escience

Kristin Briney's Data Management for Researchers: Organize, maintain and share your data for research success is a book that should be on the shelf (physical or virtual) of every librarian, researcher and research administrator. Scientists, engineers, social scientists, humanists -- anyone who's work involves generating and keeping track of digital data. This is the book for you. Like the title says -- data management for researchers. If you have data and you're a researcher, this is the book for you. Organize, maintain and share, the title says. If you're a researcher that needs to manage…
As I mentioned way back on October 22nd, I was kindly invited to give a talk at the Brock University Physics Department as part of their seminar series. The talk was on Getting Your Science Online, a topic that I'm somewhat familiar with! Since it was coincidentally Open Access Week, I did kind of an A-Z of online science starting with the various open movements: access, data and notebooks. From there I did a quick tour of the whys and wherefores of blogs and Twitter. There was a good turnout of faculty and grad students with lots of great questions and feedback, some more skeptical that…
It seems that Brock University in St. Catherine's, Ontario really likes me. Two years ago, the Library kindly invited me to speak during their Open Access Week festivities. And this year the Physics Department has also very kindly invited me to be part of their Seminar Series, also to talk about Getting Your Science Online, this time during OA Week mostly by happy coincidence. It's tomorrow, Tuesday October 23, 2012 in room H313 at 12:30. Here's the abstract I've provided: Physicist and Reinventing Discovery author Michael Nielsen has said that due to the World Wide Web, “[t]he process of…
My colleagues and I are taking our Creative Commons/Panton Principles presentation on the road to another library conference this winter. As a result, I'm still compiling more references on the topic so I thought I share what I've found recently with all of you. Of course, suggestions for more resources are always welcome in the comments. NLM APIs (library as data incubator) Harvard Releases Big Data for Books What does one do with millions of MARC records? Harvard Library Bibliographic Dataset Now Available via EBSCO Discovery Service™ from EBSCO Publishing Harvard Publicly Releases…
As I mentioned last week, on Tuesday, April 17 I was part of a workshop on Creative Commons our Scholarly Communications Committee put on for York library staff. My section was on open data and the Panton Principles. While not directly related to Creative Commons, we thought talking a bit about an application area for licensing in general and a specific case where CC is applied would be interesting for staff. We figured it would be the least engaging part of the workshop so I agreed to go last and use any time that was left. Rather unexpectedly, the idea of data licensing and in particular…
As part of a workshop on Creative Commons, I'm doing a short presentation on Open Data and The Panton Principles this week to various members of our staff. I thought I'd share some of the resources I've consulted during my preparations. I'm using textmining of journal articles as a example so I'm including a few resources along those lines as well. The Panton Principles Why does Dryad use CC0? #sparc2012 a manifesto in absentia for Open Data Information mining from Springer full-text: I ask for freedom Textmining Update: Max Haussler's Questions to publishers: They have a duty to reply The…
Welcome to the latest installment in my very occasional series of interviews with people in the scitech world. This time around the subject is Michael Nielsen, author of the recently published Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science and prolific speaker on the Open Science lecture circuit. A recent example of his public speaking is his TEDxWaterloo talk on Open Science. You can follow his blog here and read his recent Wall Street Journal article, The New Einsteins Will Be Scientists Who Share. I'd like to thank Michael for his provocative and insightful responses. Enjoy…
Another issue full of interesting articles: E-Science Librarianship: Field Undefined by Elsa Alvaro, Heather Brooks, Monica Ham, Stephanie Poegel, and Sarah Rosencrans, Indiana University Comparison of the Contributions of CAPLUS and MEDLINE to the Performance of SciFinder in Retrieving the Drug Literature by Svetla Baykoucheva, University of Maryland Reference Management Software: a Comparative Analysis of Four Products by Ron Gilmour and Laura Cobus-Kuo, Ithaca College American Woods: Conservation of a Unique Item by Tierney Lyons, Penn State Worthington Scranton Local Food Systems:…
Trust me, I really tried to come up with a cool, funny title for this post. Anyways... We have a new reference assistant starting here next week. As somewhat typical for such a position, the new staff member has a science subject background rather than a library background. In this case, Maps/GIS. So I thought it might be a good idea to gather together some resources for helping our new hire get acclimatised to reference work in an academic science & engineering library. After all, we're not born with the ability to do good reference interviews! With the help of the fine folk in…
I'll be at the 2011 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries at the University of Ottawa for the next few days. I plan on doing a bit of tweeting while I'm there but probably no live blogging. I hope to have a summary post up here sometime after the conference with my impressions. Taking advantage of the relative proximity of Ottawa, this will be my first time at JCDL and I'm really looking forward to it. It's probably a bit more technical than I've been getting into recently but stretching the mind is always a good thing. I hope to see some of you there. Definitely if you're…
I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, is from August 14, 2007. (Weinberger left a detailed comment at the original post, for those that are interested.) ======= David Weinberger's…
I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart, is from April 12, 2008. ======= You know how I'm always complaining about business-y buzz/hype books & articles? How they're 1/3 repetition,…
I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, is from May 18, 2008. ======= It seems that at least half the time I mention this book to someone interested in the way the web is changing social patterns the…
If you're in the Greater Toronto Area next Tuesday, please drop by and see Michael talk. I'm thrilled that my library is co-sponsoring such a fantastic event! Presented by: Janusz A. Kozinski - Dean, Faculty of Science and Engineering The Division of Natural Science The Steacie Science and Engineering LibraryLocation: Paul A. Delaney Gallery, 320 Bethune CollegeDate: Tuesday, March 15, 2011Time: 12:30 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Refreshments will be served courtesy of Steacie Science and Engineering Library Prof. Nielsen will describe an evolution in how scientific discoveries are made driven by new…
A terrific new opportunity at my institution. I'm not in the reporting department or on the search committee, but I can answer general questions about York and the environment. My email is jdupuis at yorku dot ca. Position Rank: Full Time Tenure Stream - Assistant LibrarianDiscipline/Field: Digital Humanities LibrarianHome Faculty: LibrariesHome Department/Area/Division: Scott LibraryAffiliation/Union: YUFAPosition Start Date: August 1, 2011 Digital Humanities Librarian (Continuing Appointment) Scott Reference Department York University Libraries seeks a creative, motivated, innovative, and…
Stealth librarianship is a way of being. This particular edition of the manifesto applies to academic libraries. The principles of stealth librarianship apply to all branches of the profession, each in particular ways. Other manifestos could exist for, say, public or corporate librarians. However the core is the same: to thrive and survive in a challenging environment, we must subtly and not-so-subtly insinuate ourselves into the lives of our patrons. We must concentrate on becoming part of their world, part of their landscape. Our two core patron communities as academic librarians are…
I'm always very happy to see a librarian blogger embedded in a science blogging network. It's very important to get the library message out beyond just the library echo chamber and to the faculty, students and researchers who are out patron community. So I was very pleased to see Elizabeth Brown's new blog, Social Disruption, on the Science 3.0 blog network. From her inauguaral post: I've been able to found contacts and establish connections to quite a few people through Twitter, friendfeed, Linkedin, and Mendeley. This is/was an important resource as I'm the only person in the library with…
A few days ago I posted some thoughts on the programming of the recent ScienceOnline 2011 conference and yesterday I posted some thoughts about the more social and fun aspects of the event. In this post I like to look forward to next year's conference and start thinking about some of the sessions I might like to organize. My very early thoughts are coalescing around undergraduate education around. I have a couple of ideas which I think might be interesting to pursue. First of all, I'm interested in collaborations around teaching undergrads about the scholarly information landscape. On…
Yeah, I'm talking about you, #scio11. The conference that still has significant twitter traffic three days after it's over. I've been to conferences that don't have that kind of traffic while they're happening. In fact, that would be pretty well every other conference. Every edition of ScienceOnline seems to have a different virtual theme for me and this one seemed to somehow circle back to the blogging focus on earlier editions of the conference. Of course, the program is so diverse and the company so stimulating, that different people will follow different conference paths and perhaps…
Yes, ScienceOnline 2011 is coming up next week already! My how time flies. Just as I did last year and in the tradition of Bora's introductions of the various attendees for the upcoming ScienceOnline 2011 conference, I thought I'd once again list all the library people that are attending. I'm not going to try and introduce each of the library people in any detail, I'll leave that to Bora. I'll just get a list of all of us together in one place. Over the years, there's been a solid tradition of librarians and library people attending Science Online and this year looks to be no exception.…