Information Science
jdupuis | July 18, 2009That's four librar* blogs here at ScienceBlogs, of course, with hopefully more to come. We're taking over!
I'll let Dorothea introduce herself:
I'm very pleased to welcome you all to The Book of Trogool, a brand-new blog about e-research. My name is Dorothea Salo, I'm an academic librarian, and I am fascinated with the changes that computers have wrought in the academic-research enterprise. I hope to explore those changes, and particularly library responses to them, in the company of the wonderful ScienceBlogs community. My thanks to John, Christina, and Walt for paving the way, and to Erin…
cpikas | July 8, 2009NB: this blog post is not about cold fusion!
.... and is that a good or bad or both thing?
Upon reading something I'd written on scholarly communication in science and blogs, a reviewer suggested I read stuff by Lewenstein. My first reaction was, "huh?" He's an STS researcher who did a few articles on the cold fusion episode - but not really about the science but how communication happened, how events unfolded, and who knew what when. But it had been a while, so I thought it was worth doubling back.
This seems to be the primary article:
Lewenstein, B. V. (1995). From fax to facts:…
cpikas | July 2, 2009In a recent post I mentioned giving real feedback to vendors and people designing systems and services for us. Sue left a comment that the vendor basically acts like she's alone in this - and they say that to me, too, but we soldier on. (oh, and AIAA says we're the only ones who have any problems with their digital library)
Right now, AIP Publishing has a beta of their new journal pages that you can try out and then either e-mail them or fill out a survey with your feedback. Please do, they're some of the good guys.
Similarly, Jonathan Rochkind is impressed by the feedback he got at a recent…
cpikas | June 28, 2009I took classes on qualitative research and naturalistic research methods from researchers who follow the constructivist paradigm rather closely and who don't really believe in mixed methods research. I took statistics classes from professors who are friendly towards naturalistic methods, but who only use quantitative methods. Other professors around me use some mixed methods, some rhetorical/critical methods, some large scale quantitative methods, (and then there's SNA)... All of these paradigms have related epistemologies*. The practitioners of naturalistic methods, in particular, are often…
cpikas | June 27, 2009Michael J. Kurtz of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics came to speak at MPOW at a gathering of librarians from across the larger institution (MPOW is a research lab affiliated with a large private institution). He's an astronomer but more recently he's been publishing in bibliometrics quite a bit using data from the ADS. You can review his publications using this search.
As an aside, folks outside of astro and planetary sciences might not be familiar with ADS, but it's an excellent and incredibly powerful research database. Sometimes librarians turn their nose up at it because…
cpikas | June 23, 2009It's that time again: the 2008 Journal Citation Reports are out from Thomson Reuters. It's started already, too, the e-mails to listservs and press releases. So I'm re-posting one of my posts from my old blog for those of you who might not have seen it.
Like prices and hemlines, why do impact factors always go up?
Ever notice that certain time of year when every journal publisher announces how the impact factors of their journals is up? When the Journal Citation Report (JCR) comes out... the press releases follow. The impact factor is a measure of how important the journal is - if it is…
cpikas | June 18, 2009Bummer. Apparently Windows Live Writer doesn't automatically save drafts. So here are my foggy recollections of this session.
The session was a bit different this year. In previous years we've mostly discussed providing services (collection development and reference to computer science researchers. This year, we had three speakers on a theme: "Data Curation and Special Libraries: Education, Trends, and Developments"
The first speaker was Bryan Heidorn from UIUC. He teaches bioinformatics and information retrieval stuff, but he primarily works now as a Program Manager in the Division of…
cpikas | June 16, 2009(came in late because the speaker I initially chose to see failed to show up)
A speaker from Serials Solutionâs Summon reviewed various pieces of research done recently both by LIS researchers and by big libraries. Summed up pretty well by Tenopir (he copied her graph), increasing costs, decreasing importance as a gateway for research creates a value gap for the library. Scholars view the library and its resources as reliable and authoritative, but painful to use. So they start with google, because itâs easy and then link out to our subscriptions and my never know theyâre using library…
cpikas | June 13, 2009If you've read my blog at all, you probably know I'm a Taylor (1962,
1968)
href="http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/650">groupie.
In fact, in a recent
href="http://scienceblogs.com/christinaslisrant/2009/06/librarian_basics_the_reference.php">post
I talked about going from a visceral need to a compromised
need. This is a central idea in library science. So when I
saw this article in my feeds today, I had to pounce on it:
title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Journal+of+the+American+Society+…
cpikas | June 10, 2009This is the first in a series discussing things that librarians do.
Stephanie
Willen Brown pointed me to this hilarious video from UT Arlington.
Actually, the other librarian's reference interview isn't the model of
perfection, either, but we'll talk about that.
The purpose of a reference interview is for the librarian to understand
the patron's information need - what information will be useful to them
to resolve a problem or learn about something or whatever.
When done right, the patron can go from a sort of general
unease (anomalous state of knowledge[1]) to information in hand/on…
cpikas | June 6, 2009This post serves a few purposes. First,
href="http://friendfeed.com/billhooker/ffbe5e1d/secret-science-again-drugmonkey">
Bill Hooker questioned
href="http://scienceblogs.com/drugmonkey/2009/06/secret_science_again.php#comment-1680220">Crotty's
assertion about the importance of patents to university
researchers [*]. Bill also
href="http://www.sennoma.net/main/archives/2009/06/what_use_are_research_patents.php">posted
a nice summary of AUTM's statistics (later in
href="http://scienceblogs.com/drugmonkey/2009/06/secret_science_again.php">DrugMonkey's
comment stream there…
cpikas | June 3, 2009This is the 5th of the test essays in preparation for comps.
This question was posed by my advisor. I opened it
and went, "wow." It's sort of like the perfect storm of question.
When I first finished it, I thought I did really well, but
now it seems less than completely satisfying. So here's the essay written in 2 hours, timer started prior to opening the question.
Question (IR 1)
Informal interpersonal communication is very important among
scientists. Describe a retrieval system to identify collaborators.
Include the following in your answer:
a. Knowledge representation to enhance…
cpikas | June 2, 2009Last set of comps readings, I talked about sense of community:
belonging, having influence, fulfillment of needs, and emotional
support. Now, let's talk about the physics version of
"community" - cohesive subgroups. In a graph, these are
groups of nodes in a graph that are more connected to each other than
to other parts of the graph. Clumpy spots. If you read old
href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/30594217">Wasserman and
Faust, you'll probably think of cliques, cores, and lambda
sets... some how these didn't do it for me - literally, when I was
trying to
href="http://terpconnect.…
jdupuis | June 2, 2009As you may have noticed, ScienceBlogs is making a concerted effort to engage a broad range of the Information Science community. That community includes librarians, publishing people and scholars who are interested in issues around libraries, information management, scholarly publishing, Open Access, research metrics, human-computer interaction, privacy, intellectual property and a whole host of other topics.
The first step was recruiting a couple of new bloggers from the library community -- Christina Pikas and myself -- to supplement the considerable amount of IS discussion that's already…
ejohnson | June 1, 2009
A new channel made its debut last week on ScienceBlogs: Information Science. Through feedback from the approximately 10,000 librarians who regularly visit ScienceBlogs, we came to realize that information and library scientists are positioned to offer a unique perspective on subjects that are pertinent to all working scientists: Open access and open science; digital and print publishing; information property and ownership, and more. Check out the newest bloggers on ScienceBlogs, John Dupuis of Confessions of a Science Librarian and Christina Pikas of Christina's LIS Rant, to get a taste of…
cpikas | May 31, 2009Sunday morning I was all set to do another essay - just had to pick a
question source and question - when my mother in law called to say she
would be stopping by at about the same time I would be finishing up the
2 hour window, leaving no time for emergency house cleaning (no, I
haven't grown out of that yet despite being married for >10
years). So here are a few readings on "community" which I'll drop like
a hot potato and then run to clean the house.
Both Wellman and Rheingold dispute the idea that we're all "
href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/43599073">Bowling Alone"
and assert…
cpikas | May 30, 2009See 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…
cpikas | May 29, 2009Seems 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…
cpikas | May 27, 2009This 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…
cpikas | May 24, 2009And 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…