cpikas | June 23, 2009It's that time again: the 2008 Journal Citation Reports are out from Thomson Reuters. It's started already, too, the e-mails to listservs and press releases. So I'm re-posting one of my posts from my old blog for those of you who might not have seen it.
Like prices and hemlines, why do impact factors always go up?
Ever notice that certain time of year when every journal publisher announces how the impact factors of their journals is up? When the Journal Citation Report (JCR) comes out... the press releases follow. The impact factor is a measure of how important the journal is - if it is…
cpikas | June 22, 2009One of the main reasons I go to SLA is to catch up on what all of the journals, databases, and research tool providers are up to. Sometimes they save the big announcements for ALA and sometimes they make them at SLA.
Other years I've spent a ton of time at the exhibits, but this year it was a bit truncated. I also didn't go to any breakfasts (even free food doesn't get me into downtown DC at 7am!) and only a couple of other things put on by the vendors.
Here are a few things that I remember:
Springer's bringing out an image database which seems to combine some medical image database they…
cpikas | June 19, 2009I've talked about this a bit at sessions I taught at my library and also at Web Search University but it's still a favorite. Plus, you asked for posts on finding information. Oh, and one of the tools just released some updates so this is fairly timely.
This is not how to use the catalog to see if a book you want is available in your library and to get a shelf location! Also not about finding something good to read (frankly, I'm completely out of practice with reader's advisory, so can't help you there). Books are useful containers for information, data, and stuff you need to make new…
cpikas | June 18, 2009Bummer. Apparently Windows Live Writer doesn't automatically save drafts. So here are my foggy recollections of this session.
The session was a bit different this year. In previous years we've mostly discussed providing services (collection development and reference to computer science researchers. This year, we had three speakers on a theme: "Data Curation and Special Libraries: Education, Trends, and Developments"
The first speaker was Bryan Heidorn from UIUC. He teaches bioinformatics and information retrieval stuff, but he primarily works now as a Program Manager in the Division of…
cpikas | June 16, 2009(came in late because the speaker I initially chose to see failed to show up)
A speaker from Serials Solutionâs Summon reviewed various pieces of research done recently both by LIS researchers and by big libraries. Summed up pretty well by Tenopir (he copied her graph), increasing costs, decreasing importance as a gateway for research creates a value gap for the library. Scholars view the library and its resources as reliable and authoritative, but painful to use. So they start with google, because itâs easy and then link out to our subscriptions and my never know theyâre using library…
cpikas | June 13, 2009If you've read my blog at all, you probably know I'm a Taylor (1962,
1968)
href="http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/650">groupie.
In fact, in a recent
href="http://scienceblogs.com/christinaslisrant/2009/06/librarian_basics_the_reference.php">post
I talked about going from a visceral need to a compromised
need. This is a central idea in library science. So when I
saw this article in my feeds today, I had to pounce on it:
title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Journal+of+the+American+Society…
cpikas | June 13, 2009I have great post titles and topics in my head, but much less time to blog! (quick review: I work 40-50 hours/week, sometimes work 4 hours on Sunday afternoons, am a doctoral student preparing for comprehensive exams in mid-July, am married with a house, a old cat (in kidney failure - which creates clean up issues), and a dog.... well, you get the idea)
So, I'm going to post blog post titles from time to time, and allow the reader to fill in the responses for themselves :)
Here's #1:
When is it a valid test of the scholarly communication system to perpetrate a hoax, and when is it a party…
cpikas | June 10, 2009This is the first in a series discussing things that librarians do.
Stephanie
Willen Brown pointed me to this hilarious video from UT Arlington.
Actually, the other librarian's reference interview isn't the model of
perfection, either, but we'll talk about that.
The purpose of a reference interview is for the librarian to understand
the patron's information need - what information will be useful to them
to resolve a problem or learn about something or whatever.
When done right, the patron can go from a sort of general
unease (anomalous state of knowledge[1]) to information in hand/on…
cpikas | June 9, 2009I'm so pleased that Walt Crawford has joined us as SciBlings!
I've read Cites & Insights (sometimes people tease him by calling it Sites & Incites, but I don't recommend you try that) and his old blog for years as well as a few of his books. I'm a real fan. Yay us!
cpikas | June 7, 2009(I can't find anything wrong on the back end for previous post so let's see if this one is broken, too) :(
update 1.2.3 3.2.1 test complete. error fixed, or so i believe.
cpikas | June 7, 2009SLA is the Special Libraries Association - it's really my home
professional organization.
I often go to basically 3 conferences in my profession: SLA,
ASIS&T, and Computers In Libraries. You come back
from SLA and you want to buy
something. You come back from ASIS&T and you want to
style="font-style: italic;">study something or
just think about things. You come back from CIL and you want to
style="font-style: italic;">build something. So
they all have purposes. By far, though, SLA is the most
important to what I do for a living.
This year should be really exciting -…
cpikas | June 6, 2009This post serves a few purposes. First,
href="http://friendfeed.com/billhooker/ffbe5e1d/secret-science-again-drugmonkey">
Bill Hooker questioned
href="http://scienceblogs.com/drugmonkey/2009/06/secret_science_again.php#comment-1680220">Crotty's
assertion about the importance of patents to university
researchers [*]. Bill also
href="http://www.sennoma.net/main/archives/2009/06/what_use_are_research_patents.php">posted
a nice summary of AUTM's statistics (later in
href="http://scienceblogs.com/drugmonkey/2009/06/secret_science_again.php">DrugMonkey's
comment stream there…
cpikas | June 4, 2009From via Caveat Lector.
Position Statement From University Press Directors on Free Access to Scholarly Journal Articles:
1. The undersigned university press directors support the dissemination of scholarly research as broadly as possible.
2. We support the free access to scientific, technical, and medical journal articles no later than 12 months after publication. We understand that the length of time before free release of journal articles will by necessity vary for other disciplines.
3. We support the principle that scholarly research fully funded by governmental entities is a public good…
cpikas | June 3, 2009This is the 5th of the test essays in preparation for comps.
This question was posed by my advisor. I opened it
and went, "wow." It's sort of like the perfect storm of question.
When I first finished it, I thought I did really well, but
now it seems less than completely satisfying. So here's the essay written in 2 hours, timer started prior to opening the question.
Question (IR 1)
Informal interpersonal communication is very important among
scientists. Describe a retrieval system to identify collaborators.
Include the following in your answer:
a. Knowledge representation to enhance…
cpikas | June 3, 2009Please check out and comment on John's post on Looking for Ideas for the Information Science Channel.
So far:
Information policy including open access, intellectual property, and gov't openness
Information visualization
Information architecture
Publisher/publishing funding models: subscriptions, page charges, article charges
Information search strategies
Citations - importance of (for attribution? as a proxy for "quality"? not sure)
Digital preservation including data curation
Wow. I can't speak for John, but I only feel 100% comfortable in one of those areas. The "voting" never closes…
cpikas | June 2, 2009Is that all our vendors hear when they ask us to try out their new
interfaces? A couple of us were kvetching on friendfeed about
this.
Lemme tell you a little story. A little while ago a really
important society publisher in the geosciences re-did all of their web
pages and they were pretty - jewel tones (not what I would have chosen,
but pretty none the less). If you had a doi or were using an
open URL resolver, you would go straight to the article and be
satisfied - I pulled a bunch of articles for people this way and didn't
notice. Then one day, probably 6 months after the site had…
cpikas | June 2, 2009Last set of comps readings, I talked about sense of community:
belonging, having influence, fulfillment of needs, and emotional
support. Now, let's talk about the physics version of
"community" - cohesive subgroups. In a graph, these are
groups of nodes in a graph that are more connected to each other than
to other parts of the graph. Clumpy spots. If you read old
href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/30594217">Wasserman and
Faust, you'll probably think of cliques, cores, and lambda
sets... some how these didn't do it for me - literally, when I was
trying to
href="http://terpconnect.…
cpikas | May 31, 2009Then I have the job for you. If you are a scientist, but you want to get out of the lab, want to have a little more variety in your life, like helping people and finding information, but still want to use your science degree and be part of the scientific enterprise, then you might want to consider becoming a librarian.
You know a little about what a librarian does and if not you can see my recent post. Don't worry, though, all of those functions are not typically done by the same person. You don't have to be in public service, actually, you could deal with metadata or building discovery…
cpikas | May 31, 2009Sunday morning I was all set to do another essay - just had to pick a
question source and question - when my mother in law called to say she
would be stopping by at about the same time I would be finishing up the
2 hour window, leaving no time for emergency house cleaning (no, I
haven't grown out of that yet despite being married for >10
years). So here are a few readings on "community" which I'll drop like
a hot potato and then run to clean the house.
Both Wellman and Rheingold dispute the idea that we're all "
href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/43599073">Bowling Alone"
and assert…