cpikas | September 16, 2009quality? popularity? utility? I'm pretty sure I've blogged about MESUR (a research project that studied how usage statistics - as we call them in the industry - can be a metric like citations are). I've also blogged a discussion by MJ Kurtz in which he discusses how usage is very much like citations, if offset. Some researchers including some bibliometricians have issues with using usage for some pretty good reasons:
if citations can be gamed then click fraud anyone?
if we don't know what citations mean, then what can we say about downloads at all?
what is actually counted? pdf downloads?…
cpikas | September 16, 2009Sure Hubble's pictures are prettier, but there's a lot of cool science coming out of the nifty MESSENGER spacecraft. She's up for a third Mercury fly-by in two weeks. She'll go into orbit in 2011 and she's the first spacecraft there for 30 years!
Already we've seen her video leaving Earth on a 2005 fly-by. Her first two Mercury fly-bys showed part of the planet we had never seen, and also answered some questions about the Caloris basin (and its formation), the planet's exosphere, and the planet's magnetic field.
Go visit the website to hear more or read from the special issue of Science from…
cpikas | September 15, 2009Anybody can code but what just anybody codes can be crap.
There's a real problem in my place of work and probably in other places where you have scientists and engineers who haven't been formally trained in CS and haven't taken the time or effort to learn about proper techniques but who are writing a lot of code. It's one thing to whip something up quickly to answer a question, but some of this code becomes pieces of larger things or gets delivered to a customer. And someone has to maintain it, but it's got memory leaks, isn't documented, it is unreliable, it's not secure, and no one knows…
cpikas | September 11, 2009So anyone who's spent any time at all with Google Books (hence forth GB), has probably noted some really bizarre - I mean truly strange - metadata. Like messed up titles, authors, publication years, oh and categories are totally hit or miss. I frequently take for granted that everyone has seen all of the memes that go around in the library web 2.0 circles. But that's crazy of course. So I'll just throw this at you scattershot.
At a meeting at the Berkeley iSchool on the GB settlement (and that's another thing I should blog about but don't have time for the research needed), linguist Geoff…
cpikas | September 5, 2009...'cause I thought I heard of a software and I know people at x conference said and seems like....
I get this all the time. Most recently I did a pretty detailed presentation of some analysis I did. Once I was done, I got the question: can you demo the tool that provided these answers for our boss? Another time that sticks out in memory - a customer saying to me: oh, find out what software or algorithm P (a male member of our group) uses to give all of that helpful info. Just as I thought, P had a reminder set up so that every Wednesday morning he opened the web page and searched and…
cpikas | September 2, 2009Sometimes so many things come up at the same time it becomes difficult if impossible to ignore. Here's just a brief list:
An oceanographer came to me and asked to see a print copy of an AGU journal article. If you've followed me here from elsewhere, then you'll know my place of work was mandated to discard all print materials (we did actually make the case for maybe 4 journals that are both not available online and are not widely held - there was a 5th but it got discarded by accident). Turns out that the entire point of the article was to show two color graphics on the second page. Well…
cpikas | August 29, 2009So often we hear of large studies like the GSS being used for attitudes towards science. We also hear the results of science achievement metrics and are disappointed. This article provides a great mix between generalizable quantitative understanding gained through use of a validated instrument and more individualized understanding gained through qualitative research using a critical feminist lens. The authors choose this sequential mixed-methods approach to attend to "questioning how to meet the needs of the many while coming to understand the uniqueness of the individuals among the many." …
cpikas | August 28, 2009I love the DOI. It's the best thing since sliced bread. Actually, it's better than sliced bread - I can slice my own bread - but I can't do what DOIs do so easily.
If you've been living under a rock for a while, you might not know that a DOI is a document object identifier - it's a unique identifier at the article or chapter level (or really at any level - like each image, each paragraph, or the whole book). Like you have ISBNs for books and ISSNs for journal (titles). What's really cool is that you can just put http://dx.doi.org/ in front of one, and get directed to the publisher's page…
cpikas | August 25, 2009See: Book of Trogool, The Humble Index. http://scienceblogs.com/bookoftrogool/2009/08/the_humble_index.php
Excellent (luckily Dorothea's and my expertises are almost completely orthogonal :) )
BTW: any half decent librarian who knows her reference collection can answer a lot of fact-type questions faster with the right books with decent indexes than with the major search engine. Yay, indexers!
oops! Broken link - thank you commenter
cpikas | August 24, 2009 In case you can't read this screenshot of an e-mail (source, via), I'll quote it for you:
"Are you on a first name basis with the librarian? If so, chances are, you're spending too much time at the library. What you need is fast, reliable research you can access right in your office. An all it takes is West(tr)."
This is so much B.S. glasses and all. West, is of course, part of Thomson Reuters (the real evil empire is revealed) and they and Reed Elsevier's Lexis-Nexis divide up most of the legal information money.
Chemistry vendors are known for trying an end-run around the librarian, but…
cpikas | August 23, 2009On one side, there are some who say the future of scholarly communication in science is databases - or, rather, more or less shared and curated data sets. Some of the folks in this crowd go farther to say that science is a continuous stream and people should be able to comment on and point to this stream.
There are those who see the disaggregation of the journal with the papers remaining more or less the same. So databases of discrete pieces that can then be re-aggregated (I've mentioned this before)
And there are those who basically think we'll sort of go on as we have been, but perhaps with…
cpikas | August 22, 2009Dr. Free-Ride answers the question about what credentials are needed to become a philosopher. It's interesting to note, actually, that in library schools - places where one goes to study to become a librarian - folks might have a PhD in just about anything. From education to computer science to anything starting with information (systems/studies/science/technology/management) to economics or business or psychology.... In fact, most of the courses you need to take to become a librarian are taught by adjuncts who are practitioners.
Funny thing is that ALA's accreditation committee wants to…
cpikas | August 20, 2009I've used a citation managers/ bibliographic managers for years - ever since I came to my current job in which I do in-depth literature searching for scientists and engineers. I report my results as an annotated bibliography with analysis. To do this I need to search a bunch of research databases and compile the results and then export them into a bibliography in a useful and attractive format.
Also, I do information analysis and I compile the citations before I do some things (see my series on the same).
So WHY DOESN'T IT JUST FREAKIN' WORK!!!!
Seriously. Why?
You select things to…
cpikas | August 14, 2009Here are some things academic libraries are doing to cope. The primary caveat is that I have less experience in this area (my research lab is affiliated with a university, but we're different). I have heard a lot about this from my colleagues in my professional association and online. I would be happy to be corrected by those in the know!
Academic institutions vary widely - from large state institutions and private research universities to small liberal arts colleges - and so they also vary in how things are funded. Sometimes the various portions of the university- the colleges - will each…
cpikas | August 12, 2009Why Friendfeed's acquisition by Facebook concerns this user.
The title is an imitation of Walt's Monday, old, and insufficiently paranoid. I love friendfeed. It's really the porous boundaries between the groups that really does it. You get to know people because things they share/post are "liked" by people you know and trust. I've been introduced to tons of librarians and scientists I would never have met in other settings. A few scientists and I also wrote an abstract for a paper about how friendfeed works - each of us was from a different country! Blogs that never get any comments are "…
cpikas | August 9, 2009Now that I'm not scared to look at my responses... This one doesn't look so bad, so I'm sharing. Please do keep in mind that this was written in 2 hours, by a tired person, with tired fingers!
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Christina K. Pikas
Comps Information Retrieval (Minor)
July 20, 2009
Question F2: Design an information retrieval system for scientists that covers full-text peer-reviewed articles as well as blogs and wikis
0. Introduction
Today, scientists use more than just the peer-reviewed journal literature in their work, but our information retrieval systems such as our library research databases and…
cpikas | August 8, 2009Eleventy!!!!111!!!!111!, and so forth :)
So now I'm eligible to advance to candidacy. So I would be a PhD Candidate, if I were to put the paperwork in right away. At my advisor's suggestion, I'm going to hold off on that for a few months to not start the next clock (and my work have to pay more for tuition - now I can register for 1 credit pre-candidacy research).
cpikas | August 8, 2009Public libraries are incredibly important in economic bad times. Things people just bought for themselves without thinking, they now borrow if they can. People need emergency assistance with housing or medical or childcare and they don't know how to find an appropriate agency or charity. People are looking for jobs and need assistance finding listings and to use the computer to fill out the application or complete a resume. Even people with jobs and computers might not be able to afford internet access and so come to use the free wireless or computers.
Public library funding depends on where…
cpikas | August 5, 2009Louisville was hit with a massive rainstorm that overwhelmed the sewer system and caused massive flooding everywhere. It took out the bottom floor of the library. Preliminary damage is assessed at $1M, but I would expect that to go higher (see).
I divided a session at CIL with Greg Schwartz a few years ago. He works in the system and his tweets and attached pictures show how horrible this is.
Steve Lawson has set up a way for librarians to donate. Others can also check this blog to get the address for the library foundation.
Update 8/7/2009: The library director is interviewed by Library…
cpikas | August 2, 2009A quick note on the tension between sharing everything as quickly as possible and keeping things for yourself.
The thrill of collaboration when like minds come together to brainstorm and solve big problems and the egoboo of having something you created "liked" or reused should not exclude or overshadow the value of figuring things out for yourself and having something you can point to as your own.
Recent posts from Sabine and Cameron got me thinking about this a little more. There are also some excellent comments on Sabine's post.
I think it's important to go offline for a bit and to work…