scientists do not talk with the media or communicate with the public and if they do so, it is only because they are required to by funders' "broader impact" requirements. The evidence, however, does not support this view. This article is another in a series of communications based on a multi-national study of how scientists in several fields communicate with the media. (you might have seen [1] or [2]). This article only uses data from US scientists who were recently corresponding authors on peer reviewed articles in stem cell research and epidemiology (survey sent to…
This was originally posted 1/9/2009 on my old blog. Due to popular demand (well 3 requests :) ), this is a commentary and additional information for my conference paper and presentation: Pikas, C. K. (2008). Detecting Communities in Science Blogs. Paper presented at eScience '08. IEEE Fourth International Conference on eScience, 2008. Indianapolis. 95-102. doi:10.1109/eScience.2008.30 (available in IEEE Xplore to institutional subscribers) [also self-archived - free!- here] The presentation is embedded in another blog post, and is available online at SlideShare. The video of me talking…
Sometimes you have to just let go and release something to the wild. I have mentioned on a few occasions a qualitative study I did prior to the network study. To be honest, I think I actually did it in the Fall of 2007 ?! I thought (and was encouraged to believe) that I could get a journal article from it, but at this point, I've moved on.  With the recent publication of another article on science blogs, I thought that this needed to be out there. Plus, it's really not fair to the participants who gave me their time. After re-reading this just now, I don't think it's bad, but the title is…
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 thereâs a blog here to talk about the preparations. This is one reason why itâs cool to live near DC â 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, youâll be judging them on looks not…
This post reviews a fairly recent article that examines the experiences of black men in nursing and asks whether they experience the "glass escalator" effect or if the work is racialized as well as gendered. As requested by some fellow Sciblings, I recently blogged about an older article* that coined the term glass escalator. In my post I was uncertain about how the findings from the study were viewed by experts familiar with that body of work. In the comments, Kris D, who identifies as a sociologist, said that these findings have been upheld by subsequent research. Kris also recommended the…
Back when I was working at the public library, I used to do the "introduction to the internet" classes. These were typically at 9 - before the library opened- and so attracted stay at home moms and retirees. Attendees usually picked things up pretty quickly. For one thing, they admitted not knowing how anything worked so would listen and take notes and then stay to practice on the public systems. We assume that "kids today" and indeed all educated adults are fluent in the use of browsers and the web. Not so. There is a strange example recently that demonstrates this point.  I assumed everyone…
This blog is a Research Blogging Awards 2010 Finalist Thank you for whoever nominated me and thanks for your votes! I'll try to bring more research blogging posts to you in the coming year :)
This thread is hilarious, yet so true it makes me want to cry.
I ran across this piece again just now after having read it when it first came out in 20056: Foster, I. (2005). Service-Oriented Science. Science, 308(5723), 814-817. doi:10.1126/science.1110411 It's a good piece and quite helpful. Google Scholar says it's been cited 209 times, so that's not terribly surprising. But here are some things that are at least mildly surprising. The widget that uses the Web of Science api to provide number of citations directly on the HTML page for the article shows that the piece has been cited 23 times. When you click through that to Web of Science - if your…
With the recent snowstorms and all, I brought an official work machine home so I could work on full VPN. We have an SSL VPN option and with full network connect, it's just like I'm in my office. Most of the time, when I need an article here or there, I just use the proxy server. From my end, how this works is I either link out from the catalog or I right click and reload through proxy using my LibX plugin. I then login with my directory ID and password. If I need something more "popular" - like reviews for an upcoming purchase, car repair diagrams, or how-to information - I'll just use my…
A brief note. Remember when I told you about free to you research databases? Remember when some other librarians told you about a certain company negotiating for exclusive access to certain popular magazines, choking out other aggregators?  Well, now these two things have something in common. Ebsco.
At the PSP Pre-Conference (see my notes), Dr. Harley of the Higher Education in the Digital Age program reported being surprised by their finding that young scholars were unwilling or unlikely to experiment with new scholarly communication (tools/practices/channels). There was a question from the audience that showed the person's disbelief of this finding. No matter how many times this myth is debunked, it remains firmly entrenched. Here are some variations on it: when generation {x,y, millennial, etc} gets in {university, grad school, the workplace}, {collaboration, communication, search…
These are a continuation of my notes. This portion has been transcribed from my scribble - I was sitting on stage for the second half of the day so live blogging didn't really seem appropriate :( If there is something wrong, not malicious, just bad handwriting.   Diane Harley, Senior Researcher and Director, Higher Education in the Digital Age Project She's an anthropologist who has long studied the issues around new technology for scholarship and teaching. She's not an advocate for any particular type of approach for integrating new technology. She looks at value systems and faculty…