See what a "test essay" is in the introduction to my previous essay. This is a question another doctoral student was assigned. The question asked for a lot of details, so nothing is covered very thoroughly. I did only minor editing just now, and those edits are marked with []. The question: "A large firm is acquiring technology to enhance group work. because of the great expense, management is very concerned about assessing the adoption process at various times over the next two years and taking steps, as necessary to insure its successful adoption within the firm a) define "successful…
Seems like I was at the wrong session at the wrong time - I missed Bilder's comments and others that have traveled widely on twitter. Search for #ssp09. The opening keynote today was by the current head of href="http://www.arl.org">ARL, the Association of Research Libraries, Dr Charles B. Lowry.  ARL includes123 major research libraries from the US and Canada - members are the libraries, not individual librarians. Note, too that I think he said that 113 of these were universities.  There are research libraries that are not in universities, btw.  You can read about their mission on their…
I wasn't complete sure what to expect with this conference. There were some old acquaintances from the society publishers who spend a lot of time with the Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics Division at the Special Libraries Association (Hi Tony! Hi Terry!). I also spoke with a representative of IMLS, some other librarians, and Victor from Mendeley. Some sessions had some people spouting marketing BS about impressions and conversions and librarians as checkbooks, but the majority were friendly and looking to better scholarly communication. In the morning after the keynote, I went to We Have…
Re-architecting Science: A Vision for STM in the 21st Century by Adam Bly Opening Keynote, May 28, 2009 - this is live blogged, basically notes on what he said... analysis to follow. Where the world is today, where science is, at a high level.. Need to solve problems using a systems approach.  Study of epidemics requires understanding of climate change, need to study growth, need to study demographics and the future of society, etc. These are tough times, need science more than ever, but they are optimistic times because what we know and what we can know. Exciting things happening high energy…
It's right up the street, there are discounts for librarians, several sessions talk about collaborations between libraries and publishers (we'll see), and lots of interesting stuff. This page has the program. I probably won't live blog, but I'll certainly post some summaries and wrap up information. No doubt I'll be tweeting, too (@cpikas, #ssp09)
This is the third in a series of test essays I'm doing to prepare for my comprehensive exams.  The questions for these essays come from 3 places: ones I've made up based on my readings, ones assigned to previous doctoral students, and ones my advisor makes up based on my readings.  I'm assuming the advisor ones will be closest, but I don't want to knock them all out in a row - it almost seems like a waste when part of this is getting the timing right, practicing writing, and test-taking.   Rules of the road are as follows: closed book, closed internet, all you have is the question, a computer…
What happens when you href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087332/quotes">cross the streams? Or, norms in online communities, how journal commenting is different, and waving the flag on potential issues when aggregating web comments with journal articles. There have been a couple of interesting discussions on friendfeed recently about commenting on journal sites vs. commenting elsewhere and about commenting anonymously, with an established online persona, or with the name on your drivers license. (I'm intentionally not linking to them, because the threads ended up in some less than…
Here in the United States, it's Memorial Day. This is a day set aside to remember and be thankful for the sacrifices of the men and women who gave their lives for our country and way of life. So, thank you! And thank you to all of the wounded veterans for your sacrifice. And thank you to all of the service men and women and veterans who pledged to give your life in our country's defense.
And now for something a little different. I'm continuing my preparations for comprehensive exams from my old blog.  There will be some test essays and also some continuing notes on readings.  Typically, I don't mark my notes on readings as "Research Blogging" because the articles are some what older, and some of my notes are very brief although they are on peer-reviewed research. I would be interested in feedback on that - if you think I should mark them research blogging, let me know! Quan-Haase, A., & Wellman, B. (2005). Local Virtuality in an Organization: Implications for Community…
I believe in libraries and librarians. I think it was Dana Roth who posted this quote to a listserv: "To ask why we need libraries at all, when there is so much information available elsewhere, is about as sensible as asking if roadmaps are necessary now that there are so very many roads." ~Jon Bing, Professor of IT Law, Univ. of Oslo I hear this all the time - why do we need libraries? why do we need librarians? If it weren't for accreditation, we would get rid of this place... Young kids today, they can find whatever they need on the web. I can find it myself - why just the other day,…
So there I was... merrily blogging along for 5 years... when all of the sudden... the borg needs librarians (and who doesn't?). Please allow me to introduce myself. I am a librarian in a university-affiliated research lab. Our lab does mostly physical sciences and engineering. My favorite things to research go BOOM or WHOOSH! I wrote a long post on what librarians do, but what you need to know about me, is that I do in-depth literature searching and I'm embedded in some teams. In-depth means that I might work 40 hours or so on something and the completed product is an annotated…