Information Science
cpikas | June 30, 2010
How do zombies seek and use information? What are their information needs?
Their information needs primarily consist of finding brains. They pretty much search by geographic proximity and pattern matching. The type of browsing they do doesn't seem to be well supported by information systems.
How should a reference interview with a Zombie go? No studies have been published on walk-up reference, but there are some ideas on doing phone or virtual reference. The zombies aren't really good with a mouse, so in virtual reference it's best to send images. In telephone reference, screaming doesn…
cpikas | June 26, 2010Nick Carr, quoted by the Readablity folks here, talks about hyperlinks as distractions - part of how the web screws up our brains. I was just browsing (couldn't possibly read this one from cover to cover) Nentwich (2003) and ran across the section, "Better match of traditional reading habits". In this portion of the book, the author is talking about the impacts of ICTs, specifically hyperlinked texts, in how scientists deal with information. I'll now quote directly from page 297:
It is a truism that academics seldom read articles (not to speak about books from the first to the last paragraph…
jdupuis | May 25, 2010Another terrific issue. I'm going to list everything but the book & database reviews & reports so as not to clutter the post too much.
Five Voices, Two Perspectives: Integrating Student Librarians into a Science and Engineering Library by Eugene Barsky, Aleteia Greenwood, Samantha Sinanan, Lindsay Tripp, and Lindsay Willson, University of British Columbia
Collection Assessment in Response to Changing Curricula: An Analysis of the Biotechnology Resources at the University of Colorado at Boulder by Gabrielle Wiersma, University of Colorado at Boulder
Browsing of E-Journals by…
cpikas | May 24, 2010Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media is being held right now in DC. Use both twitter hash tags: #icwsm2010 and #icwsm.
The papers are online at: http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM10/schedConf/presentations.
cpikas | May 24, 2010My larger institution's (so not my place of work, but our parent org's) libraries had a fabulous get together Friday with a session on data curation. The speakers were: Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information, Carole Palmer from UIUC, and Joel Bader from JHU and JHMI.
I tweeted, but there wasn't a hashtag, so there goes retrieval. These weren't live blogged but reconstructed from handwritten notes. These are my reconstructions of their points - so not my points and maybe not theirs.
Lynch spoke about institutions while Palmer spoke more about librarians. Bader spoke about…
cpikas | May 17, 2010Here's a quote from the Professional and Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of
American Publishers' response (pdf) to the FRPAA legislation (about):
There is no need for federal agencies to replicate content on their own sites when web-linking approaches to publishers' authoritative versions could serve better the same goal of public access. Acting on its own in the free market, the publishing industry already has made more research information available to more people than at any time in history. Articles are widely available in major academic centers and private-sector online…
cpikas | May 15, 2010Revere of Effects Measure has a great post on expertise, authorship, and "real" names. At this point, after years and years of blogs it's a shame this has to be said explicitly. The general points go like this:
there are many legitimate reasons to be pseudonymous in authoring a blog. I describe some of these in my 2007 post but another one is to let your words speak for themselves instead of bolstering them by using your professional reputation, that of your institution, or that of your publication venue.
even if you had his name, would that alone allow you trust what he's saying (Mertonian…
cpikas | May 13, 2010John Dupuis comments about a review of This Book is Overdue, saying that libraries' roles in their institutions are not well understood by others in the institution because of inherent insularity in academe - silos, in effect. Drug Monkey basically sees the library as infrastructure. When I say infrastructure, I mean the SL Star (RIP) and Ruhleder (1996) version:
Embeddedness. Infrastructure is "sunk" into, inside of, other structures, social arrangements and technologies;
Transparency. Infrastructure is transparent to use, in the sense that it does not have to be reinvented each time or…
cpikas | May 5, 2010Or maybe it's personal information management FAIL! - If you're sensitive to the difference. In other words keeping or not, organizing, retrieving, and re-using information things.
I have no desktop search. I have no desktop search at work because the only one I could get has been emasculated - it's prevented from searching e-mail or shared drives (I know, I KNOW, really). Where the vast majority of my stuff sits.
Our shared drives are very crowded and things get moved around and deleted. I periodically go through folders that I care about and label everything and move things into sub-folders…
cpikas | May 1, 2010Anne Jefferson from Highly Allochthonous pointed me to a new essay from Geoscientist Online, the member magazine of the Geological Society (UK). That essay points both to the survey of women geobloggers (previously mentioned here) and a survey done by Lutz Geissler, Robert Huber, and Callan Bentley. (probably haven't mentioned before).
In the Geoscientist essay by Michael Welland, he discusses his own slowness in taking up blogging, but also his enjoyment of the geoblogosphere and the community he finds there. He learns of new things he wouldn't come across in his other readings and he…
cpikas | April 25, 2010 Mixed methods are always attractive, but many researchers give up because each method typically requires some epistemology which often conflicts with the epistemology of other methods. When mixed methods are done, they are often done in sequence. For example, qualitative work to understand enough about a phenomenon to develop a survey or interviewing survey respondents to get richer information about their responses. Network methods are neither quantitative* nor qualitative and it's not typical to combine them with qualitative methods - hence my interest in this piece. Of course I'm also…
cpikas | April 16, 2010I was happy to see that the authors published this article in PlosOne. I was following their work a while ago, but had lost track (plus, when asked, the last author implied that they had moved on to new projects). So here's the citation and then I'll summarize and comment.
Divoli, A., Wooldridge, M., & Hearst, M. (2010). Full Text and Figure Display Improves Bioscience Literature Search PLoS ONE, 5 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009619
The authors created a prototype information system that used Lucene to index the metadata for open access biomed articles, the full text, and the captions…
cpikas | April 9, 2010V. brief post. Jonathan Rochkind points out that a lot of libraries are doing mobile sites and things, but he questions if they actually have a reason to think that these services are needed and will be used or if they are just creating these things because they're cool.
Please read his post, and let him know if you've talked to any users - either formally or informally - about what they want wrt mobile stuff. Thanks. BTW - I'd be happy to summarize here anything that is posted to his comments or that is shared with me directly.
cpikas | March 24, 2010I'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…
cpikas | March 10, 2010This 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…
cpikas | March 9, 2010Sometimes 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…
cpikas | March 6, 2010Back 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…
jdupuis | February 22, 2010Here's what they're about:
The first draft of Panton Principles was written in July 2009 by Peter Murray-Rust, Cameron Neylon, Rufus Pollock and John Wilbanks at the Panton Arms on Panton Street in Cambridge, UK, just down from the Chemistry Faculty where Peter works.
They were then refined with the help of the members of the Open Knowledge Foundation Working Group on Open Data in Science and were officially launched in February 2010.
Here they are:
Science is based on building on, reusing and openly criticising the published body of scientific knowledge.
For science to effectively function…
cpikas | February 21, 2010I 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…
cpikas | February 15, 2010With 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…