Read this (pdf). So the UC system has been screaming - they are totally cutting budgets, people, everything... And NPG has decided to hike their subscription renewal prices by 400%. So if the offer doesn't change, UC's going to fight back, and it will hurt. Boy, will it hurt.
Kevin Zelnio of Deep Sea News tweeted the title of this piece and sent my mind going over the various theories of citation, what citations mean, studies showing how people cite without reading (pdf) (or at least propagate obvious citation errors), and also how people use things but don't cite them in certain fields... I was also thinking, I know what inappropriate touching is, but what's inappropriate citing?  So let's take a look at the article: Todd, P., Guest, J., Lu, J., & Chou, L. (2010). One in four citations in marine biology papers is inappropriate Marine Ecology Progress Series…
Many/most/all (?) scientists and engineers who have ever published anything anywhere are now being inundated with calls for papers (CFP).  At least 3 have made it to my desk in the past month, forwarded from my colleagues who are curious and want to know more about the publisher. Two of these were precisely the same e-mail, with just names and article titles changed. That was enough that I spent a few minutes to create an internal wiki page as a guide to authors. I'm not going to share the whole thing, but I'll sketch out some points. I started out by trying to make the point that whether or…
Featuring quotes by yours truly as well as our dear Dr Isis, Drugmonkey, and Bora Zivkovic. Kamalski, J. (2010). Blogging about science. Research Trends 17. Retrieved from http://www.info.scopus.com/researchtrends/archive/RT17/beh_dat_17.html .
Please consider completing this survey conducted by two professors at the University of Maryland iSchool. (you can opt in for aggregated results - should be interesting!)
Fourth 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.
My 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…
Here'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…
Revere 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…
John 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…
see more Lolcats and funny pictures Someone around here is bound to have an answer! Ask a scibling is back, see this post: http://scienceblogs.com/seed/2010/05/ask_a_scienceblogger_anything.php Feel free to ask any library or information questions, too.
I â¥â¥â¥ this essay by Barbara Fister: Washington, We Have a Problem at Library Journal.   Go read it.
Or 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…
Anne 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…
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…
When I joined ScienceBlogs, I was halfway done preparing for my comprehensive exams. That involved a lot of reading, re-reading, and then practice essays. I blogged that to stay honest - you could see weeks that I didn't accomplish as much as well as pretty productive weeks. I also got some great feedback from readers on some of my reactions to some of the articles. So now I'm working on my proposal, and I have been for a while... with nothing really to show for it. I'm trying to work out a way I can blog the proposal so you all can keep me honest again (since you were so good at it last time…
I 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…
V. 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.
The following is by Susan Fingerman. She and I were discussing all of the media commentary, so when I heard she actually read it, I asked - no, make that begged - for a review. She was kind enough to supply. By now many of you have probably heard about This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All (Harper,2010). The author Marilyn Johnson was inspired by the really interesting obituaries of librarians while writing a prior book on obituaries. Does the irony of this strike anyone else out there? Will we (librarians) and the places we work be more interesting, more…
I expect D to have a more thorough take (she always does!), but there's finally a more widespread outcry against Ebsco. A few of us commented about the exclusive rights to magazines and closing access to Ageline. There was also (rightfully) a kerfuffle about deep linking to HBS articles. Now we hear from Meredith Farkas about exclusive access to military history journals and  a more general piece by Sarah Houghton-Jan. When I've posted something negative about Ebsco, I've gotten a phone call or e-mail from someone in management there. It's always been to solicit more information on the issue…