Information Science

In a recent post on openness and sharing in chemistry, I briefly touched on proximity to industry. This is actually somewhat nuanced and a few research studies have looked into it. As I mentioned Birnholtz, in his dissertation [1] and subsequent JASIST article [2] describes proximity to industry as both/either being funded by a commercial or industrial organization and/or "the extent to which there is an interest by researchers or others in commercializing or otherwise profiting financially from research discoveries" (dissertation, p27). There's the myth that the research university gets all…
With well known and respected open science projects coming out of chemistry as well as cool tools like pubchem and emolecules... it seems a bit unfair of me to ask if chemists are grinches. But there has been and there continues to be a lot of study of data/information/knowledge sharing in chemistry - or, really, the lack thereof.  In general, pre-prints are not passed around or self-archived, there is very little data sharing (there are counter examples in crystallography), and details are withheld from conference presentations or the conference slides are not made available (Milo used to…
How do you balance robust enterprise IT services with computer science as a research area? This post has been floating around in my head for a while - I even had this started but lost the draft in a tragic overnight OIT loaner laptop reboot. I can't actually answer this question, and trying to has left this draft in my queue for way too long. So this is really some thoughts and more questions. In a research organization that does CS research, you'll still have an IT department to keep the lights on, so to speak. They run the network, set up new machines, and all of the other typical things. …
One of the great things about my interests overlapping computer science is that computer scientists believe in self archiving and making their work freely available on the web. The scientometric parts of IS are that way, too, but the L of the LIS... well, that's just sad (except for Dorothea, her stuff is available). I still hope to write a review of one of these books because I'm really enjoying it. Here are a few: Hearst, Marti (2009). Search User Interfaces. Cambridge University Press. Available from: http://searchuserinterfaces.com/book/. Sure there are lots of books on information…
(I'm posting things from my old blog while I'm on a much-needed vacation) This originally appeared December 21, 2007 Implications of newer models of popularization of science for science library collection development* When we look at science communication - communication about science or by scientists - we normally divide that into communication among scientists (scholarly communication) and communication to non-scientists (variously: popular communication of science, popularization, or the French - vulgarization). Within scholarly communication we have formal scholarly communication (…
(I'm posting some classics from my old blog while I'm on a much needed vacation) This originally appeared February 26, 2006 The reference interview in a scientific research setting: question pairs establish intellectual identity (This is thinking out loud stuff not approved scientific paper stuff ;) ) In library school, we're told that we don't need to know the subject, we just need to know how to find it. Yet in real life reference situations, we see customers making quick decisions on whom to ask and what to ask based on some assumptions of common ground. Librarians try to establish common…
As I mentioned in my previous post, I did a little Q&A about the new outsourcing arrangement that CISTI has negotiated with Infotrieve. Q1. What's the effect on jobs at CISTI from this move? As you may know, NRC-CISTI is transforming itself to be well positioned to serve the needs of Canadian knowledge workers now and in the future. This transformation is a major undertaking for the organization and will require a significant transition for NRC-CISTI's workforce. NRC is working to mitigate the effect on employees by seeking to place as many of the affected employees as possible within…
Is it possible or even desirable to have one search interface that serves every need? I have about 10 minutes to write this placeholder of a post. Hopefully, I'll get the opportunity to revisit this topic near and dear to my heart later. I've often railed against naive librarians and administrators who insist we need "google boxes" as our only interface for every system, for every need, regardless of what is behind the box. In fact, we just fought this battle had this discussion with our enterprise search consultants, but anyhoo. This particular post was prompted by Martin Fenner's discussion…
While I'm trying to get back on my blogging feet, here are some quick takes on things happening in library land: The kerfuffle about the institutional subscription price of Scientific American continues. For those of you joining the discussion late, Nature Publishing Group is now integrating it into the Nature journals web site, offering a back file, and perpetual access to what you've purchased. Nothing will be pulled from Ebsco but I guess at some point new stuff won't be added. Ok, that's sounds fine, right? The only thing is that the institutional subscription price will go from $40 to $…
It's time for the annual Mocking of the Thomson session. Check out my previous iterations of this amusing pastime: 2002, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2008. Yes, I've been at this for a while, but to no avail. My main point in all this is to make clear that I don't believe that the Nobel prizes are chosen on the basis of citation count. Sure, there's going to be a correlation between the two, but the causation is extremely weak. Thomson's constant hawking of their "Citation Laureates" is, in my opinion, self-serving and wrong-headed. And yes, they do get them right occasionally, but that's because…
Here's an amazing and fairly unique opportunity for a research-minded librarian who wants to significantly advance her or his research program. The appointment is for up to three years and the starting date is somewhat flexible. Here's the terms of reference for the position: Each appointment to the Chair will be a limited term appointment for up to three years. A committee will be established to undertake a search for the Chair. The selection will be based on the quality of the proposed research program along with evidence for the successful completion of the research proposal. The…
quality? popularity? utility? I'm pretty sure I've blogged about MESUR (a research project that studied how usage statistics - as we call them in the industry - can be a metric like citations are). I've also blogged a discussion by MJ Kurtz in which he discusses how usage is very much like citations, if offset.  Some researchers including some bibliometricians have issues with using usage for some pretty good reasons: if citations can be gamed then click fraud anyone? if we don't know what citations mean, then what can we say about downloads at all? what is actually counted? pdf downloads?…
I haven't done one of these in a while, so there's quite a backlog to clear. Reports Digital Scholarly Communication: A Snapshot of Current Trends Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity Strategic Outsourcing and Cloud Computing: Reality Is a Sober Adversary Library Storage Facilities and the Future of Print Collections in North America XC User Research Preliminary Report (Extensible Catalog) Edgeless University: why higher education must embrace technology Beyond Scientific Publication: Strategies for Disseminating How Teens Use Media: A Nielsen report on the myths and realities of teen…
No, I don't mean the werewolf entry in Wikipedia, I mean the use of Wikipedia by werewolves. You see, I recently received a review copy of The Werewolf's Guide to Life: A Manual for the Newly Bitten by Ritch Duncan, Bob Powers and Emily Flake. As you can imagine, it an imaginary non-fiction book helping new werewolves to cope with their newly transformed lives -- it talks about work, romance and all the rest. I'm not quite finished it yet, but it's very amusing and definitely worth a look if you like that kind of thing. What struck me, though, is something from the entry on figuring out when…
...'cause I thought I heard of a software and I know people at x conference said and seems like.... I get this all the time. Most recently I did a pretty detailed presentation of some analysis I did. Once I was done, I got the question: can you demo the tool that provided these answers for our boss? Another time that sticks out in memory - a customer saying to me: oh, find out what software or algorithm P (a male member of our group) uses to give all of that helpful info. Just as I thought, P had a reminder set up so that every Wednesday morning he opened the web page and searched and…
See: Book of Trogool, The Humble Index. http://scienceblogs.com/bookoftrogool/2009/08/the_humble_index.php Excellent (luckily Dorothea's and my expertises are almost completely orthogonal :) ) BTW: any half decent librarian who knows her reference collection can answer a lot of fact-type questions faster with the right books with decent indexes than with the major search engine. Yay, indexers! oops! Broken link - thank you commenter
In peer reviewed research, scientific insight is often gained as much from the comments on a published journal article as it is from the paper itself. Comments address mistakes overlooked during peer review and offer scientists with opposing views a chance to critique their competitors' work. But what if the journal refuses to publish a comment because it is barely over the accepted length--while simultaneously publishing much longer comments on other articles? Steinn Sigurdsson of Dynamics of Cats discusses an account written by physicist "How to Publish a Scientific Comment in 1 2 3 Easy…
The Internet may have largely replaced many traditional means of storing and sharing information, but as ScienceBloggers are pointing out, it has far to go before its potential is fully realized, particularly in research. On Built on Facts, Matt Springer discusses what it would take to digitize the entire Library of Congress collection—scanning the pages of all 32 million titles and finding enough server space to store the data produced. On Common Knowledge, John Wilbanks compares the functionality of published scientific journals to that of web-based publishing, arguing that the web not…
During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from November 7, 2007. It generated quite a few interesting comments, so you might want to check back at the original post. My feeling on a lot of these points has shifted a bit with time, so I'll probably revisit the topic in the fall. ===== This is a topic I've been thinking about a lot recently, as we (at York and as a profession) start to move in a coordinated way to making ebooks an important part of our collections. What's the…
Scott Delman, Group Publisher of the ACM, has responded to my post earlier this month on society publishers and open access. That post generated some very good discussion in the post comments that are well worth checking out. Delman's article is in the most recent Communications of the ACM (v52i8): Responding to the Blogosphere. Here are some excerpts, although Delman's article is so interesting that I wish I could quote the whole thing. The fact that ACM charges both for access to the published information in its Digital Library and also extends the courtesy of "Green OA" to its authors is…