Confessions of a Science Librarian

Check out the new home for Confessions of a Science Librarian

2009-05-18T11:30:00.001-04:00

Over at http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/.

After 6.5 years and over 1300 posts, a new chapter begins.

My sincerest thanks to everyone who's read, commented and supported this blog over the years for your time and attention. And I'll be seeing you over at the new digs!

Library Faculty Open Access Declarations

2009-05-13T12:20:00.002-04:00

That I know of, we have ~~three~~ four groups of library faculty that have adopted declarations of one sort or another that promote more availability and openness for the content they produce, either work-related or professional/scholarly contributions:

University of Calgary Academic Council of Libraries and Cultural Resources. IR deposit. (via)
University of Oregon Library Faculty. IR Deposit, CC license. (via)
The University of Michigan Library. CC license to materials such as "bibliographies, research guides, lesson plans, and technology tutorials." (via)
Oregon State University Libraries. IR deposit. (Via Dorothea in the comments)

Now I have two questions:

Are there any others I don't know about?
What are the rest of us waiting for?

Librarians are big promoters of OA but I think sometimes we don't quite practice what we preach. An opportunity exists for us to show that we mean what we say -- that sharing and openness are the values we both promote and practice.

(Disclosure: There have been rumblings at MPOW about this, but nothing concrete yet. I'm also rather slowly depositing my own stuff in our institutional repository; I'll try and get something else in today. BTW, check out my spiffy new web site!)

C2E2/CDEN: Engineering the Future

2009-05-13T09:33:00.004-04:00

Thanks to Sharon Murphy of Queens for reminding me that the final deadline for the call for submissions is May 15th for The Sixth International Conference on Innovation and Practices in Engineering Design and Engineering Education. The conference is July 27 - 29, 2009 at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

From the general call for papers:

The sixth CDEN International Design Engineering Conference will focus on design innovation and engineering education that are such essential ingredients of creating a new future for the people of Canada and the world. Submissions can include, but are not limited to, the philosophy of design; tools and techniques for effective and successful design; methods and tools for designing to meet needs; methods for and research into the assessment of design; teaching and promoting design; humanitarian design; design successes and failures; tear-downs of designs and design-processes; the infrastructure required for design; lessons and methods used in non-engineering design fields; design for commercialization; and related topics.

The goal of the conference is to explore design practice and teaching that leads to better lives for Canadians.

Sharon's coordinating the technical session on "Information Research and Knowledge Management" and would love to see proposals from librarians. You can contact her at murphys at queensu dot ca.

Unfortunately, the conference is during my Summer vacation this year, so I won't be able to attend. It's doubly unlucky because Hamilton is so close to Toronto that attending would have been quite easy.

The real reason I will never give up my job: the library

2009-05-12T17:32:00.002-04:00

A nice sentiment from not one, but two profs: Eugene Wallingford and Rudbeckia Hirta!

There's a lot of things you can do with the Internet

2009-05-08T14:08:00.003-04:00

Thanks to Michael Geist for the information that tomorrow's Ivor Tossell column in the Globe and Mail will be his last. I've really enjoyed Tossell's column over the years, even (especially) when I've disagreed. He's given good coverage of the online world and I'll miss that. I understand that sometimes a column just runs its course and maybe the Globe wasn't getting what it hoped for any more, but I'll certainly miss it. Hopefully, the Globe will replace the column with something new and equally exciting.

I'll quote most the same bits from the final column as Geist because they are representative of Tossell at his best:

There's a lot of things you can do with the Internet. You can sit around all day, strip-mining the Net for free movies. You can disappear into virtual worlds. You can log onto your favourite website and leave a comment that will cause readers to wonder whether the planet wouldn't have been better off left to the dolphins.

You can buy a webcam and do something profoundly embarrassing that will render you unemployable for years. You can spend your days filling up Facebook with a hollow performance of yourself. You can create a Web service that seems destined to change everything, only to discover - several billion dollars later - that it really changed nothing, because people are people, and the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Or you can make something. On the sunniest days, I look at the Web and I see a world of people making things. Maybe they're cat videos; maybe they're full-blown recreations of science-fiction series from the late sixties. Either way, the creative process never happens in a vacuum. It's an endless back and forth of ideas and materials, and some of them will always cross the lines of ownership and copyright.

Friday Fun: Five songs I love

2009-05-08T09:15:00.000-04:00

Not my five favourite songs -- that list doesn't really exist. Not the five best songs. Not even five objectively great songs. Just five songs that really keep knocking around my head. This week is pretty hard rock -- maybe I'll do a different set another one of these weeks.

Neon Knights by Black Sabbath. I'm a major Sabbath fan, mostly of the Ozzy and Dio eras although I enjoy the other eras as well. Interestingly, I never really got into the Ozzy stuff until after I heard this song, which is probably my favourite Sabbath song.
Tears of the Dragon by Bruce Dickinson. I've never been that much of an Iron Maiden fan but I do love Dickinson's solo stuff. Chemical Wedding is one of my all time favourite albums. (A great unplugged version of Tears of a Dragon.)
Dreamline by Rush. Canadian content, of course, in mandated on all blogs originating in the Great White North. I'm not a huge Rush fan, but this is one song of theirs I really love.
Young Man Blues by The Who. Back in high school, when everyone else was arguing whether The Beatles or The Stones were the best rock band in the world, I was saying The Who (Yes, I'm that old). I haven't changed my mind.
My Sacrifice by Creed. Prime cheese, I know, but I just love this song. It's probably the only Creed song I like even a bit.

So what are five songs you really love?

Are you a librarian?

2009-05-05T19:25:00.000-04:00

Such were the innocent words on the big ad on the ScienceBlogs site the other day.

Well, I'm a librarian, I like the ScienceBlogs site quite a bit, so I clicked the link. Lo and behold a librarian survey. "Hey", I think, "ScienceBlogs wants to know what I think about stuff!"

To cut a long story short, it's not really a survey about what librarians think about science publishing, science blogs or ScienceBlogs. It's a marketing survey basically asking us if we subscribe to Seed Magazine (both Seed and ScienceBlogs are run by the same company). My library already does. As a nice reward for filling out the survey, they promised to send anyone who filled it out a ScienceBlogs coffee mug. At that point, I thought it was a fair trade and promptly posted a link to the survey on both FriendFeed and Twitter. And forgot about it.

But, thanks to a couple of comments on Friendfeed from suelibrarian, especially "I got to a question related to whether I would consider purchasing a particular magazine then got out of it." I started thinking a bit more.

At this point, it would probably be most useful to check out the FF conversation that resulted.

Offended, annoyed, bemused, whatever. The point that came to mind from this particular bit of marketing was that Seed saw me as a librarian more in the cheque-writing role than in another possible role, that of a collaborator with publishers in the job of disseminating scholarly and other information about science and technology.

And that's ok. I certainly wear a "buying stuff" hat. I like Seed Magazine and I really like ScienceBlogs, so I bear no ill will to them at all for this particular marketing strategy and will use my mug with great gusto when it arrives. If they pick up a few library subscriptions and that helps them get through a tough economy, great. (On the other hand, it would have been nice if...)

More precisely, this incident has raised a number of questions I have for myself. Scholarly communications is changing, Open Access is growing, commercial publishers are holding on to their places fiercely, scholarly monographs are transforming (slowly), media is approaching a weird singularity.

What are some of those questions?

How do we want publishers to see us?
What do we need to tell publishers about what we do?
How do we form as strong ties to OA publishers as we have often done with toll access publishers in the past, both commercial and society?
What would an OA publisher Library Advisory Group look like?
How can librarians help publishers figure out what business model is most appropriate for them?
What does a post-stuff library look like?
What does a post-stuff librarian do?

Lots of questions, of course, and not particularly any answers at this point.

I'd be interested to hear any answers and/or questions from all of you out there. Maybe we can come up with some together.

Is Canada losing the lab-rat race?

2009-05-04T11:26:00.001-04:00

Good article in Saturday's Globe and Mail by Erin Anderssen and Anne McIlroy.

Ariana Rostami ranks chemistry and biology as her favourite classes. She gets top marks in her advanced Grade 11 courses and is happy to discuss quantum mechanics. But ask her about a career in research and she grimaces as though someone suggested locking her in a dark closet.

Which is only a slight exaggeration of how she and many of her fellow students regard the scientific enterprise - they picture long, lonely nights exiled in a lab, isolated from other humans, continually begging for funding.

"Look up 'scientist' on Google," the 16-year-old says, "and you will see someone in a lab coat." At the moment, she is considering something with more immediate results, such as physiotherapy.

*snip*

How do you change education systems that often drive students away from science and build a national culture in which the best young minds naturally envision themselves as future Nobel winners and not ostracized, penny-pinching lab rats?

Just ask the students in Ottawa if they can name a Canadian scientist. "Only if he's dead," jokes Shadman Zamau, 16, before volunteering Alexander Graham Bell - whose invention of the telephone is now more than 130 years old.

It's a very eye-opening article on an important issue -- attracting young people to science research careers. There's a very interesting tension, here, of course. You always want the best and brightest to pursue research careers. But there are many things that are discouraging them.

First of all, actual career prospects are mixed at best for academia. Salaries are often only mediocre after a very long apprenticeship. Compared to other careers like medicine or law, this is definitely to science's disadvantage.

Second of all, scientists have a very low media profile and what there is of it is very poor. Again, compared to medicine and law, what's the profile of science on TV or in the movies? Pretty well the only positive images are in the CSI shows, and those are more crime shows than science shows.

Third of all, science has a low social profile in Canada. When you look at how it's published (especially the major commercial and academic houses, which virtually ignore science and what's happening at NRC Press), how it's featured in newspapers and other media, what the various governments actually do as opposed to what they say they're going to do, it's hard not to argue that we're getting the national science infrastructure we actually want.

Interestingly, the one argument that doesn't resonate with me is the idea that science is poorly taught in high school and that discourages students. I went to high school, and all the subjects were taught poorly, not just science. I had good science teachers and bad science teachers. But the exact same thing was true of the other subjects as well -- there were good and bad teachers.

Anyways, read the article. It makes these points in much more eloquent detail that I can.

BTW, I can't help seeing this particular quote in the article as a clarion call for more Canadian science blogging:

Success breeds success, he says. "As a nation, we expect our hockey teams to win because they always have. If you are good as a nation at something, there are role models for young people coming through."

Scientists themselves accept some of the blame. Samuel Weiss, who won a prestigious Gairdner Award last year for his discovery that the adult brain can produce new cells, says Canadian scientists have to get better at thumping their chests.

"As scientists, we are way too reticent to tell the story and engage the community the way scientists engage the community in other countries. ... We'll point to government, but I don't know if we have made the case about how important science is."

Friday Fun: Explaining Twitterspeak to Others

2009-05-01T11:16:00.003-04:00

Hahahahahaha.

This one really is priceless.

When someone on Twitter says, "I’m here in [COOL LOCATION] but am so exhausted from the flight I’m gonna crash."

What they really mean is, "Hey everyone, I got to go to [COOL LOCATION] and you are stuck in your lame place!"

Oh, so true -- Twitter definitely uncovers some less-than-proud moments for humanity. And you know what, we've mostly all been guilty of Tweetspeak at some point too! (Or at those of us on Twitter. All you other lower life forms get a pass on this one ;-)

(Yeah, yeah, subscribe to me on Twitter, because, you know, I need "only 7 more followers until I reach [IMPRESSIVE-SOUNDING NUMBER]!")

The Bookstore of the Future

2009-04-29T09:00:00.001-04:00

A very fine article by Claude Lalumière in the latest issue of Quill & Quire (Nothing online yet for the issue, but their editor just passed away recently, so I imagine they'll be a little behind for a while).

You might be thinking that the future of bookstores is a little off the beaten track for me, but there are a couple of reasons why I'm pointing this article out.

First of all, the way the author envisages the intersection between technology and physical space in the bookstore of the future is very relevant for academic libraries. Second of all, Claude's been a good friend for something like 20 years (!) and when he mentioned that he was about to publish an article on the future of bookstores when I saw him at Ad Astra a few weeks ago I just knew that it was something I wanted to highlight. (Plus Claude has a new short story collection coming out.)

I wish there was a full text version of the article I could point you to, but there isn't. So, I'll just have to give a few longish quotes:

Some customers browse on computer terminals, while others tap away at their laptops at cafe-styled tables. Some are sitting on couches, having animated conversations about the books in their hands. People thumb through demo copies of selected books, displayed on the few bookshelves and promotional tables to be seen. Staffers circulate, answering questions. Somewhere in the back, a machine hums -- it's printing books on the spot, which will then be brought out to the counter and handed to paying customers.

This is the bookshop of the future.

*snip*

To be competitive, the bookstore of the future will need to offer access to any title within minutes, in order to provide faster and more reliable service than online retailers, instantly satisfying book buyers' fickle interests. At the same time, it must keep offering the kind of personal, social experience that no online venue can match. To achieve this, our vision of how a bookshop operates must step out of the 20th century. But bookshops cannot march into the future by themselves: publishers, too, need to invest in new infrastructure.

*snip*

The bookshop can and should be more exciting than ever. If reinvented with sufficient passion, imagination, and co-operation, it will become the preferred venue for readers to navigate our information-rich world, and for authors and publishers to reach their audiences.

Almost word for word, many of these same points apply just as much to academic libraries -- in our desire to remake ourselves as social and informational hubs for our communities, places where learning can take place in a variety of contexts and settings.

Will we concentrate on delivering monographs via print-on-demand technology rather than online to reading devices? Probably not, but we're not trying to sell artifacts at a profit.

I think the point claude is mostly trying to make is that to survive, bookshops need to somehow find a way to resonate with the life of their communities and to leverage than into a revenue stream. Similarly, libraries need to resonate with the life of their communities and to leverage than into continued growth and support within their institutions.

(Unfortunately, Q&Q doesn't seem to be online anywhere so if you want to read the whole article you'll have to either find it at your library or local bookshop. Oh, the irony.)

Friday Fun: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era

2009-04-24T09:00:00.001-04:00

McSweeney's strikes again!

Check out their syllabus for ENG 371WR: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era:

As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade...

*snip*

Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences. w00t! w00t!

Read the whole thing. It's very funny. And perhaps a little too close to true sometimes...

(Via Dan Cohen.)

Yet more reports & books on the future of academic libraries

2009-04-23T16:36:00.000-04:00

Yes, yes, I'm still completely obsessed with this futuristic prognostication business (consider that a bit of foreshadowing). I will continue to try and make the laundry lists a little shorter and more digestible.

Reports

Books

The Future of Management by Bill Breen & Gary Hamel
Redefining Literacy 2.0 by David Franklin Warlick
Slow Reading by John Miedema
Twitter Revolution: How Social Media and Mobile Marketing is Changing the Way We Do Business & Market Online by Warren Whitlock & Deborah Micek
YouTube for Business: Online Video Marketing for Any Business by Michael Miller
Secrets of Social Media Marketing: How to Use Online Conversations and Customer Communities to Turbo-Charge Your Business! by Paul Gillin
Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom: How Online Social Networking Will Transform Your Life, Work and World by Matthew Fraser & Soumitra Dutta
Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business by Larry Weber
Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day by Dave Evans
Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter
Electronic Tribes: The Virtual Worlds of Geeks, Gamers, Shamans, and Scammers edited by Tyrone L. Adams & Stephen A. Smith
First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin & Pat Harrigan
Networked Publics by Kazys Varnelis
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts
Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness by Duncan J. Watts
The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You by Mark Buchanan

As usual, I'm happy to take suggestions for other books, reports, blogs, etc. about the future of academic libraries here in the comments, on Friendfeed or via email (jdupuis at yorku dot ca).

(Apologies for all the social media marketing books. Believe, it's just a small sample of what's out there. Frankly, it's probably not worth taking more than a quick glance at one or two of them.)

(A bunch of the books are from The Social Software Primer: 13 Books You Must Read)

Conferences vs. journals in computing research

2009-04-22T10:52:00.003-04:00

Such is the title of Moshe Y. Vardi Editor's Letter in the most recent Communications of the ACM (v52i5).

I'll excerpt it a bit:

What I'm referring to is the way we go about publishing our research results. As far as I know, we are the only scientific community that considers conference publication as the primary means of publishing our research results. In contrast, the prevailing academic standard of "publish" is "publish in archival journals." Why are we the only discipline driving on the conference side of the "publication road?"

Conference publication has had a dominant presence in computing research since the early 1980s. Still, during the 1980s and 1990s, there was ambivalence in the community, partly due to pressure from promotion and tenure committees about conference vs. journal publication. Then, in 1999, the Computing Research Association published a Best Practices Memo, titled "Evaluating Computer Scientists and Engineers for Promotion and Tenure," that legitimized conference publication as the primary means of publication in computer research. Since then, the dominance of conference publication over journals has increased, though the ambivalence has not completely disappeared. (In fact, ACM publishes 36 technical journals.)

*snip*

My concern is our system has compromised one of the cornerstones of scientific publication—peer review. Some call computing-research conferences "refereed conferences," but we all know this is just an attempt to mollify promotion and tenure committees. The reviewing process performed by program committees is done under extreme time and workload pressures, and it does not rise to the level of careful refereeing. There is some expectation that conference papers will be followed up by journal papers, where careful refereeing will ultimately take place. In truth, only a small fraction of conference papers are followed up by journal papers.

Years ago, I was told that the rationale behind conference publication is that it ensures fast dissemination, but physicists ensure fast dissemination by depositing preprints at www.arxiv.org and by having a very fast review cycle. For example, a submission to Science, a premier scientific journal, typically reaches an editorial decision in two months. This is faster than our conference publication cycle!

So, I want to raise the question whether "we are driving on the wrong side of the publication road." I believe that our community must have a broad and frank conversation on this topic. This discussion began in earnest in a workshop at the 2008 Snowbird Conference on "Paper and Proposal Reviews: Is the Process Flawed?" (see http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1462571.1462581).

Interesting. I'm curious about all this and I wonder if any of the computing people out there who are reading this share Yardi's ambivalence. It's always seemed to me that the computing community's tendency to self archive on their own web space has been a great strength, probably leading to a somewhat lower probability of an arxiv-like system coming in and taking over like with physics. From what I've seen, probably 80-90% or more of most conference proceedings are available via authors' web pages.

Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services

2009-04-21T16:03:00.000-04:00

I've always thought that Morgan & Claypool's Synthesis product is one of the best, most forward-looking products out there. They give quality, targeted, born-digital content of the kind that I can push out to faculty & grad students. And most of all, content that's worth paying for. They're also very receptive to the library community, welcoming input and feedback. And supporting our activities at conferences, etc.

Now they've even given back by starting a series of basically Information Science lectures on Synthesis!

Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services is edited by Gary Marchionini of the University of North Carolina. The series will publish 50- to 100-page publications on topics pertaining to information science and applications of technology to information discovery, production, distribution, and management. The scope will largely follow the purview of premier information and computer science conferences, such as ASIST, ACM SIGIR, ACM/IEEE JCDL, and ACM CIKM. Potential topics include, but not are limited to: data models, indexing theory and algorithms, classification, information architecture, information economics, privacy and identity, scholarly communication, bibliometrics and webometrics, personal information management , human information behavior, digital libraries, archives and preservation, cultural informatics, information retrieval evaluation, data fusion, relevance feedback, recommendation systems, question answering, natural language processing for retrieval, text summarization, multimedia retrieval, multilingual retrieval, and exploratory search.

Take a look at the first four:

Introduction to Webometrics: Quantitative Web Research for the Social Sciences by Michael Thelwall
Exploratory Search: Beyond the Query-Response Paradigm by Ryen W. White, Resa A. Roth
New Concepts in Digital Reference by R. David Lankes
Automated Metadata in Multimedia Information Systems: Creation, Refinement, Use in Surrogates, and Evaluation by Michael G. Christel

Great stuff -- I think this is going to end up being a terrific resource. You can see some of the lectures they have under development here:

Digital Libraries by Ed Fox
Faceted Search by Daniel Tunkelang, Endeca
Grid-Based Repositories by Reagan Moore, Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI)
Information Architecture by Wei Ding and Xia Lin
Information Concepts by Gary Marchioninil
Information-Seeking Behavior by Raya Fidel
Personal Information Management by William Jones
Personalization in Information Retrieval by Javed Mostafa
Reading and Writing the Electronic Book by Catherine C. Marshall
Research and Analysis of Online Social Networks by Fred Stutzman
Web Analytics by Bernard J. Jansen

SciBarCamp 2009: Registration is open!

2009-04-17T15:49:00.004-04:00

Registration is open for this year's edition of SciBarCamp Toronto. Last year was a blast.

This year, it's in collaboration with the Science Rendezvous series of events in and around Toronto.

So what's SciBarCamp?

SciBarCamp is a gathering of scientists, artists, and technologists for a day of talks and discussions. The second SciBarCamp event will take place at Hart House at the University of Toronto on May 9th, 2009, with an opening reception on the evening of May 8th. The goal is to create connections between science, entrepreneurs and local businesses, and arts and culture.

One of the topics we will be exploring this year is "Open Science", but we welcome any suggestions from participants. After all, in the tradition of BarCamps (see BarCamp.org for more information), the program is decided by the participants at the beginning of the meeting, in the opening reception on May 8th. SciBarCamp will require active participation; while not everybody will present or lead a discussion, everybody will be expected to contribute substantially - this will help make it a really creative event.

The participant list is already up and growing and there is some preliminary information on the program. If there's a topic you're interested in, add it here.

One of the organizers, Eva Amsen, has more on her blog. There is also, of course, a Friendfeed room and a Twitter hashtag.

York University Libraries 2.0

2009-04-14T19:35:00.005-04:00

My colleague Bill Denton and I whipped up a little article for the Libraries' spring faculty newsletter on some of the stuff we've been trying out recently.

We called it YUL 2.0.

Over the last few years the World Wide Web has changed from a place where we passively consume information to one where everyone can carve out their own little place to participate and contribute. The set of Internet technologies that encourage interactivity and user contributions—blogs, wikis, social networks and social bookmarking sites—are called Web 2.0.

Over the last year the library has embraced many of these Web 2.0 technologies, venturing out in the wilds of the interactive web and looking for involvement with our students, faculty, and anyone else around the world.

Here are some of the projects we have up right now, and one or two that are still just experimental glimmers in our eyes.

The kids are alright

2009-04-13T16:20:00.000-04:00

Or at least Hana is.

She's one of York's official student bloggers and her entries on the student blog YUBlog are always worth reading.

First of all, I really like her response, Are we really that stupid, to the Toronto Star's article Profs blast lazy first-year students.

The Star article is fairly typical "kids today are all lazy and dumb" overstatement. That's not to say that it doesn't make some pretty good points about problems in high school education or the cult of self esteem that pervades a lot of educational theory. It does. But similar problems have always plagued us as a society. Undergrads have always been lazy and unmotivated, overconfident and looking for shortcuts. New technologies haven't changed that, only given birth to new ways for those tendencies to manifest.

Enough of me, here's Hana:

Now I’m not sure what to make of all this - it seems like every generation of teachers says that this young generation is truly hopeless and clueless, since the beginning of time. But there is something to be said about how easy it is to slack off with the help of a laptop and Wikipedia, and there is also something to be said about parents who are too nice to enforce some discipline during high school.

*snip*

Unprepared or not, there are resources on campus for students who want to use them. Study workshops, writing centres, extensive disability services, one-on-one academic counselling, library research classes, and professors themselves are there for you. If you put in the effort and are in a program you’re passionate about, there’s no need to worry.

Hey, Hana, thanks for the shout-out to the Libraries!

And speaking of books, I also like her Best 10 things I’ve read in university:

3. Maus I and II - Art Spiegelman

Maus is an amazing, amazing graphic novel about a Jewish family’s experiences during World War Two. All the characters are presented as humans in animal masks - the Jewish characters are mice, the German characters are cats, the French are frogs, the British are fish, the Russians are bears, the Americans are dogs, you get the idea. It’s really disorienting and almost makes you forget you’re reading a children’s story instead of nonfiction. Maus took thirteen years to complete, and is based on the stories told to Art Spiegelman by his father, Vladek Spiegelman. It’s a really wrenching read, something that you come back to compulsively between meals and sleeps.

And another shout-out to the library for item 9!

In any case, I do think it's too bad that she was able to get through four years of Creative Writing without reading any science or technology books that really grabbed her, but what can you do. I'd be interested to hear which Natural Science course she took. If you're reading this Hana, drop me a line for some good suggestions to take out from Steacie!

The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians

2009-04-09T09:00:00.000-04:00

What with all the fuss and bother about the Taiga Provocative Statements, I thought I'd take a break from doom and gloom and highlight a more recent set of statement that certainly provide a more optimistic, almost kumbaya, view of the profession.

Of course, I mean The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians which were written by John Blyberg, Kathryn Greenhill, and Cindi Trainor.

One of the great things about the CC-BY license that the statements are released under is that I can share the full text of the statements with you all below.

For the most part, I really like the statements. They are optimistic and forward thinking, envisioning the best that libraries and librarians can be. There represent something to aspire to.

Not surprisingly, however, I do have some small quibbles.

I'm never too pleased to see rhetoric like, "Hire the best people and let them do their job; remove staff who cannot or will not," especially just after they say, "Identify and implement the most humane and efficient methods, tools, standards and practices." This kind of corporate, Wal-Mart, race-to-the-bottom approach to HR is the wrong approach for public or non-profit institutions.
Frankly, some of the statements are a bit over-stated, almost veering into the sentimental and mawkish. For example, "The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization" or "The Library has a moral obligation to adhere to its purpose despite social, economic, environmental, or political influences. The purpose of the Library will never change." I would have a hard time reciting those in front of a group of faculty and keeping a straight face. While ducking tomatoes.
I feel that the statements aren't really aimed at academic libraries so much as public or even national libraries. I'm sure many in institutional or special libraries would feel the same way. This isn't a big deal, of course, but it would have been nice to see something a bit more explicit about Information Literacy, for example. As I mentioned above, the current incarnation probably wouldn't go over that well among faculty or academic administrators, who would tend to see themselves as the guardians of civilization. It might make an interesting exercise to remix the statements to be more applicable to the academic environment.

But like I said, these are just quibbles.

(BTW, the Annoyed Librarian takes a stab at fisking the Darien Statements. She/he/it/they mostly miss the mark, but do make a few good points.)

So, here they are, the full text of The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians (word version):

The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians
Written and endorsed by John Blyberg, Kathryn Greenhill, and Cindi Trainor

The Purpose of the Library

The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization.

The Library has a moral obligation to adhere to its purpose despite social, economic, environmental, or political influences. The purpose of the Library will never change.

The Library is infinite in its capacity to contain, connect and disseminate knowledge; librarians are human and ephemeral, therefore we must work together to ensure the Library’s permanence.

Individual libraries serve the mission of their parent institution or governing body, but the purpose of the Library overrides that mission when the two come into conflict.

Why we do things will not change, but how we do them will.

A clear understanding of the Library’s purpose, its role, and the role of librarians is essential to the preservation of the Library.

The Role of the Library

The Library:
Provides the opportunity for personal enlightenment.

Encourages the love of learning.

Empowers people to fulfill their civic duty.

Facilitates human connections.

Preserves and provides materials.

Expands capacity for creative expression.

Inspires and perpetuates hope.

The Role of Librarians

Librarians:
Are stewards of the Library.

Connect people with accurate information.

Assist people in the creation of their human and information networks.

Select, organize and facilitate creation of content.

Protect access to content and preserve freedom of information and expression.

Anticipate, identify and meet the needs of the Library’s community.

The Preservation of the Library

Our methods need to rapidly change to address the profound impact of information technology on the nature of human connection and the transmission and consumption of knowledge.

If the Library is to fulfill its purpose in the future, librarians must commit to a culture of continuous operational change, accept risk and uncertainty as key properties of the profession, and uphold service to the user as our most valuable directive.

As librarians, we must:
Promote openness, kindness, and transparency among libraries and users.

Eliminate barriers to cooperation between the Library and any person, institution, or entity within or outside the Library.

Choose wisely what to stop doing.

Preserve and foster the connections between users and the Library.

Harness distributed expertise to serve the needs of the local and global community.

Help individuals to learn and to use new tools to create a more robust path to knowledge.

Engage in activism on behalf of the Library if its integrity is externally threatened.

Endorse procedures only if they guide librarians or users to excellence.

Identify and implement the most humane and efficient methods, tools, standards and practices.

Adopt technology that keeps data open and free, abandon technology that does not.

Be willing and have the expertise to make frequent radical changes.

Hire the best people and let them do their job; remove staff who cannot or will not.

Trust each other and trust the users.

We have faith that the citizens of our communities will continue to fulfill their civic responsibility by preserving the Library.

Recently in the IEEE

2009-04-06T16:38:00.000-04:00

Some selections from recently published journal issues.

IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, v31i1, special issue on Asian Language Processing: History and Perspectives

A Journey from Indian Scripts Processing to Indian Language Processing by Mahesh K. Sinha, R.

IEEE Engineering Management Review, v37i1

Surf's up: Transforming engineering education by Langford, L.K.

IT Professional, v11i2. Special issue on Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing: IT as a Service by Lin, Geng; Fu, David; Zhu, Jinzy; Dasmalchi, Glenn
The Case for Cloud Computing by Grossman, Robert L
Business Models in the Service World by Weinhardt, Christof; Anandasivam, Arun; Blau, Benjamin; Stößer, Jochen
A Services University by Zhang, Liang-Jie

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, v28i1

Predators or plowshares? arms control of robotic weapons by Sparrow, R.
The internet and the changing nature of intelligence by Resnyansky, L.

IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, v52i1.

Tech Talk: An Investigation of Blogging in Technology Innovation Discourse by Davidson, E.; Vaast, E

IEEE Transactions on Education, v52i1.

Programming Anxiety Amongst Computing Students—A Key in the Retention Debate? by Connolly, C.; Murphy, E.; Moore, S.
Predicting Computer Science Ph.D. Completion: A Case Study by Cox, G.W.; Hughes, W.E.; Etzkorn, L.H.; Weisskopf, M.E.

IEEE Security & Privacy, v7i1

The NRC Takes on Data Mining, Behavioral Surveillance, and Privacy by Landau, S.
Cyberpandemics: History, Inevitability, Response by Michael, B.; Voas, J.; Laplante, P

Book Reviews: Cory Doctorow and Mafiaboy

2009-04-04T17:15:00.000-04:00

Calce, Michael with Craig Silverman. Mafiaboy: How I cracked the Internet and why it's still broken. Toronto: Viking Canada, 2008. 277pp.

Doctorow, Cory. Content: Selected essays on technology, creativity, copyright and the future of the future. San Francisco: Tachyon, 2008. 213pp.

I'm reviewing these two books together for two reasons. First of all, I don't feel the need to go on at great length about either of them. Secondly, I think that they're related -- they both touch on the free, open and ungoverned (ungovernable?) nature of the Internet. One is a white hat treatment and the other, black hat. Or perhaps, many will think of both of these books representing a black hat perspective, that perhaps both these books represent the worst that the Internet has brought to modern society. The Web promotes openness and freedom. Generally, we consider both of those qualities to be positive. Certainly, Cory Doctorow would be a prime advocate of openness on the Web. On the other hand, the freedom that the Internet provides can also be cover for those that would exploit weakness and take advantage of others. Certainly, the story of Mafiaboy epitomizes the dark side of hacker culture.

Cory Doctorow's Content is a colletction of Doctorow's various essays on copyright and open content. collected from a bunch of different places, this is a stimulating and thought-provoking collection. Of course, every single essay is available for free on the net. An interesting conundrum, of course, is that if it's all available for free on the Web then why did I buy it? Most of all, I really like the idea of sending a little cash to the artists and thinkers whose work moves and inspires me. So, yes, I still buy books and CDs and pay to see movies in the theatre.

Never mind what you should pay for this book, who should read it? Well, if you're a copyright minimalist it's preaching to the choir. You'll agree that information wants to be free and that you the best business model for artists is to give stuff away that's easily copied and sell stuff that isn't. In other words, in a world where bits can be easily copied for virtually no cost, you have to be able to actually sell something other than pure content to make a living -- like experience. If you're a copyright maximalist, well, Doctorow is the anti-christ and you probably won't really appreciate the book. If, like most, you're in the middle, then this book is for you. Doctorow really makes a very strong and very persuasive case for his point of view, that . It's compelling and hard to ignore. You might not end up agreeing with everything (I certainly don't), but he will definitely win you over on a lot of points.

If there's one thing that detracts from Doctorow's ability to make his case, it's his attitude. Sometimes he's just too cocky, too arrogant, too sure that he's right and you're dead wrong. There's no agree-to-disagree is his world, it's my-way-or-the-highway. Take his opinion of opera:

The idea of a 60-minute album is as weird in the Internet era as the idea of sitting through 15 hours of Der Ring des Nibelungen was 20 years ago. There are some anachronisms who love their long-form opera, but the real action is in the more fluid stuff that can slither around on hot wax — and now the superfluid droplets of MP3s and samples. Opera survives, but it is a tiny sliver of a much bigger, looser music market. The future composts the past: old operas get mounted for living anachronisms; Andrew Lloyd Webber picks up the rest of the business.

My only reaction is that Doctorow is completely wrong in this. In fact, he really contradicts the main point of the long tail that Internet gurus are so adamant about. The new media landscape doesn't make 60 minute operas less interesting and relevant. It makes them more so -- finally able to find their niche in the long tail of human artistic expression. People that like opera can enjoy and obsess over it. People that don't, well, can listen to whatever they like. The point isn't Doctorow's rather juvenile assertion that some particular type of artistic expression is somehow not worthy, the point is that the Internet enables every kind of artistic expression is a way that was not possible before.

In any case, that was one of the few false notes (all the same kind of thing) in an otherwise excellent book. Read it and disagree, engage and enrage. But it's too important to ignore. I would recommend this book to any academic or public library as well as to anyone interested in the future of content in a fragmented and radically shifting online landscape.

And let's take a look at Michael Calce and Craig Silverman's account of Calce's life as Internet hacker Mafiaboy. Its a fascinating story of a Montreal-area teen and how he got involved in the world of hacking and ended up launching a couple of big denial of service attacks on some prominent web sites like Yahoo! and CNN. Calce tells the story of how he got involved in the hacking underworld as well as how he was caught, the jail time he served as well as how he's reformed and is using his obvious computing gifts for good instead of evil.

A couple of interesting points, though. Especially in his tell of the early part of the story, Calce comes off as a bit arrogant and clueless about the seriousness of his actions, not really showing much empathy. I find this interesting because while the later chapters make it pretty clear that he's grown up and left those feelings mostly behind, there are still glimpses and insights into the teenager that caused the havoc. We see the macho reputation building, the bragging and the power trips but not really from the point an introspective point of view. I guess it's hard to expect anyone to write that kind of book.

A great story, well told, well worth reading and thinking about. I would recommend it to any academic or public library interested in the way the Internet is shaping our society.

Some provocative statements

2009-04-01T09:00:00.002-04:00

A little while back the Taiga Forum: A Community of AULs and ADs released their TAIGA 2009 Provocative Statements. There's been a fair bit of commentary around the web, most not that impressed.

A bit late to the party as usual, I've decided to add a bit to the not-so-impressed pile.

For the most part, their statements seem meant almost not to be taken seriously. They are pokes-in-the-eye. Unsupported and unsupportable....and yet, I've done a lot of the same things in my own ten years series, I've even said some of the same things (of course, a few years earlier). So the idea that you can be provocative and a little far out shouldn't bother me, right?

What bothers me is the tone. It's destructive and negative rather than cautionary or even visionary. It's "look at me, look at what a guru I am" In fact it's part of a strain we see these days of people trying to out "apocalyptic guru" each other. One person says, "newspapers and old media are dead" and the next says, "I think newspapers and old media are deader than you think they are!" "No, I think they're deader!" "No, I do!" And so on.

So, "Libraries must change!" and "No, I think libraries must change more than you do!" The Chicken Little impulse is natural, but not constructive.

Frankly, it's not hard to picture them all sitting around a table in dark sunglasses, black berets and smoking Gitanes, discussing Don Tapscott or Chris Anderson instead of Sartre or Camus.

So, in the same spirit of making ridiculous, unsupportable, poke-in-the-eye provocative statements, I feel the need to make some about them too:

I have trouble remembering their name. I always think targa or parka.
The document is in PDF format only. This seems oddly old fashioned.
What's with all the ellipses? Really, you didn't need them and it makes the document look funny.
The web site is so 2001. It looks like it was cobbled together in a weekend using FrontPage.
There's no blog or online forum to promote discussion, not even a page that allows comments. This is very web 1.0, not what you'd expect of provocative visionaries.
Not even Twitter. How can you be provocative without Twitter?
"faciliate" is just funny. How are you going to get librarians to take you seriously if you can't spell.
"An online social network is maintained by the Taiga Forum to faciliate continuing discussion of pertinent issues throughout the year. Membership in the online social network is open to all AULs and ADs who wish to participate. To receive an invitation to join the network, please fill out the contact form on this web page."
The whole top-down, non-crowdsourced, walled-garden approach is kind of old-fashioned (see text of previous item).
They changed their minds on their best point.
The provocative statements are actually the Provocateurs preferred future.

In the complementary spirit of unsupported and unsupportable commentary, let's take a look at the individual statements.

1. ... all librarians will be expected to take personal responsibility for their own professional development; each of us will evolve or die. Budget pressures will force administrators to confront the "psychological shadow" cast by tenure and pseudo-tenure that has inhibited them from performing meaningful evaluations and taking necessary personnel actions. Librarians who do not produce will be reassigned or fired.

This is definitely provocative.

However, in my opinion, any organization that refuses to play any role in supporting the professional and career development of it's staff is a bad organization. Any organization, especially one with an academic mission, that behaves like this isn't "provocative." It's dysfunctional. Why so confrontational? Should we expect better? Shouldn't anyone who works in a knowledge industry expect better? Who do these people take their management lessons from? Donald Trump?

Yes, libraries have personnel issues, tenure can be a problem, transitioning people to new skill sets and career paths is a challenge. Yes, it's called leadership.

Yes, yes, I know that the Provocateurs aren't actually advocating running libraries this way, that it's all only a thought experiment. But it's all so gleeful and gosh-wow that it's hard not to extrapolate that this would be their current preference.

2. ... collection development as we now know it will cease to exist as selection of library materials will be entirely patron-initiated. Ownership of materials will be limited to what is actively used. The only collection development activities involving librarians will be competition over special collections and archives.

Just-in-time collection development versus just-in-case. Haven't we been discussing this for years?

In a nearly 100% online collection environment, it's entirely possible that we won't actually own anything, but will only access things on a pay-per-use basis, especially for new e-only monographs. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine all the commercial journal publishers disappearing in five years and that a pay-per-use model for all that content makes any sense for us or them.

On the third hand, as we see progress towards an Open Access paradigm, it's hard to see how this point is relevant to that material at all, or that they even considered libraries' role in curating, organizing and managing those scholarly resources at all. And I guess they've completely written off IRs.

The dig at the end about gladiator-like competition makes a lot of sense in the human resources model the Provocateurs seem to favour in #1.

3. ... Google will meet virtually all information needs for both students and researchers. Publishers will use Google as a portal to an increasing array of content and services that disintermediate libraries. All bibliographic data, excepting what libraries create for local special collections, will be produced and consumed at the network level.

In the PDF version of the document, this provocative statement is actually crossed out, as if they changed their minds and no longer thought this was a provocative statement.

Oddly, I actually think this provocative statement is the best of the lot. It implies a very large question: What do we think is worth paying for?

The dominance of discovery at the network level will put A&I database vendors under the gun, forcing them to innovate like crazy or die, something we're already seeing. The opportunity for us to to be able to use the money from cancelled A&I services to fund other aspects of the transformation we need to survive, particularly to our physical spaces.

Provocative? Sure. Hardly a new idea. I wrote about it two years ago and I'm sure others before me.

4. ... knowledge management will be identified as a critical need on campus and will be defined much more broadly than libraries have defined it. The front door for all information inquiries will be at the university level. Libraries will have a small information service role.

Frankly, I can never get myself to finish reading a sentence that has the term "knowledge management" in it.

I'm not sure what's provocative about this one. Are there any libraries that are currently the knowledge management hub of their campuses, meeting all possible information needs? Is this a role that makes sense in the future. Maybe if I had a clearer idea of what they meant by this statement.

5. ... libraries will have given up on the "outreach librarian" model after faculty persistently show no interest in it. Successful libraries will have identified shared goals with teaching faculty and adapted themselves to work at the intersection of librarianship, information technology and instructional technology.

I sort of understand this one. The point seems to be that faculty are no where near as interested in us as we are in them. This always has been and always will be true.

"Outreach Librarian model" is used oddly here. I would think that part of reaching out to the campus community is identifying shared goals with teaching faculty. I'm not sure that the role of outreach librarian is generally so narrowly defined as to exclude what the statement is implying we will embrace.

If faculty show no interest in "outreach", what makes them think that faculty will show any interest in identifying "shared goals" and working with us at the "intersection of librarianship, information technology and instructional technology."

But is it provocative to suggest that the best way to engage faculty is by getting involved in their educational activities? The best way to do outreach is via curriculum integration. A kind of broader form of integrating into the curriculum via educational technology is exactly what this statement is suggesting.

6. ... libraries will provide no in-person services. All services (reference, circulation, instruction, etc.) will be unmediated and supported by technology.

Yes, this one is genuinely provocative.

It's interesting that this sort of assumes that libraries will have no role on campus in providing study, collaborative or casual spaces. And that all the successful Learning Commons projects will just fold up and disappear and no new ones will be initiated.

If students are in our physical spaces, they may actually want to talk to somebody about something at some point. I can kind of see myself (after all, I'll only be 51 in five years), running away from students in the library so that I'm not tempted to perform some service for them unmediated by technology.

It also assumes that pretty well all aspects higher education will be mediated by technology. Which is possible but hardly likely in five years.

And I assume that Information Literacy will also disappear, as I will begin running away from profs and ignoring their emails just in case they want me to do some unmediated instruction or consultation with their students.

7. ... libraries will have abandoned the hybrid model to focus exclusively on electronic collections, with limited investments in managing shared print archives. Local unique collections will be funded only by donor contributions.

I'm not sure that anyone would think of this as particularly provocative anymore. The idea that libraries will abandon print completely one day has been around for awhile, particularly in the science library community. Will most or all libraries completely abandon print as soon as five years? Probably not. Probably not even ten years, although by then we might only be spending one percent or less of our budgets on print.

However, the idea that local unique collections would only be funded by donour contributions is absurd, destructive and actually kind of misses the point. If newspapers can find part of their survival strategy in aligning themselves to their communities with an intensely local focus, then so should academic libraries. It seems to me that local unique collections can provide something that Google can't and that intensely local focus might be something that we do think is actually worth spending money on. And yes, I'm sure we'll digitize our intensely local print collections.

8. ... library buildings will no longer house collections and will become campus community centers that function as part of the student services sector. Campus business offices will manage license and acquisition of digital content. These changes will lead campus administrators to align libraries with the administrative rather than the academic side of the organization.

Ah, now I understand #6.

But isn't playing video games with students and serving them coffee a service that's unmediated by technology? Oh, sorry, can't play Wii games with them, only MMORPGs.

I would suggest that what they're talking about is also no longer a library, so I guess I'm not working there anymore anyways. Which leads to understanding #s 1, 2, 5 and 7. Wal-Martization is the term we're looking for, the race to the bottom hollowing out the mission of all of higher education.

In fact, I think it's possible to see this as the uber-provocative statement, the one from which all the others follow. The loss of the academic library's academic mission leads to treating our staff like Wal-Mart treats theirs and to viewing our licensed and purchased content like Wal-Mart views the products they stock.

Which makes it odd to put at #8. It probably should have been #1.

And I surely can't imagine that this would be anyone's preferred outcome.

9. ... the library community will insist on a better return on investment for membership organizations (e.g., CRL, DLF, CNI, SPARC, ARL, ALA). All collaboration of significance will be centered around either individual entrepreneurial libraries (e.g., HathiTrust, OLE), or regional consortia.

This one's fine, although I'm not sure why they would have considered it even mildly controversial rather than full-blown provocative. Using the word "all" rather than "most" or "much of" does seem rather strong, but again not provocative.

10. ... 20% of the ARL library directors will have retired. University administrators will see that librarians do not have the skills they need and will hire leaders from other parts of the academy, leading both to a realignment of the library within the university and to the decline of the library profession.

Since these statements are coming from AULs & ADs, I find it odd that they don't seem to think that they are qualified to make the next step and become directors. Or that anyone on their campuses will think that they are. Although the skills that librarians do have are probably not best suited for running what's left of the library the in the student centre model anyways, so maybe it's just as well.

It's interesting. The sum total of the provocative statements seems to be that we'll all be spending our time serving coffee to students in the next five years as pretty well every other library function will either completely disappear or be taken over by someone else. It seems that they're despairing that we'll lose virtually any sort of genuine, meaningful, professional role that libraries or librarians can have in the academic mission of the university.

Now, what they provocatively suggest may come true. The Provocateurs may even think it's inevitable or desirable, although I hope not. I do think that it would have been possible to have worded most of their statements differently, in a way that suggests a way forward. I don't think it's useful to approach the future from such a defeatist perspective, that some of their provocative statements could actually show some, you know, that thing we expect of library leaders like AULs and ADs. Oh yeah, leadership.

I also find it interesting how much contempt and disdain for their fellow library workers oozes out of the various "provocative statements."

(I like to think that the Future of Academic Libraries presentation I did in 2008 is nicely sprinkled with provocative statements. Take a look.)

(BTW, just to reiterate, this whole screed is intended in the spirit of provocativity. No harm, no foul. Right?)

(Also, it may very well be no coincidence that it's published on April 1.)

The Cluetrain Manifesto -- Ten Years Later

2009-03-30T12:50:00.000-04:00

The Cluetrain Manifesto (full text) is one of those books I've always meant to read but haven't. Not sure why, but it's probably due to the fact that when it came out initially I was just beginning library school and wasn't that plugged into the whole social media/internet will change the work business literature like I am now.

There is a copy kicking around the house and now I feel like I have to crack it open and give it a look. Why? Because Simon Owens was kind enough to let me know about his interview with three of the four Cluetrain authors, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke and David Weinberger. The title of the article gives us a strong indication of where both Owens and the authors are coming from: 'Cluetrain Manifesto' Still Relevant 10 Years Later.

From Wikipedia, a bit of what TCM is about:

The Cluetrain Manifesto is a set of 95 theses organized and put forward as a manifesto, or call to action, for all businesses operating within what is suggested to be a newly-connected marketplace. The ideas put forward within the manifesto aim to examine the impact of the Internet on both markets (consumers) and organizations. In addition, as both consumers and organizations are able to utilize the Internet and Intranets to establish a previously unavailable level of communication both within and between these two groups, the manifesto suggests that the changes that will be required from organizations as they respond to the new marketplace environment.

Owens' piece is interesting in that he talks about both what TCM got right and what it got wrong.

Overall:

I recently spoke to three of the four authors of the manifesto about the last decade and the relevance of their words today. Does the existence of Twitter merely confirm what they asserted about the near-instantaneous conversational tone of online media? Surprisingly, their individual answers varied widely (some were almost borderline curmudgeonly) but all seemed to agree that, for the most part, the "Cluetrain Manifesto" has continued to be relevant and -- with a few exceptions -- its 95 theses have held up to the test of time.

It's particularly interesting in the context of what Weinberger says about how long it's going to take before we can really see the web's true impact on business and society:

"There's real progress and it's a daily struggle," he said. "I think it's likely to be a daily struggle for a generation. Many of the changes we now take for granted, and thus they are invisible to us. There was a time when if you wanted to buy a car, you had to rely upon the information that the car dealer gave you. These days the car's website is maybe the last place you go to."

When asked why he thought this struggle continues, Weinberger said it was because there are real risks involved with online media.

"Institutional participation in the leading edge of social media is always going to be tinged with embarrassment," he said. "The leading edge is always where they're going to be most exposed and will likely do things in which they look foolish. And I salute companies that are willing to look foolish."

I like that, "a daily struggle for a generation." The real change in academia will come when the kids that are in high school and are undergrads now become the tenured faculty of the future. I hope (and work for every day) that libraries and librarians will be waiting for them, which unfortunately requires that we at least start transforming before the rest of academia.

Maybe I won't dig out the copy I have at home. Maybe I'll wait for the new edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto that's coming out in June.

Socially network with me!

2009-03-30T11:22:00.001-04:00

We should probably all do this every once in a while, just as a way of expanding our connections a bit.

Here are the social networks that I'm reasonably active on:

As far as IM is concerned, the only one I am on with any frequency is Meebo, for which you can use the widget on the sidebar.

I'm on LinkedIn, Nature Network and Connotea, but not particularly active. I don't currently have any other active blogs.

So, friend, follow or subscribe to me and let's connect online. In particular, if you haven't joined my favourite of the bunch, Friendfeed, I would encourage you to give it a try. There are active and vibrant library, science and technology communities there, all of which I have lots of connections to. It would be quite easy to start with friending me and branch out into those areas and explore. Friendfeed is by far the best source for conversation online, vastly superior to Twitter. FF is talking with a group of friends at a bar or restaurant, Twitter is shouting at each other from across a crowded concert hall.

(Yeah, I know I should have a text box on the sidebar with all this info. I'll get that up and running fairly soon now that this post is done.)

Friday Fun: 50 Reasons No One Wants to Publish Your First Book

2009-03-27T09:00:00.000-04:00

It's been a while since I picked up something from Bookgasm, but this one really caught my eye.

Although many of the reasons are decidedly NSFW (and hilarious), here's a few that are appropriate for a family blog:

4. Where are the vampires?

5. No, seriously, where are the vampires?

29. Everyone who attempts to load a copy of the manuscript onto their Kindle is found dead three hours later.

33. Writing a book about vegetarian zombies kinda indicates you don’t exactly know why people like zombies in the first place.

50. Again, I ask one last time, where are the freaking vampires?

Academic Blogging: Promoting your Research on the Web

2009-03-26T11:11:00.005-04:00

I did a workshop/presentation to York faculty as part of the Libraries' Research Frontiers series. As the title of this post suggests, it was on the usefulness of blogging to an academic career.

Here are the slides I used:

You can link to the slides here, and in our institutional repository here.

It was a pretty cozy session, which was ok since that lead to a lot of interesting questions and discussion.

Of course, I couldn't resist using Friendfeed as a way of working my way though some of the issues around academic blogging. I started by asking about potential titles for my session and ended up getting a pretty good discussion going around more general issues.

There were a lot of really great suggestions for titles, serious and not-so-serious and I was happy to be able to use those suggestions at the beginning of the presentation, both as a way to provoke discussion and as a way of demonstrating the usefulness and value of online communities. Needless to say, I'm very grateful to my freeps for all the input and suggestions.

I particularly liked what Cameron Neylon had to say:

I started up a blog and all I got was five invites to give keynotes, ten new collaborators, introduction to new funding bodies, an interview in Nature, an invite to scifoo, three papers...and a couple of t-shirts

Point very well taken.

Clay Shirky on Web vs. Print

2009-03-20T17:09:00.000-04:00

Cobbling together a 4 part Twitter message:

The "Web vs. Print" conversation has been dominated by two camps, each knowing one thing. One camp knew that the web couldn't replace print functions, and assumed the web wouldn't destroy the print model. One camp know that the Web would destroy the print model, and assumed that the web would replace print functions. Both camps were right about what they knew, and wrong about what they assumed.

Serious food for thought here and a very succinct summary of his very fine recent post Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. And although Shirky was talking about newspapers, I think the general sentiment is also applicable to books and magazines as well -- with print journals already having been supplanted by online.

In terms of journals, if online hasn't exactly replaced all the print functions, I think that all the new functions added have, for most people, more than made up for what was lost. Print journals will disappear more-or-less completely in the fairly near future.

I think the same will be true for newspapers, that ultimately the added functionality that online gives will more than make up for the lost print functionality and that print newspapers will more-or-less completely disappear in the foreseeable future. Probably later than for journals, though I might be wrong on that.

It'll be interesting to see how that dynamic plays out for books -- whether online/ebook/Kindleish will add enough new functionality to make the trade-off worthwhile for the majority of people. I think it'll happen, it'll just take longer than for journals and newspapers.

(An interesting question: how exactly would you save something like Shirky's Twittering in Zotero or EndNote or something? As well, how exactly would you cite it in a paper? As a web page? blog post? personal communication?)

Friday Fun: 10 Annoying Habits of a Geeky Spouse

2009-03-20T09:00:00.000-04:00

This one's pretty funny. I'm not actually guilty of very many of these. Honest.

Here's a sample:

5. Wearing obscurely geeky T-shirts to "normal" places - Every geek has at least a few of these; don't try to deny it. We love them, because we get the jokes and we know that only other geeks will get them, too. Unfortunately, they can make our less geeky significant others feel a bit conspicuous when out with us—or maybe they feel the geekiness will rub off on them, I'm not quite sure. Still, I feel that if I have to occasionally let my daughter wear a Hello Kitty shirt out of the house, I can wear my shirts from ThinkGeek.

Let's just say I have a pretty impressive collection of library vendor t-shirts and leave it at that.

Ten weeks of stats

2009-03-18T12:47:00.000-04:00

Warning! Navel gazing ahead!

At the beginning of January, I did a longish post about the hit stats for the blog over 2008. It had been a good year as well as about 18 months since I'd last posted stats, so I thought it was a good time. I also favour transparency in such things; I appreciate it when others post their stats as I think it demystifies the whole "popularity" business.

Little did I know what the beginning of 2009 would bring.

Not that the rush has been that impressive -- I've gotten 19,113 pageviews so far this year compared to 73,212 for all of last year (26% of last year's total in 21% of the year so far, so a slight increase). It's how it's come.

So far this year, I've had my most popular post ever as well as my 6th most popular. That's since June 2006 when I started using Google Analytics. Before then, however, my traffic was only about 5-10% of what it is now so the data from then probably won't affect "all time" totals much.

So, what are those two posts?

The Reports post has already become my most popular post ever by a fairly large margin. Let's take a look at the top 10, with total pageviews since June 2006 in brackets.

Twenty-nine reports about the future of academic libraries (3,584)
Best and worst science books (2,540)
Jeff Healey (1,494)
Interview with Timo Hannay, Head of Web Publishing, Nature Publishing Group (1,445)
My Job in 10 Years: Collections: Further Thoughts on Abstracting & Indexing Databases (1,051)
Tor.com & Globe and Mail Books: What can library websites learn (1,014)
The life of a CS grad student (980)
Best Science Books 2007: Library Journal (913)
Giving good presentations using PowerPoint (860)
GuruLib home library organizer (715)

Of course, the reason those two posts have become so popular so quickly is because they were both linked quite widely. The Reports post in particular got a lot of mentions all over the library and educational blogospheres. The Tor/Globe and Mail got a bit boost from a mention in AL Direct. Thanks to all!

Movers & Shakers -- The Science/ScholComm Sublist

2009-03-16T10:50:00.001-04:00

First of all, a hearty congratulations to all those selected for the Annual Library Journal list of Movers & Shakers. I'll highlight a few here that are part of the science and scholarly communications communities. I've only looked at the list very quickly, so if I miss anyone, please let me know.

Dean Giustini (blog)

In his preweb library days, Dean Giustini noticed that consumer health groups for breast and prostate cancer, along with the AIDS movement, were using the library intensively. “That was a major reason I liked health libraries,” says Giustini, who, as University of British Columbia (UBC) biomedical branch librarian, works in a hospital. “I could help people find information so they could make life-death decisions.”

Joe Murphy

Murphy developed an iPhone-based text messaging reference service for the Yale Science Libraries, matching patrons' mobility by “bringing reference where they are through a preferred medium.” The iPhone also saves time, enabling SMS, phone, email, IM service, and posting directly to Twitter and Facebook from one device.

Kristi L. Palmer

Kristi Palmer loves touching original historic objects and documents. But she also believes that free, open, easy digital access to them reveals otherwise impossible research avenues to otherwise unreachable audiences. As metadata librarian for IUPUI's digital repository, IDeA, and manager of its Electronic Theses and Dissertations collection, she provides 1000 downloads per day worth of access.

Melissa L. Rethlefsen

While Melissa Rethlefsen was a student working at the Bio-Medical Library at the University of Minnesota, a reference staff member found her engrossed in the writings of Herodotus—the ancient Greek researcher known as the world's first historian, who chronicled events in an organized, logical way. The librarian asked Rethlefsen to work at the reference desk. Rethlefsen's affair with research and information tracking had begun.

Dorothea Salo (blog)

As digital repository librarian at the UW-Madison Library, all Dorothea Salo's computer knowledge is self-taught, leading to a “rough and ready” approach to making things work. Steve Lawson, humanities librarian, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, says that Salo's “exhortation to just 'beat things with rocks until they work' has been a source of much inspiration for me.”

Rachel Walden (blog)

Rachel Walden, observes David Rothman, information services specialist, Community General Hospital Medical Library, Syracuse, NY, “is unique in providing frequent, authoritative posts on the science and politics of women's health.”

Dean Giustini also appears to be the only Canadian this year.

(Side note: given my recent musings about the usefulness of blogs to career development, it's interesting to note how many of the M&S people have blogs. Look here for a nice list of the recipients and their blogs or other web presences.)

Here & There

2009-03-14T23:00:00.000-04:00

A pretty amazing day or two around the blogosphere, with a few posts really worth your attention:

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable by Clay Shirky
Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

Some of the best commentary on what's going on in the news business is coming from Clay Shirky. I really like him because he doesn't get into the whole "I think old media is deader than you think old media is" posturing of so many "new media gurus" but rather looks carefully and objectively at what's happening.
It’s not all about the tech - why 2.0 tech fails by Meredith Farkas
If it’s something that’s failing because staff aren’t contributing to it, you need to try to understand what’s behind their resistance. Make sure you’ve done all you can to secure buy-in. Are staff comfortable with the technology? Are they not being given time to add content? Did you offer trainings on it? Are there any technology barriers that you can bring down — make it easier to post, make the wiki/blog/etc. the homepage on their computer, even post things for people to get them started, etc.? But honestly, if most staff members don’t recognize that there’s a need for a library wiki or library blog or whatever in the first place, or the project isn’t strongly supported by administration, it’s not going to be a good fit for your library.

Clear-eyed, practical advice. We all have dead 2.0 projects littering the landscape and this post helps us understand why. We should all be so addled. Ricard Akerman continues the conversation.
Revisiting potential research-support roles for the library by Richard Akerman
Where I think things are possible is on the smaller scale, building and integrating advanced discovery and integration with researcher workflows piece-by-piece. (This shouldn't be read as "build all" - integrating includes e.g. helping researchers integrate Connotea, Zotero, etc. into their workflows.) Many researchers are not that web-aware beyond Google searching - there are all kinds of tools that they could use. The library has a role in providing information about those tools. In the near term, there are some very quick wins just providing better discovery and information management tools, most of which are already available for free on the web. In the medium term, there are intriguing possibilities to support researchers with Virtual Research Environments. And in the long term, true semantic discovery may be possible, with very advanced computational and visualisation tools supporting very sophisticated computer- and data-driven science.

Some interesting ideas, if a little challenging to carry through on. Peter Murray Rust continues the conversation and gives a bit of insight on the challenges libraries face carrying through.
On science and selfishness
When it comes to scientists, you don't just have to hand them a sharper saw, you have to force them to stop sawing long enough to change to the new tool. All they know is that the damn tree has to come down on time and they will be in terrible trouble (/fail to be recognized for their genius) if it doesn't.

I suspect the phenomenon that Bill refers to really applies far beyond just academic scientists but to all academics, students and even the general public. For most people, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. If it doesn't solve a pressing need faster and better, then it's too much trouble. Bill and others continue the conversation.

If there's a thread that goes through all these items is that change is hard to predict. That humans alternatively embrace and resist it in strangely (un)predictable ways. The future is hard to guess and even harder to shape. But, doing nothing and waiting for the change that the future brings just isn't an option. You'll be overwhelmed and snowed under. You have to keep moving, keeping learning and keep trying stuff, even if it doesn't seem to work.

State of the Computer Book Market, 2008

2009-03-12T11:30:00.001-04:00

O'Reilly publishes a periodic update on the state of the computer book market on their Radar blog. It used to be done by Tim O'Reilly himself, but now it's done by Mike Hendrickson.

This time around it's in five parts. Let's take a look at some of the hightlights. As usual, if you're interested in computer books, the posts are well worth your detailed attention. The comments are also very interesting to track.

Part 1: The Market

As you can see, the computer market is only 1% of total unit sales in bookstores and online retailers. The Computer category was the only category down [-8%] year-over-year...

What you won't see on this chart is that the computer book market cratered in 2001, shrinking twenty percent a year for three years until it stabilized in 2004 at about half the size that it was in 2000. (We only have reliable data going back to 2004.) We are hoping that the cratering we experienced in the second half of 2008 will not be as pronounced or long as 2001 because the current economic conditions are not squarely for computer books centered around Tech. That being said, 2008 was the worst performing year since we've been collecting the Bookscan data. The chart immediately below shows total units by year for the Computer book category. As you can see, 2008 was the worst year for unit sale in the computer book market.

Really worth looking at is the chart of hot to not-so-hot topics. Hottest are: Mac programming, vitualization, mobile phone, computers and society and social web. Least hot include: web authoring, windows, Linux, MS programming, ipod & itunes.

Part 2: The Technologies

In response to previous State of the Computer Book market posts, there have been reader comments indicating that part of the decline in the market is due to a lack of anything that new in the Tech world to sustain lots of books selling lots of copies. It begs the question -- will we ever see another Java-like phenomena similar to what we experienced 12 years ago? (And yes, we understand it was much more than just a Java event, but Java skyrocketed more than all others - it was truly astronomical...) However, we believe that one reason why programming and administration topics are suffering more than consumer topics is that sophisticated users are the first to show the preference shift from books to online content consumption.

Part 3: The Publishers

The most notable factor is that Wiley continues to hold the leading spot as the largest publisher, with 30% market share of units sold, while Pearson lost 2% market share and O'Reilly gains 1%. (We’ll look at revenue share later in the analysis.)...

So what is notable from this data? First that these top 8 publishers are down - 375,820k units from 2007 to 2008. Only O’Reilly and Reed Elsevier saw modest gains in 2008. Seven out of the eight top publishers had more titles making the top 3000 list in 2008. Wiley, O’Reilly, and Reed Elsevier saw their efficiency improve in 2008 while the other large publishers saw their efficiency decrease.

Part 4 -- The Languages

Overall the market for programming languages was down 5.9% in 2008 when compared with 2007. There were 1,849,974 units sold in 2007 versus 1,740,808 units sold in 2008, which is a decrease of 109,166 units. So the unhealthy 8% loss in the Overall Computer Book Market was not completely fueled by programming-oriented books....

If you look at the five-year trend for the languages shown below, you can see that C# has been steadily growing year after year while Java has been going in the opposite direction during the same period. PHP, ActionScript and Python are the other languages going in a positive direction. Ruby, Java, and C++ had the biggest declines in unit sales during 2008, and Ruby dropped out of the top 10 languages....

Lastly, the following languages sold fewer than 1,000 units in 2008. Here is the list in alpha order: abap, ada, awd, blitzmax, cl, cobol, cs2, d, delphi, directx, dsl, e, eiffel, fortran, haxe, idl, javafx, jcl, kml, labview, lingo, lisp, m, maxscript, ml, mumps, mysql spl, natural, ocaml, octave, oopic, opl, pascal, pda languages, peoplecode, phrogram, pl/1, qbasic, realbasic, rexx, rpg, s, scratch, smalltalk, spark, sql server, squeak, unknown, unrealscript, windows script, and x++.

Part 5 -- eBooks and Summary

The market got off to a fast start in 2008 but during July took a nose-dive downward and never recovered. 2008 ended up 8% behind 2007, and there were very few bright spots. There were significantly fewer new titles making it into the Top 3000 reports, which means that more titles that were published before 2008 continued to make the list. Titles that were published in 2008 performed worse than those published in the prior 6 years and only outperformed titles from 2001 and earlier. Apple and its software and hardware [iPhone, iPod, and Mac OS X] had the biggest impact on computer book sales in 2008. Social media development, virtualization and mobile also performed better than in 2007. From a publisher perspective, O'Reilly showed the best gain while Pearson, Wiley, and Microsoft Press lost the most ground. The two Imprints of O'Reilly and Dummies have the most diverse publishing programs due to their strong performance in our six categories. The number one title for 2008 was O'Reilly's Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual. The number one programming language was C#, with Objective-C and ActionScript showing strong growth in 2008. That's the quick view....

As you can clearly see, the decline in print has been slowly happening while Safari has maintained a very healthy double-digit growth rate. Do you believe we are at or near a tipping point for the computer book industry? Do developers want content online or a combination of online and print? Or is there a chance that new technological innovation will re-ignite a somewhat stale computer book market?

ICSTI 2009 Conference: Managing Data for Science

2009-03-11T12:18:00.003-04:00

A very interesting conference coming up this June in Ottawa. I'm almost certain that I'll be there.

ICSTI's 2009 Public conference will take place on June 9 and 10, 2009 at Library and Archives Canada, 395 Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Speakers from Canada, the United States and Europe will address:
How eScience affects the way libraries, publishers and scientists relate to each other.
How the era of "big data" will enable enhanced experimentation and collaboration in science.

The conference program will inform researchers, scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishers, IM/IT professionals, chief information officers, and librarians about specific data initiatives of experts from Microsoft, the San Diego Super-Computing Center, Indiana University, Carleton University (ODESI Project), the British Library, and other institutions.

The program looks great!

ICSTI is the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information. Canada's national science library, CISTI, is organizing the conference.

More books and reports on the future of academic libraries

2009-03-09T09:00:00.002-04:00

The two posts I did a little while back on books and reports about the future of academic libraries have proven to be surprising popular, with the latter edging up towards being my most popular post ever (details in a few days).

Of course, there are a lot more books that are relevant to the future of academic libraries that aren't part of the formal LIS literature. So, I thought I'd follow up with an even bigger list!

This list of books is a bit more scattershot, a bit more random, but still it picks up a few themes the last set didn't, like crowdsourcing. Like with the last list, I'm not sure I expect anyone to read every word of all of these books. To be sure, the business book style that a lot of them embrace would lead to Lovecraftian dementia, what with the excessive repetition and hype. On the other hand, I think that each of them could have one idea or one case study that's worth paying attention.

There are also a couple that aren't published yet that I'm looking forward to.

More Books

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins
Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web by David Weinberger
The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, David Weinberger
Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block
Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self Interest by Peter Block
The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism by Matt Mason
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration by Keith Sawyer
The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun
Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe
Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr
We-Think: Mass innovation, not mass production by Charles Leadbeater
Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson
Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters by Scott Rosenberg
Mind Set!: Eleven Ways to Change the Way You See--and Create--the Future by John Naisbitt
Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years by Bruce Sterling
Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters by Bill Tancer
Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know
The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed
Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinner and the Age of Affluence to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Dubner, Stephen J. Levitt
Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition by Guy Kawasaki
Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of their Own by David Bollier
The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship by John Willinsky
Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet by Christine L. Borgman
The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid
Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass R. Sunstein
Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
The Tower and the Cloud by Richard N. Katz, Editor
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold
The Virtual Community:Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier by Howard Rheingold
Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age by Jeff Gomez

Just like I didn't mention every single interesting book last time, I also left out a few reports that look promising. The FriendFeed thread for the previous Reports post garnered a few suggestions that I'll repeat here. As well, I found a few more on my own.

More Reports

Friday Fun: Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added To Curriculum

2009-03-06T16:26:00.004-05:00

Boy, do I ever love The Onion:

"Our schools are orderly, sanitary places where students dwell in blissful ignorance of the chaos that awaits," West said. "Should our facilities be repaired? No, they must be razed to the ground and rebuilt in the image of the Cyclopean dwellings of the Elder Gods, the very geometry of which will drive them to be possessed by visions of the realms beyond."

The whole article is hysterical.

By the way, I absolutely love the caption to a Cthulhu drawing: "Artist's rendering of the Cthulhu, a hideous demon borne of pure malice that fewer than 3 percent of high school sophomores can identify."

Friday quiz: The board member's name (Charles West) is a combination of the names of two Lovecraft characters. Without googling, which ones?

(via LisaSlo)

Open Laboratory 2008 is for sale

2009-03-05T11:03:00.002-05:00

It's finally here and available for purchase at Lulu.com.

This year's editor Jennifer Rohn put together a collection of fifty-two selected blog posts showcasing the quality and diversity of science writing on blogs in 2008. You can see the background story on how the book came about here. You can order the first (2006) volume here and the second (2007) here.

I'll be ordering one copy for myself and one for the collection at work as I think that this is a worthy project to support.

If you want a preview of the contents of the book, links to all the winning posts are here.

I look forward to reading and reviewing the book.

Best Science Books 2008: Library Journal Best Sci-Tech Books

2009-03-04T12:09:00.000-05:00

This might be the last post for 2008 books, and it's one of the best annual lists out there. Every year, I use this LJ list to catch up on my popular science ordering for the year, to get the good stuff I missed. I don't order a huge amount of popular science for our collection, but I do like to get the best stuff. I like the fact that the books I get are check out quite a bit. There is a demand for popular materials among academic library users.

Here goes, some hightlights:

Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food by Ronald, Pamela C. & Raoul W. Adamchak
Death from the Skies! These Are the Ways the World Will End... by Plait, Philip
The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies by Hölldobler, Bert & Edward O. Wilson (text) & Margaret C. Nelson (illus.)
Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by Palfrey, John & Urs Gasser
Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff by Pearce, Fred
Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion–Year History of the Human Body by Shubin, Neil
Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked a Nation on Prescription Drugs by Petersen, Melody
The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation by Shapin, Steven
One to Nine: The Inner Life of Numbers by Hodges, Andrew
Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life by Zimmer, Carl
Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures by Schutt, Bill (text) & Patricia Wynne (illus.)
Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique by Gazzaniga, Michael
The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking To Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics by Susskind, Leonard
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Roach, Mary

Whither CISTI and the Canadian War on Science

2009-03-02T15:36:00.004-05:00

Many of you will have heard of CISTI, the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, one of the premier scientific libraries in the world and a key document delivery provider for universities everywhere.

Well, apparently the Government of Canada doesn't think that this is such a good thing to have because, I guess, everything is on Google for free.

Here's the recent announcement (via) (emphasis mine):

An announcement from CISTI as to the upcoming changes:

Dear colleagues,

I would like to share some news with you regarding upcoming changes to CISTI as a result of the recently approved Canadian federal government budget.

Over the course of 2008, the National Research Council (NRC) was included in the Government of Canada’s Strategic Review http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/media/nr-cp/2009/0206a-eng.asp process. As a result, NRC will be realigning resources and programs, which will include major changes to CISTI.

The NRC Strategic Review plan focuses on the issue of ‘core role of government’. For NRC-CISTI, this will be realized through the spin-off of NRC Research Press and the transformation to new delivery models of the Information Intelligence Services and National Science Library Programs.

CISTI will continue to exist but will function on a significantly smaller scale, and will seek to deliver some services via private sector vendors or partners. The provision of scientific, technical and medical (STM) information remains a priority for NRC and the Government of Canada. CISTI will continue to partner with other organizations to fulfill its core role as part of Canada’s innovation infrastructure, as feasible under the new model.

The option we have recommended for the Research Press is to move to a new not-for-profit corporate entity to permit a continued commitment to provide a viable Canadian S&T publishing option. Free electronic access to Research press journals for Canadians is in question due to the projected loss of DSP support.

It is too early to say how these changes will affect the way we work with you. The proposed program transformations will require investigation of feasibility and best options, consultation with staff, potential partners and stakeholders, and planning. This planning phase will occur in 2009, with implementation beginning in early 2010. You will be consulted as CISTI moves into the planning phase, and I will provide you with more information when I have more details.

CISTI’s core value of delivering quality STM information service remains unchanged and we will try to minimize the impact of these changes on our clients and stakeholders. However, this year is going to be a very challenging one for everyone at CISTI due to the scale and complexity of the proposed changes and the ambiguity around how some of them will be implemented.

Sincerely,

Pam Bjornson

Director General, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information
Directrice gnrale, Institut canadien de l’information scientifique et technique
National Research Council Canada | 1200 Montreal Road, Ottawa, ON K1A 0R6
Conseil national de recherches Canada | 1200, chemin Montral, Ottawa (ON) K1A 0R6
Tel/Tl: 613-993-2341 | Fax: 613-952-9112

Thanks to a FriendFeed pal, I see this letter to opposition leader Michael Ignatieff framing a possible response to the government's actions:

The lion’s share of these cuts to the NRC are shouldered by the National Science Library CISTI. From the present budget of about $48M the current budget by NRC to CISTI for 2010 is targeted at $16M - a dramatic drop of close to 70%. While some proportion of this cut will be accounted for by the planned privatization of the NRC Press this measure represents a major slashing of public spending on the basic infrastructure of science and technology: knowledge. At a time when scholarly science libraries are transforming from bricks and mortar repositories of papers and books to sophisticated information retrieval engines in specific fields of science, our country needs more, not less, investment in next-generation digital libraries as well as time to implement them.

Sigh. It seems that the current government has begun it's own little war on science. In particular, check out this article from today's Globe and Mail. I'll excerpt it below, but it's well worth reading the whole depressing thing:

So while the Barack Obama administration in Washington has added $10-billion (U.S.) to finance basic research in the United States, the three agencies that back basic research in Canada must cut spending by $148-million over the next three years.

CIHR, for example, Canada's main funding body for medical research, has to find about $35-million in savings by 2012, and $28-million of that is by eliminating a program that provided grants to research teams.

*snip*

The Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, which had been financing his work, received no new money in budget 2009.

CFACS, like Genome Canada, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation, was one of 14 agencies created in 2000 to finance particular areas of peer-reviewed research.

But without new funding, CFACS will shut down by March 2010 and 24 research networks that have studied climate change and related issues will close down with it.

Meanwhile, NSERC's priorities do not involve funding climate-change research, he said, "and there are not many places you can go to for this money."

"As a citizen I have to question whether upgrading facilities is a good idea if there's no one there to run them," said Dr. Drummond. "I don't want to demonize anybody, but you have to question the wisdom."

*snip*

"I think it's a fundamental philosophy of the Conservative government that they don't see the value in basic research," said Dr. Boone. "We'd like to stay in Canada," he adds, "but there's only two options: You stick it out and wait till the government changes or you go somewhere else."

Computing Surveys on cheminformatics, online community success and web page classification

2009-02-26T12:42:00.000-05:00

From the latest issue, v41i2:

Chemoinformatics—an introduction for computer scientists by Nathan Brown
Web page classification: Features and algorithms by Xiaoguang Qi, Brian D. Davison (OA version)
A life-cycle perspective on online community success by Alicia Iriberri, Gondy Leroy (OA version)

Twenty-nine reports about the future of academic libraries

2009-02-23T14:45:00.000-05:00

First of all, apologies for the insanely long list of reports, white papers, etc. I'm clearly obsessed. I think they are all freely available, although a couple may require registration to demonstrate a higher ed institutional affiliation.

Sorry about the science-centric nature of many of the reports I've mentioned. My interest in the future of academic libraries is much broader than just a scitech focus so I would really appreciate any readers out there who can suggest reports that are relevant to the various other academic areas: business, humanities, social science, arts, etc.

Zotero 1.5 Beta with multi-computer syncing is released

2009-02-23T12:55:00.000-05:00

This is a potential game-changer in the citation management wars.

The Beta version of Zotero 1.5 has been released.

The most notable new features are:

Syncing
Automatic synchronization of collections among multiple computers. For example, sync your PC at work with your Mac laptop and your Linux desktop at home.
Free automatic backup of your library data on Zotero’s servers.
Automatic synchronization of your attachment files to a WebDAV server (e.g. iDisk, Jungle Disk, or university-provided web storage).

Other New Features
Automatic detection of PDF metadata.
Automatic detection and support for proxy servers.
Trash can with restore item functionality
Rich-text notes
A new style manager allowing you to add and delete CSLs and legacy style formats.
Support for Endnote® export styles

Syncing being the feature that pretty well everybody was waiting for.

This is really interesting for a number of reasons. Most of all, Zotero is a free and open source software package, so it can potentially be customized to work for local groups. Zotero is now a very real competitor to RefWorks and others for consortial and institutional site licenses and local implementations.

Looking forward, if I were interested in designing and building a cradle to grave research environment for researchers, Zotero has to be a candidate for the citation management component.

Two things I'd still like to see are some social sharing features like with Del.icio.us or Connotea. Looking forward to that seamless research environment, it would also be great if they could work out integration to an online document preparation system like Google Docs or Zoho.

I'm about to start some pretty intense literature reviewing myself pretty soon, and I have to admit I was still unsure which way I would go, citation management-wise. Now I'm thinking I'll give Zotero a shot.

Friday Fun: Expo 67!

2009-02-20T10:43:00.004-05:00

Wow, is this ever a blast from the past.

For over 150 years, world's fairs have fascinated the general public with their blend of futuristic optimism and desire to entertain the masses. In 1967, the city of Montreal played host to Expo 67 from April to October. This particular world's fair also set a single-day attendance record when 569,000 visitors came on the third day it was open. The Library and Archives of Canada has created this virtual tour of the fair, complete with information about all the pavilions, activities, and special guests. In the "Pavilions" section, visitors can watch a movie about these unique structures, and also learn about how each country chose to represent their nation at the fair. Another section that's well-worth checking out is the "News Report" area. Here visitors can read some of the news headlines from that heady time. You won't want to leave the site without downloading the Expo 67 logo for your screen saver or checking out the theme song to the fair, "Hey Friend, Say Friend".

The virtual exhibition, created by the Library and Archives Canada along with the Archives of the City of Montreal, is absolutely fantastic. It really gives a feel what it was like to be there.

I should know. I was there. Born in 1962, of course, I was only a little kid at the time, not quite 5 during that summer. However, my father worked as an engineer at Expo so we could get in for free. I remember going an awful lot that summer. I also very clearly remember tons of family from across Canada staying with us during Expo; we even took had some families we didn't know stay with us, which I think was probably quite common during that more innocent era.

Lots more links here and there's also a solid article in Wikipedia.

(via The Scout Report.)

If you don't have a blog you don't have a resume (Part 3)

2009-02-19T10:15:00.001-05:00

Yes, I know, I only planned two parts to this series but I have to admit that it's something that really interests me and I'm passionate about and I do keep finding more interesting posts to highlight. In that spirit, I hearby declare this series open-ended.

Once again, as Daniel Lemire so aptly puts it, Blogging is really part of our day jobs!:

I decided to copy Daniel Tunkelang’s idea and maintain a list of some people who read my blog. This is not meant to be an ego-boosting or name-dropping project. My goal is to prove that blogging is a serious business. Blogging is part of my day job! Indeed, this list proves that professional networking results from my blog.

Don't worry, I'm not tempted to start a similar list for this blog. But it you want to unlurk or declare yourself a scitech liblog reader, feel free to do so in the comments.

And speaking of students, I believe that blogging has a lot of benefits for building reputation at the very outset of a career, as it can really help to distinguish one candidate from another. In other words: Blogs as E-portfolios: Better for the Students, Cheaper for the .edu.

The original idea of an e-portfolio was to help students keep a record of the work they did. This was intended to help them learn and show progress (the faculty and institution value) and get a job (the student's value). While there is some tension between the faculty and the students with their respective values, both are good simple goals.

Companies were set up to build technology to facilitate this collection and distribution of information, but times changed and new methods have become clear, easier, more effective, and cheaper.

Blogs are a much better way to go.

A simple rule of thumb: it's not an e-portfolio if Google can't find it. (emphasis added)

There's lots of good stuff about the benefits of blogging for students as well as some discussion of possible drawbacks.

When it all comes down to it, this is all really about something called a Personal Marketing Plan. From an academia point of view, putting it that way can seem a bit crass and distasteful. On the other hand, it's also a reality that academia is about reputation and reputation management. And that's what marketing is about too.

Some think marketing yourself is what you do when you need a new job, but in fact that’s not the case at all - it’s actually about having a voice in our industry, creating a name and reputation for yourself, and shaping the future. Also, there is a symbiotic relationship between any company you work for and your personal brand. Smart companies embrace this behavior because they understand the value in nurturing talent. Ideally, all parties win.

Take on marketing yourself as your personal challenge and an ongoing project with no end date. If you were an interior designer, would you hire someone else to furnish your house? I doubt it, what would that say about your skills as a designer? An interior designer’s proudest work should be their own interior, just as you should be your own personal case study of success.

This post is generally excellent and I think well worth reading in its entirety and I think the final point is a very powerful one:

The real trick isn’t to make it about you

Here’s a hint: market others, share their content, put them in the spotlight - don’t even worry about directly promoting yourself. The smartest way to market yourself is actually to make it not about you.

It's our passion for our profession that builds our reputation, not the other way around.

Friday Fun: Chess Biathalon?

2009-02-13T09:00:00.000-05:00

Ok, this is seriously odd:

What a great idea! In an area where there is lots of snow, and where most people are accomplished Nordic skiers, why not mobilise the chess enthusiasts amongst them to take part in a Chess Biathlon. You ski and stop, not to shoot at targets, but to solve chess puzzles. Is this the first time that such an event was staged? It is certainly worth emulating.

*snip*

As the students navigated the course, they stopped to write down solutions for the mate puzzles at the different stations. Some worked in pairs, others were solo. At the finish line everyone's course time was recorded. They each turned in their solutions sheets to the trail assistant. For each correct solution time was subtracted from their finishing mark. Incorrect solutions added time to the finish. Skipped puzzles added double the time.

Of course, not as odd as chess boxing.

Sixteen books about the future of academic libraries

2009-02-11T09:00:00.000-05:00

And how come none of them have librar* in the title?

Here's a bunch of books I've read (or will be reading) to help me figure out what's going on.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by charlene Li & Josh Bernoff
The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet by Daniel J. Solove
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky
Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become by Peter Morville
Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres
The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next by Lee Smolin
Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger
Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig
The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler
Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser
The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind by James Boyle
Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson, and Michael B. Horn
True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society by Farhad Manjoo
Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now by Gary Hall

It could just as easily been twenty or thirty. They're also evenly split between books I've already read and ones that I feel I need to read. The books I haven't read would constitute an entry in the "Books I'd Like to Read" category. (The Doctorow book I've read but not reviewed yet.) As usual, if you know of any books out there that I should read but haven't listed, feel free to let me know in the comments.

And what's up with me choosing teh ye olde paeper bookes for looking into the future anyway -- shouldn't I have chosen blogs, wikis, podcasts, video and ejournals and the like? Go on, set me straight. What should I be reading?

(Next up, I think I'll see if I can round up a list of relatively recent reports and white papers that look interesting. Yes, I'm obsessed, so shoot me.)

If you don't have a blog you don't have a resume (Part 2)

2009-02-09T12:50:00.000-05:00

Welcome to Part II of my musings on how a blog can help you in your professional life. Before going any further, you might want to check out Part I if you haven't seen that already.

I'd also like to be more explicit about chicken/egg of interplay between our passion and commitment to the profession that blogging brings out and how that directly feeds into concrete reputation-building and the benefits that may result. In general, I believe that if you blog to become famous (in other words, to explicitly build your reputation, with cynicism not passion), that will be your reputation. If you blog to share and grow and explore, it's that passion that will hopefully influence your reputation-building efforts and that any concrete benefits that you accrue will reflect that.

Blogging isn't for everyone. Blog because it's what you want to do, not because you feel you have to.

That being said, I really I really like how bluntly Neville Hobson puts it: Your Blog is Your CV.

What do you want people to find out about you? Time to think about that. And if there’s anything you’ve posted about yourself that you’d rather clean up, let’s say, read Scoble’s post as it has some good advice on what to do to sort that out.

Hmm, let’s change the title of this post. This works better: Google is your CV.

Kyle Lacy also gives a couple of good nuts-and-bolts Top 10 lists of what we can learn from blogging, Ben Barden's and his own, in the post 20 Things We Have Learned from Blogging. Let's take a look at a couple from both lists:

Barden

1. You Need to Choose a Topic You Know and Like. (This is number one)

2. You need to enjoy Writing. (You need to enjoy thought promotion and learning. I hated writing before I started blogging. Just believe in what you are writing about)

6. You don’t usually get links by asking for them.

8. Your posts need to be different

10. You’ll meet some great people. (Amen)

Lacy

4. Use Google Alerts for content ideas. It has worked for me numerous times.

6. Get out into the community and network offline. It will help build further support

7. You should always put your blog URL on your business card and email signature.

8. Always measure the time you are spending online. If the return is not there… switch up your strategy.

9. Do not focus too intently on content. Get the thing written and change it later.

Scientist David De Roure has a new blog and this is some of what his rationale is for blogging (and really, I can't think of a better way to explain the drive to blog that De Roure's): Reasons to be Blogging 1 2 3
.

But I want to. I lead a hectic (possibly crazy…) academic life where I get to work with experts in many disciplines - I get a unique, perhaps privileged, view of the world and it’s one I want to share. For example, when I’ve been in a good panel, there is information to be shared and debate to be continued too - time to blog. And from where I sit, not only do I get to see things but I get to see the connections between things - what better mechanism than a blog for communicating that interconnectedness? So for me it’s not ego, it’s duty and the appropriate tool.

And it’s part of my research - research is about connectedness and i want to understand how to achieve it. I see a compelling analogy between the informal communications of the great scientists of old - the “invisible college” communicating by letter and annotated book margin - and the emerging research practices of open science and Science 2.0. I see the benefit in understanding how the scholarly knowledge cycle can evolve, especially in the context of the shift to digital and data-centric research.

To sum up these two laundry list posts, to answer the questions of "why blog" or "isn't twitter better than real blogging", I really like what Hutch Carpenter has to say: Why Professionals Should Continue to Blog in the Era of Twitter. I'm only including the first of Carpenter's main points, but the whole post is terrific and definitely worth reading.

But blogs are the professional’s curriculum vitae. They are a standing record of strong thin king about a subject. When you devote the time to put together a blog post covering your field, you’re likely doing this:
Research
Analysis
Linking to others
Establishing your voice
Influencing the thinking of others
Showing the ability to pull together longer form thinking, a requirement in professional work

My own experience is that if you blog, every so often you pop out a signature piece. The kind of post that resonates with others and establishes your position in your field. These blog posts receive a lot of views, get linked to and turn up in Google searches. When you get one of these, congratulations! You have successfully put your flag in the ground for your field.

Tweets don’t do that. Tweets create a tapestry of someone, they foster ambient awareness. This has value in its own right. But they’re not vehicles for heavier thinking. They don’t demonstrate your capacity to size up an issue or idea and bring it home.

Keep in mind that LinkedIn now lets you add blogs to your professional profile. What’s going to be more valuable to you when people are running searches? Tweets or well-thought blog posts?

So, there we go. My feelings on blogging. Decide for yourself whether or not you could integrate blogging into your own professional development plan. It's definitely worth it for pretty well anyone to at least give it a try. And if you don't have a professional development plan, I have to say that blogging will help you define and refine your goals and interests. Believe it or not, just writing a little about a lot of different things really will help you figure out what's important to you.

BookCamp Toronto

2009-02-08T20:21:00.003-05:00

I just registered for something called BookCamp Toronto:

BookCampToronto is a free unconference about:

The future of books, writing, publishing, and the book business in the digital age.

DETAILS:
Date: Saturday, June 6, 2009 (9am-5pm)
Location: MaRS Centre 101 College Street [map]
Cost: FREE!
What to bring: Your ideas about the future of books.

For more info see:
http://bookcampto.pbwiki.com

or, contact:
Hugh McGuire
hugh@bookoven.com
+1.514.464.2047

I don't know much about it or the organizers, but it looks like it's going to be a very lively and interesting event.

One of the few great things about FaceBook is that sometimes someone else in your network can surface these kinds of things for you. Also, take a look at the Globe and Mail story. Registration is apparently capped at 150 and it seems to be at about 125 now. I imagine they'll set up a waiting list or even let the registration drift a bit higher as free unconferences usually have a lot of no-shows. On the other hand, why risk it. If you're interested, register while you can.

Cool engineering conferences

2009-02-06T14:52:00.000-05:00

A couple of conference announcements have crossed my real and virtual desks lately and I think that they are both more than interesting enough to warrant a mention.

First of all, thanks to Sharon Murphy of Queens for bringing The Sixth International Conference on Innovation and Practices in Engineering Design and Engineering Education to my attention at OLA this past week. The conference is July 27 - 29, 2009 at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

From the general call for papers:

The sixth CDEN International Design Engineering Conference will focus on design innovation and engineering education that are such essential ingredients of creating a new future for the people of Canada and the world. Submissions can include, but are not limited to, the philosophy of design; tools and techniques for effective and successful design; methods and tools for designing to meet needs; methods for and research into the assessment of design; teaching and promoting design; humanitarian design; design successes and failures; tear-downs of designs and design-processes; the infrastructure required for design; lessons and methods used in non-engineering design fields; design for commercialization; and related topics.

The goal of the conference is to explore design practice and teaching that leads to better lives for Canadians.

Sharon's coordinating the technical session on "Information Research and Knowledge Management" and would love to see proposals from librarians. You can contact her at murphys at queensu dot ca.

The other cool conference is Engineer of the Future 2.0: Summit on Transforming Engineering Education, on March 31 & April 1, 2009.

Although curriculum reform has been on engineering minds for some time, it is clear that reforms are difficult to sustain and diffuse, and often even when innovations are won, it is difficult to maintain the organizational will to continually improve and adapt. Indeed, the problem of effective educational transformation is as much organizational and political as it is pedagogical and curricular; and it may be the case that effective engineering education transformation requires not a top-down approach, but rather an open-source approach in which diverse voices gather at the grassroots with a variety of views and methodological approaches and openly and actively share best practices.

To explore this possibility, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering and the University of Illinois have joined forces to put on the Summit on the Engineer of the Future 2.0. The event will be held on April 1, 2009 (Wednesday, with opening reception the night before) at Olin College in Needham, MA and will feature a keynote talk by Dean Karan Watson, Texas A&M, a panel discussion of successful engineers of the future (recent grads 5-10 years out with a track record of entrepreneurial, corporate, organizational, or societal success), and brainstorming and involvement sessions in the afternoon. The event will be followed on Thursday with the opportunity to visit Olin College.

Submissions here.

Both conferences look fabulous and unfortunately I won't be at either. It's doubly disappointing because Hamilton is in my back yard but the time is right in the middle of my summer vacation this year.

If you don't have a blog you don't have a resume (Part 1)

2009-02-04T15:00:00.001-05:00

I was just going to call this post "On Blogging" but I decided I like Robert Scoble's rather provocative statement better. This is not to say that I agree with his rather extreme stance, because I definitely don't, but I think it's an interesting way to frame this rather long list of links I've collected over the last little while.

The point here is to make the case that blogging is good for your career. It's been good for me and it's been good for a lot of other people and I think it has potential for everyone.

Now, is everyone a blogger-in-waiting? Of course not. Would absolutely everyone actually benefit from blogging? Probably not. And if absolutely everyone did take up blogging, would the massive amount of noise generated actually cancel itself out and end up hardly benefiting anyone at all? Probably.

That being said, let's take a look at what's been making me think about blogging lately.

First of all, let's take a look at the Wired article that started all the fuss:

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here's some friendly advice: Don't. And if you've already got one, pull the plug.

Writing a weblog today isn't the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It's almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

As Walt Crawford said during his recent OLA presentation, you know for sure that blogs have entered the useful tools stage of the technology life cycle when Wired says that they're dead, buried and useless because it's no longer possible to become a famous blogger overnight.

Well, I don't know about you, but I long ago gave up on being an A-list blog. So, does blogging actually offer anything to the average person? Is it possible to use a blog to build a reputation in a niche area?

Let's see what the blogosphere is telling us about these questions:

What's the motivation for any user-generated content on the web anyways? Why toil away in obscurity, commenting on YouTube videos or gaming sites or anywhere? Because there truly is a reputation economy out there that is divorced from money. And if you can build reputation that way, it's often possible to leverage that for real-world benefit (or just egoboo): Will Work for Praise: The Web's Free-Labor Economy

Beyond brand-hungry strivers, masses of free laborers continue to toil without ever seeing a payday, or even angling for one. Many find compensation in currencies that predate the market economy. These include winning praise from peers, earning an exalted place within a community, scoring thrills from winning, and finding satisfaction in helping others.

Of course, a lot of what happens is merely attention seeking, shouting "me me me" into the void. What's the point of attracting attention?

Attention is easy to measure:
You can record the number of people subscribing to your blog.
You can count the number of people citing your research papers.
You can point to your number of followers on Twitter or your number of friends on Facebook.

However, I do not blog or write research papers merely to grab attention. Instead, I seek to increase my reputation. While attention fluctuates depending on your current actions, reputation builds up over time based on your reliability, your honesty, and your transparency. To build a good reputation, you do not need to do anything extraordinary: you just need to be consistent over a long time.

So, blogging can build your reputation.

What does a library school student have to say about the benefits. These ideas are certainly applicable to anyone starting out in a new career or even faced with a potential job hunt mid-career:

A list of reasons why every library school student should become a blogger:
Self-promotion.
Let's face it: when you apply for your first full-time gig after graduation, your potential employer will be going through a stack of CVs from people just like you, and every single candidate will have an MLIS, and the vast majority of them will have some experience working in the field. If you don't make your CV stand out, it will never make it to the top of the pile, so you need something to show how special you are. Blogging shows that you're interested in the field and have ideas to contribute, so when you include your blog's URL on your CV, employers will take notice...

Becoming part of the community
As students, we're already part of a community; library programs tend to be small enough that we get to know most of our classmates, and this is important since we will likely work with many of these people in the future. But wouldn't it be great to have a network of contacts outside of school, made up of people who share your interests and are able to provide advice and support?...

The opportunity to put your thoughts into writing
If you're like me and enjoy writing, then keeping a blog is a fun way to organize your thoughts. If you're not like me, then keeping a blog is a way to encourage yourself to practice your writing.

There also seem to be a lot of caveats to the whole blogging thing in academia, though. Are the downsides real or just myths?

Blogging is dangerous for non-tenured faculty: Blogging will not get you tenure. Neither will giving talks worldwide. Tenure is usually granted because you were able to hold a decent research program, and you showed respect for the students. However, if blogging prevents you from getting tenure, something is very wrong with your blogging or your school...

Serious researchers have no time for blogging: Indeed, there is always another paper to write and more time to spend at the library, isn’t there? Let me quote Downes on this: If you are spending time in meetings, spending time traveling or commuting to work, spending time reading books and magazines, spending time telephoning people (or worse, on hold, or playing phone tag) then you are wasting time that you could be spending connecting to people online.

Blogging distracts you away from the research: bloggers do not tend to write about their latest research results. We tend to write about ideas that will not make it into our research papers. Is it a distraction? It might be, but does blogging cause you to lose focus in your research? I doubt it...

That's it for now. Next time we'll have four more posts that take a look at the concrete benefits of blogging.

Update 2009.02.11: Part 2!

Best Science Books 2008: Strategy + Business

2009-02-02T16:16:00.003-05:00

Thanks to Kris Fitzpatrick of the IEEE for pointing me to this rather extensive list of business books from 2008.

The catagories include General, Strategy, Life Stories, Marketing, Rhetoric, Innovation, Globalization, Human Capital, Capitalism and Community, Management and Miscellany.

In particular, there are a number of very interesting-looking books on community building. The relevant ones from all the lists are here:

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Sony vs. Samsung: The Inside Story of the Electronics Giants’ Battle for Global Supremacy by Sea-Jin Chang
Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk by James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer
Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton M. Christensen
The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan
The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community by Stephen A. Marglin
Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block

OLA2009: My session on Science 2.0 & community building

2009-01-29T21:51:00.003-05:00

My presentation was this morning and I thought it went very well. The attendance was around 30-35, which is pretty good for a niche topic in a conference with so many parallel sessions. There were some good questions, the timing worked out ok (which is good for me as I can tend to run longer that planned), the audience seemed to be following and nodding in the appropriate ways at the appropriate time. Also, at the end a few people came up to the front and had some very kind things to say.

So, a success.

Here are the slides:

The non-embedded version is here.

For those that are interested, I'll include the references I read but didn't link in the presentation here:

http://del.icio.us/jdupuis/science2.0
http://del.icio.us/jdupuis/escience
http://jdupuis.blogspot.com/2008/09/science-in-21st-century-reading-list.html

Finally, I'd like to thank Alison Stirling for convening my session and for her very kind and generous introduction.

OLA Superconference: Web 2.0 Community Building Strategies: The World of Science 2.0

2009-01-27T18:15:00.005-05:00

That's the title of my upcoming presentation the Ontario Library Association's Superconference. It's this coming Thursday at 10:40.

Web 2.0 Community Building Strategies: The world of science 2.0

Session # 429
Thursday, January 29th, 10:40 AM

John Dupuis, Science Librarian, York University

Science is a collaborative, incremental enterprise. Large teams must work together on massive long-term projects, working toward common goals and creating joint scholarly outputs. Scientists also have to deal with information overload like everyone else with countless journals, conferences and blogs vying for their attention. Science is also becoming data oriented, with the computational analysis of huge datasets (genomic, geospatial, astrophysical) and the modeling of complex systems (climatological, chemical, biomechanical) becoming a core activity in most disciplines. Scitech academics and publishers are reacting to all these forces as well as the pressure from Open Access publishing by becoming more innovative in the features and services that they are offering. What are some of the lessons that the library community can learn from their experiences?

Convenor: Alison Stirling

It should be fun. I'm hoping for as lively and interactive session as I had last year. I find myself becomming more of a fan of the unconference format every day and I hope my audience will take the presentation away from me just like last year.

My slides are in late beta and, for those interested in an advance peak, can be found here. It's not quite too late for suggestions!

After the session, I'll embed the slides here like last year. As for blogging the other sessions that I attend, well, we'll see. I never got around to it last year and since February promises to be an incredibly busy month for me this year, I won't make any promises.

And speaking of epic fails, I'm really disappointed to see that OLA doesn't appear to be having a public blog for the conference this year. Instead they have hidden it behind the LibraryNG registration wall. Needless to say, I am very disappointed with this decision and think it's completely wrongheaded. I've written about LibraryNG before, so I won't belabour the point here.

Update 2009.01.28: Link to slides fixed. Thanks, Michael!

ScienceOnline '09: Sunday summary and final thoughts

2009-01-26T16:43:00.000-05:00

As with the Saturday summaries, I won't really go into detailed summaries of sessions -- you can get a lot of summary information on the conference wiki or on FriendFeed.

So, here goes. In each case, I'll link to the wiki discussion page:

Reputation, authority and incentives. Or: How to get rid of the Impact Factor — moderated by Peter Binfield and Bjoern Brembs

An intense session about a lot of different ideas, mostly generating a lot of questions but not a lot of answers. Is is possible to game the impact factors or influence how they are calculated? Are impact factors better than nothing? Should they be replaced by a variety of different performance metrics that each show a different things? Should we have performance metrics at all? If metrics are useful for filtering, will it be possible to replace them at all? How do you construct an incentive system for science if what's good for scientists (ie. using impact factors for filtering) isn't good for science (ie. distortion of science by using impact factors for filtering)? How do you align those two parallel incentive structures?

Hey, You Can’t Say That! — moderated by Greg Laden, Rick MacPherson, Karen James and Mark Powell

More questions! How do you manage your online persona? Once you say something, can you put the genie backin the bottle? Do you have to practice self-censorship? Should employers have rules and procedures about employee blogging, even if it's on their private time? And what do bloggers owe their day jobs?

How to search scientific literature – moderated by Christina Pikas and John Dupuis

A bit of bad luck for the presentation that Christina and I did, right at the very last timeslot of the conference. We couldn't get the data projector to work with Christina's laptop, nor could the tech support guy from Sigma Xi. So, our breezy interaction demo and tips sessions became...talk. Oh well. All in all, I hope that the attendees were happy with our tips and strategies, at least to the extent we were able to explain rather than show. We do have slide that we were going to shoe, here.

Final Thoughts

Another great conference, if anything objectively even better than last year. I say objectively, because subjectively my experience of community was rather profound and knowing what to expect this year, it's hard to compare those kinds of feelings.

And just like last year, the community continued to the last possible minute. Last year, I was hanging around with Deepak Singh and Salman Hameed more or less right up until I got on the plane back to Toronto. This time all the GTA attendees were on the same plane back home! So Sam and I hung around with Eva Amsen, Glendon Mellow and Michael Nielsen until the very last minute. Victor Henning was connecting home via Toronto, so he was there too. Eva has a picture of us at the airport.

The sessions were great but it was also great to renew friendships from last year, to see old friends again and to meet new friends. I know that Sam felt very welcome and not at all looked down upon as a kid and that his contributions and comments were valued as a peer; it makes a dad proud. I hope to bring him back again next year. There were vague rumblings of another London/European event, which I more or less promised Corie Lok and/or Martin Fenner that I would attend.

Unlike last year, I'm not going to even attempt to list all the people I met and talked to. Really, that was a bit odd what I did last year -- what was I thinking? The only one I will mention is the new scitech library blogger I met, Chris Clouser of The Logical Operator. After all, we librarians need to stick together.

Thanks to all the organizers for putting on such a wonderful show, Bora, Anton and David. See you all next year.

Is Barack Obama good news for science in Canada?

2009-01-24T23:26:00.004-05:00

As President of the USA, Barack Obama is going to restore science to its rightful place. That's the good news.

From a Canadian perspective, that's apparently also the bad news, according to Carolyn Abraham and Elizabeth Church's Globe and Mail article, As U.S. emerges from dark age, Canada's scientific edge fades.

But in Canada's research community, Mr. Obama's plans have sparked anxiety that if this country fails to keep pace, it will have a tougher time recruiting smart people and convincing talent not to flock south. In short, Canada could lose its competitive edge to the Obama advantage.

"We have come off a very good period compared to the States and now we are in danger that they will just drive way past us," said Harvey Weingarten, president of the University of Calgary.

*snip*

There is little question that the brain drain of the Bush era was Canada's gain: The number of American educators who received permits to work here grew by 15 per cent between 2002 and 2007, according to Citizenship and Immigration Canada. That figure includes a 27-per-cent jump in the number of university professors and assistants who moved north during the same period.

And this just as Canada has a Conservative government (and a Prime Minister in Stephen Harper) that's somewhat skeptical about science:

Yet recent history has made some fretful of the Harper government's plans. After more than a decade of remarkable growth, federal research funding to Canadian universities has flat-lined and sunk. Some Tories' past skepticism on the science of climate change, the government's overruling of the Nuclear Safety Commission, the firing of the commission's president and the Conservatives' decision to abolish the office of the independent national science adviser have brought international criticism.

*snip*

"We already have no science adviser advising our prime minister," he said. Mr. Harper has mentioned no plans to reinstate that position, but Dr. Hayden believes "we should have an office of science and technology at the cabinet level."

In contrast, Mr. Obama has appointed leading scientists as advisers in his inner circle, such as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu as his secretary of energy, and Nobel laureate Harold Varmus and MIT genome biologist Eric Lander as chairs of the Presidential Council of Advisers on Science and Technology.

Dr. Hayden also wants to see Canada find a way to commercialize its top-notch research by offering tax and investment incentives to spur industry. As it is, said Dr. Hayden, half of Canada's 500 biotech firms are expected to run out of cash within the year.

"We're in a dreadful state," he said.

Nature Network Toronto Pub Night: Monday, January 26, 2009

2009-01-24T10:14:00.004-05:00

From the Nature Network Toronto Forum:

There’s a pub night coming up! The theme of the evening is blogging.
As usual, it’s casual, but we’ve got a guest speaker, a report from the ScienceOnline09 conference, some science bloggers, and hopefully a hard copy of the new edition of Open Laboratory to browse through. The pub serves decent food, so come early and have dinner (and meet fellow Toronto Nature Networkers) before the talks start.

---

Have you ever thought that you’d like to start a blog, but wondered how to combine blogging with your work?

Toronto tech blogger (and “Accordion Guy”) Joey DeVilla will give a talk about how he successfully incorporated blogging in his life and work.

We’ll also look at the newest edition of Open Laboratory, a book collecting the best posts from science weblogs in the past year, and get a report from the ScienceOnline09 conference (held January 16-18 in North Carolina) to see some of the ways blogs are used in science.

Date: Monday January 26th 2009
Location: Fionn MacCool’s (181 University at Adelaide)
Time: 6 PM onwards (talks start at 7)
Contact: Eva Amsen eva@easternblot.net

There's a FaceBook event, of course.

It looks like it's going to be a great event and I look forward to seeing some of my GTA readers there. The ScienceOnline section will has the GTA bloggers who attended the conference talking about the experience: Eva Amsen, Michael Nielsen, me and possibly Glendon Mellow.

Li, Charlene and Josh Bernoff. Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social media. Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2008. 286pp.

2009-01-23T15:20:00.000-05:00

The first wave of social media books, like Wikinomics or even Here Comes Everybody, were of the "what the heck is this all about" variety. They focused on getting people up to speed on what social media is and what it could be used for, not so much on concrete strategies for implementing social media for a particular organization or community. The second wave of social media books is starting to hit now, books about the nuts and bolts of online community building, and Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff's Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social media is an excellent example.

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book to anyone who actaully wants to implement social networking or media software in their organization or for their community. Yes, library and science 2.0 communities, this means you. Want to engage your patrons in online library spaces? Want to build a "Facebook for scientists" that will actually be more than a barren windswept wasteland? This book is for you.

Trying to summarize or explain all the lists of suggestions and strategies the authors give us is probably not that practical, especially since their top to bottom, beginning to end treatment of implementing social media will mean that some chapters are more relevant to some people and other chapters to other people.

A brief outline of the sections will probably give a better feeling for what the book is about. The first part explains what the social media groundswell is and why it's suddenly become important for organizations to engage their communities directly. Part two is about tapping into the groundswell: listening, talking, energizing, helping and embracing. Part three is about transforming your organization internally so that it can embrace the customer groundswell.

One like I did like, at the very end of the book, does give us an idea of how the authors see organizations transforming their attitudes to allow them to embrace the groundswell.

So, we'll finish with some advice, not on what to do, but on how to be. This is the essence of groundswell thinking we've been describing...developing the right attitude. Here are some lessons we learned from groundswell thinkers, lessons that will help you make this amazing transition.

First, never forget that the groundswell is about person-to-person activity...

Second, be a good listener...

Third, be patient...

Fourth, be opportunistic....

Fifth, be flexible...

Sixth, be collaborative...

Seventh, and last, be humble...

These are the principles of groundswell thinking. Aspire t these qualities, and you can use the strategies we've laid out to your advantage -- or invent your own. You'll be able to build on you successes, both with customers and within you company. And then, as the groundswell rises and becomes ubiquitous, you will be ready.

I'm often critical of business hype books and their shallowness and repetition. This book just isn't like those others. It's actually pretty down to earth and practical. It has certainly changed the way I think about library web presences and how we can work to engage our patron communities. It also shapes my thinking and research directions every day.

This book is suitable and recommended for any collection that supports entrepreneurship and online community building, be it in a business, social science, technology or industrial setting. As well, public libraries that reach out to local business communities could do with this book, both for their patrons and for figuring out how to reach out to their communities.

And has there ever been a better time in recent memory to be a community organizer?

Friday Fun: Aragorn wears La Sainte-Flanelle!

2009-01-23T09:08:00.005-05:00

As many of you no doubt are aware, my favourite hockey team, the Montreal Canadiens are celebrating their centennial this year. As part of the celebrations the CBC is airing a special on the team.

Andrew Ryan of the Globe and Mail wrote an article on the special, from which I extract this quote:

In the most notable star endorsement, American actor Viggo Mortenson, a long-time fan, reveals he wore a classic Canadiens logo T-shirt under his Aragorn breastplate throughout the making of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. "It gave me just a little more power with the sword," he says.

How cool is that?

BTW, it's worth noting that Ryan makes a fairly serious error in Canadiens nomenclature in the article. Bonus points to anyone who finds the mistake.

ScienceOnline '09: Saturday summary

2009-01-22T10:20:00.000-05:00

So, ScienceOnline'09 was quite the experience again this year. My son Sam and I arrived in NC quite late on Friday night, so other than a quick drink there is really nothing to report for Friday. Sam's posted a bit on the conference so far.

Before I start talking a bit about the sessions I attended on Saturday, I just what to mention what my Theory of ScienceOnline was this year. I really ended up attending lots of sessions on topics that I really wasn't expecting, rather than some "usual suspects" type sessions. For example, I didn't go to the Open Access session or the Social Networking for Scientists session. Odd, since those are actually the topics I'm generally most keenly interested in, right? True, but I've been to sessions on those types of topics before so I ended up choosing in favour of other topics. And ultimately, I'm quite happy with that.

I won't really go into detailed summaries of sessions -- you can get a lot of summary information on the conference wiki or on FriendFeed.

So, here goes. In each case, I'll link to the wiki discussion page:

Science Fiction on Science Blogs? — moderated by Stephanie Zvan

This was a good session, but like all discussions on Science Fiction and X, it ended up talking about why normal people don't really appreciate SF. In any case, there was some talk about using sf as a gateway to engagement in scientific issues, and what role blogs could play in that, but not a lot. There were a few good book recommendations and some discussion about "What is science fiction for!" One thing I'm definitely going to track down is Tolkein's The Notion Club Papers!

Science online – middle/high school perspective — moderated by Stacy Baker and her students.

This was a great session, one of the highlights of the whole conference for me. Basically, private HS teacher Stacy Baker brought a bunch of her freshman and junior student to the conference and hosted this session where they could talk about what technologies they use in class and how they feel about the educational process in general as it pertains to social software. The kids talked about their use of software such as Twitter, Skype, AIM, Ning, FaceBook and others. More interestingly, the talk turned to the "creepy treehouse." In other words, how can kids, parents and educators co-exist in these online social and educational spaces, keeping it enjoyable, respectful and safe. The kids main message, probably to the despair of most educators, was "It can't be boring." I think we in higher ed will have a lot to deal with in a few years. BTW, these kids were absolutely amazing. Intelligent, articulate, funny and serious -- the future is in great hands.

Teaching College Science: Blogs and Beyond — moderated by Andrea Novicki and Brian Switek

Another very good session. For this one we broke up into groups and each group needed to come up with three ways to use blogs in education. The wiki page has very detailed notes for this, with all the ideas people came up with. This was an interesting session in that we never really seemed to run out of new ways to use blogs but we never really got to explore any particular ideas in depth.

Alternative careers: how to become a journal editor – moderated by Henry Gee (senior editor at Nature) and Peter Binfield (managing editor of PLoS ONE)

Since I don't want to become a journal editor, why did I go to this session? Mostly because I wanted to learn a little about what exactly a journal editor does and I was hoping that I'd gain some insight here.

And that's definitely the case, most particularly from Henry Gee of Nature. In his rambling, discursive style, he gave us all a very interesting picture of the life of an editor at Nature. Most precisely, the art (not science) of deciding what papers get published. He also made a persuasive case that journal editor should be considered a valid career choice for science people, not just as a fall back position for those whose more traditional career aspirations don't pan out.

Anonymity, Pseudonymity – building reputation online — moderated by PalMD and Abel

I'd tell you what happened in this panel, but then they'd have to kill me.

But seriously, I saw this session as one more about raising questions and speculating on possible best practices rather than giving hard and fast answers. Here's some of the questions that were discussed: Does anyone care what your real name is? Can a very determined stalker figure out your real name? How worried are you about being outed? What about revealing details about family members or posting pictures? Will you employer care about what you post? Do you need to let them know you have a blog before you start a new job? How about funders or sponsors? Is there an interaction between your real name and your pseudonym?

How to become a (paid) science journalist: advice for bloggers — moderated by Rebecca Skloot and Tom Levenson

As with most of the other parts of the science blogosphere, lately I've been thinking about what exactly science blogging is good for compared to more traditional science journalism. Of more precisely, how they're different and how both can be nourished and supported in their hopefully complementary (rather than mutually exclusive) roles. It seems to me that the main difference between the two modes is the emphasis on story telling, an idea that the moderators came back to repeatedly, even if indirectly. Blogs are slice of life, concentrating on one idea or event; journalism (at least in longer forms) is more about narrative, character and story structure.

Levenson and Skloot did a great job of exploring those ideas in the context of how a newbie could break into paid journalism from science blogging.

It's interesting that at the end, Tom tried to be controversial by maintaining that the habit and rhythms of blogging are inimical to being a successful journalist. Oddly, no one really took the bait.

I'll be reporting on the Sunday sessions next.

Rebooting Computing!

2009-01-20T18:25:00.003-05:00

Eugene Wallingford has some great conference notes from the recent Rebooting Computing Summit.

The Summit has a manifesto, which begins:

It is a time of challenges for the computing field. We are tired of hearing that a computing professional is enrollment to degreeTaulbee Survey, the Computing Research Association:little more than a program coder or a system administrator; or that a college or graduate education is unnecessary; or that entering the computing field is a social death. We are dismayed that K-12 students, especially girls, have such a negative perception of computing. We are alarmed by reports that the innovation rate in our field has been declining and that enrollments in our degree programs have dropped 50% since 2001. Instead of the solo voice of the programmer, we would like to hear from the choir of mathematicians, engineers,and scientists who make up the bulk of our field.

Eugene was there and has some great posts on his feelings and reactions to the conference. I'll highlight only a very small portion of his comments, all of which are well worth reading.

Notes on the Rebooting Computing Summit

One particular comment made the first morning stood out in my mind. The gap between what people want to make with a computer and what they can reasonably make has widened considerably in the last thirty years. What they want to make is influenced by what they see and use every day. Back in 1980 I wanted to write a program to compute chess ratings, and a bit of BASIC was all I needed. Kids these days walk around with computational monsters in their pockets, sometimes a couple, and their desires have grown to match. Show them Java or Python, let alone BASIC, and they may well feel deflated before considering just what they could do.

Computing creates a new world. It builds new structures on top of old, day by day. Computing is different today than it was thirty years ago -- and so is the world. What excited us may well not excite today's youth.

Rebooting the Public Image of Computing

One of my table mates told us a story of seeing brochures for two bioinformatics programs at the same university. One was housed in the CS department, and the other was housed with the life sciences. The photos used in the two brochures painted strikingly different images in terms of how people were dressed and what the surroundings looked like. One looked like a serious discipline, while the other was "scruffy". Which one do you think ambitious students will choose? Which one will appeal to the parents of prospective students? Which one do you think was housed in CS?

Sometimes, the messages we send about our discipline are subtle, and sometimes not.

Too often, what K-12 students see in school these days under the guise of "computing" is applications. It is boring, full of black boxes with no mystery. It is about tools to use, not ideas for making things. After listening to several people relate their dissatisfaction with this view of computing, it occurred to me that one thing we might do to immediately improve the discipline's image is to get what currently passes for computing out of our schools. It tells the wrong stories!

Rebooting Computing Workshop Approach Redux

Personally, I found the process to be worth at least some of the time we spent. I enjoyed looking back at my life in computing, reflecting on my own history, reliving a few stories, and thinking about what has influenced. I realized that my interest in computer science wasn't driven by math or CS teachers in high school or my undergraduate years.. I had a natural affinity for computing and what it means. The teachers who most affected me were ones who encouraged me to think abstractly and to take ideas seriously, who gave me reason to think I could do those things. The key was to find my passion and run.

I really wish I could have been there, the public image of computing (and engineering) are topics that are near and dear to my heart. At the same time, I think that what the summit needed was probably about 20% of the people there to be people that aren't in computing (or math or science or engineering). They are the ones that have those important insights, not another bunch of CS types wondering why no one loves them.

Best Science Books 2008: Seed Magazine

2009-01-15T10:06:00.002-05:00

A very nice list from Seed. There are some really interesting books here that I haven't seen on other lists.

Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure By Paul A. Offit
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex By Mary Roach
Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It By Elizabeth Royte
Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain By Kirsten Menger-Anderson
The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment By Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich
Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet By Oliver Morton
The Endless City Edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic
The Hot Topic: What We Can Do About Global Warming By Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King
Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique By Michael S. Gazzaniga
Icarus at the Edge of Time By Brian Greene
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto By Michael Pollan
The Invention of Air: A Study of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America By Steven Johnson
Jetpack Dreams: One Man's Up and Down (But Mostly Down) Search for the Greatest Invention That Never Was By Mac Montandon
The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces By Frank Wilczek
The Living Cosmos: Our Search for Life in the Universe By Chris Impey
The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom By Simon Winchester
Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life By Carl Zimmer
Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them By David Anderegg
The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life By Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot
On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science By Felice Frankel and George M. Whitesides
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions By Dan Ariely
Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food By Pamela C. Ronald and Raoul W. Adamchak
The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA By Mark Schultz, Illustrated by Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon
The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strageness of Insect Societies By Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson
The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature By Daniel J. Levitin

ScienceOnline '09: How to search the scientific literature

2009-01-14T15:25:00.000-05:00

ScienceOnline '09 is in just a couple of days!

The librarian content this year will be Christina Pikas and I presenting on Sunday morning on How to Search the Scientific Literature. Being librarians, that's a topic we could go on and on about, ad nauseum. And since Christina and I come from different institutional contexts (she works at a lab and I work at a large university), I'm sure we'd both come at from different directions anyways!

However, given the savviness level of the participants at ScienceOnline and the unconference aspect of the conference, we thought it would be appropriate to put the question out to the potential audience of the session: What do you want us to talk about?

Are there topics, databases, issues, etc, that you've always wanted to engage the library community with but didn't know who to ask? Are there gripes or complaints? Things you think we should advocate for with the publisher community? Things we could be doing for you?

Have you ever just wondered what science librarians do?

Here's your chance.

Leave a comment on this post or on FriendFeed, email me (jdupuis at yorku dot ca), leave a note on the wiki page. And we'll see what we can do.

You can see who's registered here.

Update 2009.01.14: Bumped up to the top of the blog to give everyone another chance to make suggestions.

Best Science Books 2008: The Quackometer

2009-01-14T09:35:00.003-05:00

I really have no clue what The Quackometer is, but they do have an pretty decent list of books on "quackery, scepticism, complementary and alternative medicine and its effects on society." What's nice is that most of these books aren't on other lists.

Suckers: How Alternative Medicine Makes Fools of Us All by Rose Shapiro
Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History By Damian Thompson
Healing, Hype or Harm?: A Critical Analysis of Complementary or Alternative Medicine By Edzard Ernst
Bad Science By Ben Goldacre
Don't Get Fooled Again: The Sceptic's Guide to Life By Richard Wilson
Trick or Treatment?: Alternative Medicine on Trial By Simon Singh, Edzard Ernst
The Duck That Won the Lottery: and 99 Other Bad Arguments By Julian Baggini

Tor.com & Globe and Mail Books: What can library websites learn

2009-01-13T13:35:00.000-05:00

This was a hard post to title, in that I wanted it to be reasonably short yet pack in a lot of information. The real post title should be: What can library web sites learn from commercial book-related web sites such as Tor.com and the brand new Globe and Mail Books site?

First of all, a brief note about where I'm coming from. This is a a thought experiment. It's a thought experiment about a very particular idea of what library websites could look like. There are lots of other possible thought experiments I could have engaged in about different ideas.

One thing about library web sites is that they tend to focus on concrete problem solving behaviours: find a book, find some data, find some articles. Some library web sites are good at facilitating those activities, some not so much. One thing we tend not to focus on is creating our own entertaining and engaging content or explicitly promoting specific content created or curated by some other organizations. Again, some do do this, some well, some not so much.

As a result, library web presences can be a bit dry and static. How to spice things up a bit, content-wise? (Note for that the purposes of this thought experiment, I'm assuming that we do want to spice things up. In actual fact, I'm not entirely convinced of this but I think it's something that I explicitly want to explore.)

An interesting place to look is commercial web sites that are somewhat seriously intentioned but that are also engaging and entertaining. It would also be nice if the general topic of the site more-or-less maps to what we in libraries do. In other words, good old fashioned books. Now, a case can be made that we should follow the model of YouTube or Perez Hilton for creating our own engaging content, but this thought experiment is really driven by a couple of sites I've been following lately.

So, what can we learn from a couple of relatively new commercial sites that are about books.

Tor.com

Tor.com is the home page for the sffh book publisher Tor; in other words, they are ultimately trying to sell books.

I find it very interesting that this page actually has very little directly about Tor's products -- you have to follow the link to a different Tor Books page. I also find it very interesting that the home page for the publisher is a blog and that very few of the blog posts are directly about Tor's books but rather about the world of sffh in general. I presume they do this with the idea that if people go to the site a lot to read and interact with all this content and they get tons of pageviews, this will generate a certain brand awareness and product awareness that will translate into sales. Or more specifically, they will create a community (there are forums too) around their site and their content that will create brand loyalty in a way that merely publishing good books never could.

My take-away on this: As it happens, what I really find interesting and provocative is the idea of using a blog as your home page, the idea that you can leverage the content you create and put on the blog and direct it towards the "stealth" purpose. In Tor's case, that would be buying books. In the case of a library that would use a blog as it's home page, the stealth purpose would be to funnel students to our catalogue, online resources and various services.

Would this work? The first problem is finding enough interesting and engaging content to post on the blog that is even remotely related to the library mission. The second problem is to actually do the posting in a regular enough fashion to make the library a destination blog for the community. The third problem is actually getting students who dropped by the blog to read a cultural critique of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to actually follow through and use books and articles about Buffy (or biology). Or, having enjoyed the Buffy post, come back at some later time for information about biology or history or whatever. I'm not convinced that any of those three problems are easy to solve.

Globe and Mail Books

The Globe and Mail Books site is the newly launched hub for the G&M's book coverage; in other words, they are ultimately trying to use coverage of books and book-related topics to sell advertising. This site is more-or-less replacing a radically slimmed down print print books section, which used to be separate but is now merged with the Focus section. Books sections have been easy cost-cutting targets at newspapers for quite a while now so I'm happy to see that the Globe has seen the trend as more than just an opportunity to cut costs but as an opportunity to build something that responds to the rise of book review culture on the web. Books may be old media and the web new media, but an awful lot of the web seems to be about books.

As I said, this site is very new so I imagine that they'll be tweeking it a bit over the next little while to adjust to the early reception. However, I have to say that I like the site quite a bit. It has multimedia, feature stories, exclusive daily reviews, blogs, author interviews as well as linking to book stories elsewhere on the web. It includes all the content of the vestigal print edition as well as adding a fair bit of new stuff. I find that the site does definitely draw me in and get me exploring and clicking.

The blogs could be better integrated into the site as a whole and the external posts could be better positioned as well, but they do seem to be somewhat stuck with a common Globe look and feel. The stuff that's not in the print edition (ie the blogs) really needs to be featured and highlighted. Overall the site seems to lack a really exciting visual pop -- a bit too staid even for a book site. I hope they add more bloggers and begin to seriously highlight the work of the larger books blogosphere. I also hope they surface the interaction that happens in the comments sections of the articles and blogs better. User-generated content in the form of reviews and other stuff might be interesting too, as well as a way to recruit a new generation of reviewers.

Of course, I really hope they improve their coverage of science and technology books (as well as non-mystery genres like sf, fantasy and horror), but for that only time will tell.

My take-aways from this: Even if the site is lacking a bit of pizazz, the thing that I do find interesting is that they're assuming that coverage of old media like books will generate new media pageviews and result in advertising, advertising that I guess was disappearing from the print edition.

The interesting thing for library websites here I think revolves around the kind of content we could create for the kind of bloggy site that the Tor example could lead to. The stuff on the G&M Books site is seriously intentioned but also interesting. It's multimedia and interactive in a way that draws people in rather than away.

A lack of pizazz is not usually a good thing, design-wise, but I do thing the overall approach is something that a content-oriented library website could learn from.

Conclusion

The bottom line? Maybe cool and interesting content can be used to engage students and faculty and draw them to the library web site. And once they're there, maybe they'll stick around and make use of our other collections and services that are more directly related to their tasks as scholars. Or maybe not. I guess I'm still stuck on what actual problem that our users have that that they're going to want our websites to help them solve. Is their problem that they don't have enough YouTube videos to watch? I don't think so.

Is this whole thought experiment really a case of a solution in search of a problem? Is the problem we're solving by making our websites more interesting and interactive really about improving our own self-image?

So, what can library websites learn? As far as I'm concerned, the jury is still out on this one.

Friday Fun: Chapter-by-Chapter reading notes for two famous books

2009-01-09T10:25:00.000-05:00

A couple of blogs out there are doing notes on the blog author's chapter-by-chapter reading of a famous book. One is underway and the other is just starting and I sincerely hope both are able to get all the way to the end. Both are well worth your attention.

On the fun side, Kate Nepveu is re-reading J.R.R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings with the notes on the Tor web page.

From a more scholarly perspective, John Whitfield is blogging Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species on a new ScienceBlogs blog, Blogging the Origin. This project is just getting under way.

One interesting point, one which may deserve a post all it's own, is that Tor is basically using a multi-author blog as it's home page. They do have a page dedicated to their books, but the blog is really front and centre, filled with interesting and engaging content of all types, not just about the books they publish. I wonder if there are any lessons the library world can learn from this?

(I first heard about the first project on Uncertain Principles and the second on A Blog around the Clock.)

Science Librarian, York University Libraries

2009-01-08T15:26:00.002-05:00

This is a 3-year appointment in my library, the Steacie Science & Engineering Library. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. Since I'm on the search committee for this position, I really can't answer any but the most general questions.

The deadline for applications is March 2, 2009.

Here's the posting:

Position Rank: Contractually Limited Appointment
Discipline/Field: Science Librarian
Home Faculty: Libraries
Home Department/Area/Division: Steacie Science and Engineering Library
Affiliation/Union: YUFA
Position Start Date: August 1, 2009
Position End Date: July 31, 2012

York University Libraries seek a self-directed and public service-oriented Science Librarian based in the Steacie Science & Engineering Library.

The Science Librarian will be responsible for faculty liaison, collection development and the delivery of information literacy programs for assigned disciplines and will participate in research consultations and outreach activities to departments and research centres. Responsibilities include selection of information resources, collection management and evaluation in such fields as nursing, biology, chemistry and physics. He/she will work individually and as part of a team to develop and provide reference services and information literacy programs to York’s community of users taking full advantage of the online learning and web environments. She/he will also participate in project and committee work for York University Libraries and the University. Some evening and weekend work is required.

York University offers a world-class, modern, interdisciplinary academic experience in Toronto, Canada’s most multicultural city. York is at the centre of innovation, with a thriving community of almost 60,000 students, faculty and staff, who challenge the ordinary and deliver the unexpected.

Steacie Science and Engineering Library is one of four libraries within York University Libraries. The Steacie Science and Engineering Library attracts a half million visitors a year and provides specialized resources, and reference and instructional services to the science, engineering, and health programs of York University. The Library takes pride in its extensive information literacy program and online learning support initiatives. Four full-time librarians and seven full-time support staff are currently based in the Steacie Science & Engineering Library.

Qualifications: An ALA-accredited MLIS or equivalent with up to three years’ post-MLIS experience. Educational background or library experience relevant to science and particularly health related disciplines. Knowledge of health, science and technology literature and reference resources, and awareness of emerging trends in scholarly communication. Experience with Web authoring software and Web support technologies; familiarity with Web 2.0 technologies preferred. Strong client-centred service philosophy and evidence of professional initiative and leadership. Ability to handle multiple responsibilities and projects concurrently. Strong written and oral communication skills, including demonstrated skills in teaching and public communications. Demonstrated understanding of concepts, goals, and methods of information literacy instruction and ability to teach in a variety of settings and formats. Ability to work effectively and collegially with a diversity of colleagues and clients. Interest in research, professional development, and university committee work.

The Science Librarian position is a three-year contractually limited appointment to be filled as Adjunct Librarian level and appropriate for a librarian with up to three years post-MLS experience. Librarians at York University have academic status and are members of the York University Faculty Association bargaining unit (http://www.yufa.org/). Salary is commensurate with qualifications. The position is available August 1, 2009. All York University positions are subject to budgetary approval.

York University is an Affirmative Action Employer. The Affirmative Action Program can be found on York's website at www.yorku.ca/acadjobs or a copy can be obtained by calling the affirmative action office at 416-736-5713. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadian citizens and Permanent Residents will be given priority. Temporary entry for citizens of the U.S.A. and Mexico may apply per the provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

York University resources include centres relating to gender equity, race and ethnic relations, sexual harassment, human rights, and wellness. York University encourages attitudes of respect and non-discrimination toward persons of all ethnic and religious groups, regardless of gender or sexual orientation.

The deadline for applications is March 2, 2009. Applications, including a cover letter relating applicant qualifications to the requirements of the position, a current curriculum vitae, a link to online examples of work where relevant, and the names of three referees, should be sent to:

Chair, Science Librarian Appointment Committee
York University Libraries, 310 Scott Library
York University, 4700 Keele Street
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M3J 1P3
Fax: 416-736-5451
yulapps@yorku.ca

Applications should be sent by mail, e-mail, or fax, with a hardcopy following by mail.

A year of blog stats

2009-01-06T15:10:00.002-05:00

I've been using Google Analytics to track my blog stats since July 2006. I first posted a year's worth of stats in July 2007, giving me a good year's worth of stats to report on. Of course, it seems to make some kind of more sense to report based on a calendar year rather than the anniversary of installing a kind of software.

Therefore, this post.

Last time, I was inspired by a couple of other people reporting their stats, and this time is no different. It was Richard Akerman's recent post on the stats for his Science Library Pad blog that really gave me the kick in the pants to get this done. I'm not going to get as detailed as Richard, but I do hope to give a flavour of the last year.

Some basics (visits / pageviews):

July 2006 - June 2007: 18,856 / 26,928, monthly ave: 1,571 / 2,244
Calendar 2007: 31,144 / 44,458, monthly ave: 2,595 / 3,705
Calendar 2008: 56,593 / 73,212, monthly ave: 4,716 / 6,101
Increase, 2008 over 2007: 82% / 65%

Quite an increase, one I'm very pleased about. Of course, the big reason for such a dramatic increase was being named the Blogger Blog of Note for June 9th. This alone brought me about 16,100 visits.

See below the graph I extracted out of Google Analytics and you can see how June really dominates the whole year, actually making it a bit hard to see trends for the rest of the year.

(Any caption ideas for the graph?)

So, here are some top 10 lists for 2008, with a bit of commentary on some of the interesting ones.

Top 10 Posts

Jeff Healey. (1462 page views) I posted a little anecdote about Healey shortly after he passed away this past March and somehow this got me to the top couple of Google hits on his name for a few weeks. The web is a very strange place, sometimes.
Best and worst science books. (1257) Librarians and books. Seems like an association that can't be broken.
Best Science Books 2007: Library Journal. (838) These best of the year posts are probably the only thing I do with an eye towards traffic, ever since I discovered they were so popular. People seem to want to know about the best science books and it's also something I find interesting as well so I guess it's a natural for me to post about it.
Best Science Books 2007: Royal Society. (593)
Science in the 21st Century reading list. (496) Yet another post about books. This is actually a really good reading list for people interested in where science research and communication is going.
Best Science Books 2008: The New York Times. (495)
Getting a Job 2.0. (474) What happened with this post is kind of amusing. It provoked a bit of overwrought snark amongst some library school students and ended up being quite popular as a result. I still think the advice I cobbled together for the post is valid.
Interview with Timo Hannay, Head of Web Publishing, Nature Publishing Group. (417) My most popular interview ever, by a wide margin, still popular after 18 months. Timo has a lot of interesting things to say about where science publishing is headed.
Interview with Dorothea Salo of Caveat Lector. (379) The most popular of the four interviews I did in 2008. No surprisingly, Dorothea gives a provocative, no-holds-barred interview.
Ebook Business Models. (334) I was quite pleased with this post as it spurred quite a nice conversation in the comments. From 2007 but it took a while for the post to build. As well, it's a topic that people will be only more concerned with as time goes by.

A couple of honourable mentions: the tags for the 10 Years Series and Science Books both got enough hits to make the top 10 but I decided to bump them in favour of real posts. Last year's standouts, the 10 Years Series, doesn't make an appearance this year with an actual post until number 23 with the one on A&I Databases.

Top 10 Referrers

Blogger / Blogs of Note. (14,102 visits) The big one. Being a Blog of Note really drives some traffic.
Google. (1,801) A combination of links from Google Reader and other non-search engine google sites.
Friendfeed. (574) The new elephant in the room. Quite a lot of hits considering I only joined at the end of the summer. I think a lot of people are using FF rather than RSS readers to find good content, I know I am.
ScienceBlogs. (520) Mostly Bora, for whom all thanks go for supporting this blog (as well as so many other science blogs).
Bloglines. (434)
OEDB. (268) Even though this mention in the Top 25 Bloggers list was in September 2007, it just keeps on sending the traffic. As silly as the whole concept and execution was (and is), it's brought me over 750 hits since it was published.
Computational Complexity. (240) Weird. I linked to the post and the trackback drives an awful lot of traffic.
Del.icio.us. (217)
Technorati. (154)
Cosmic Log. (114) One of my year's best books posts got link from MSNBC's blog, but I can't find the link now.

An interesting mix of referrers. Friendfeed seems to be increasing in importance while links from individual blogs somewhat less so. The Blog of Noting seems to be a smaller version of getting Slashdotted or BoingBoinged. (I have combined some groups of sites into one number, like the various Google services.)

Top 10 Keywords

best science books. (1434 visits) If people want to know what the best science books are, I'm happy to help. It seems to be a niche.
Jeff Healey. (1261)
Confessions of a Science Librarian. (491) Lots of people seem to be looking for me.
best science books 2008. (481)
science librarian. (309) I'm the number one result for this search on Google. Too bad more people aren't interested in science librarians.
best science books 2007. (256)
John Dupuis. (162) Yay! I'm the number one result for my name. As with the blog name, a fair number of people seem to be looking for me. Nice, but also somewhat creepy.
Nerac. (161)
uncomfortable questions. (89)
Mamdouh Shoukri. (84) Shoukri is the presidcent of York and I did a post a while back welcoming him. I guess it's proved popular.

I've combined some (but not quite all) of the various permutations and combinations (ie. Librarian sciences, confessions science librarian, Jeff Healy) that are lower ranked in the list.

Top 5 Book Reviews

I'm only going to do the top 5 here, as I haven't reviewed enough book over the last year to make a list of 10 meaningful.

Top 5 Interviews

As with book reviews, not enough interviews to make a list of 10 worthwhile.

Now that all the stats and lists are out of the way, I would sincerely like to thank you, all my readers out there, for your time, attention and support for this blog. I can honestly say that my primary motivation for blogging is not to attract a huge audience or to build some sort of rock star librarian reputation (and if it was, I've been doing it wrong). On the other hand, I'm not sure if I would have continued this long if I thought that no one at all was listening. As well, the opportunities that have arisen and the relationships that have sprung up have been and continue to be very important to me. I am equally grateful and appreciative of being part of the broader communities of science and librarian bloggers. The fact that you all out there are interested in what I have to say is certainly gratifying and motivating. Thanks.

I don't want to live in a world without bookstores

2009-01-03T20:05:00.003-05:00

From the Toronto Star's Vit Wagner.

I couldn't have said it better myself:

No offence to those of you who buy all your books online, but whenever anyone asks why I invariably prefer to purchase my reading matter in a bricks-and-mortar establishment, I have one simple answer: because I don't want to live in a world without bookstores. Bookstores like Book City, Ben McNally Books, Type and Pages (my personal favourites) are not only convenient places to browse unhurriedly for literature of almost every sort, but they are also among the few retail establishments where you can go to get out of the rain and snow, or arrange to meet a friend, without being made to feel like a loitering indigent. No one is saying you have to buy all of your books in a store. Just some. Consider it part of your resolution to get out more.

I'll add Bakka and the Toronto minichain BMV to the list of bookstores. I'm a huge proponent of supporting local business ecosystems, the places that keep our communities vital and employ our family, friends and neighbours.

(A world without CD/record/music stores would be a poorer place too.)

The Year in Cities

2008-12-31T13:55:00.003-05:00

Another meme, this one first encountered at Uncertain Principles. Oddly, because I was actually in one of the cities at the same time as that blog's author.

So, the cities (besides Toronto) I spent the night in during 2008:

Montreal, QC (3x, including Web 2.You)
Research Triangle Park, NC (Science Blogging Conference)
Pittsburgh, PA (ASEE annual conf)
Ste-Agathe, QC (vacation)
Waterloo, ON (Science in the 21st Century conference)
Ottawa, ON (Xmas break)

Not much of a travel year, but that's just fine with me.

A year of books

2008-12-30T18:40:00.000-05:00

I did this last year and it seemed like an interesting and maybe even useful thing to continue this year.

Trends in my reading this year? Lots and lots on science and technology, especially on the impacts of those on intellectual culture. A great year, in that respect, with Shirky's Here Comes Everybody leading the way. Not so much fiction, and especially sf, this year. This'll be corrected by the Sunburst reading I do this year and next (not recorded here, see below), but I think I just needed a break.

Overall, the total number of books I'm reading this year is the highest it's been in quite a long time. Why? Well, honestly, I think it's because of the variety. I used to read mostly fiction, mostly fantastic fiction, and I think I was just getting bogged down by the sameness of it all. Lately, since my sabbatical especially, I'm just reading much wider. And that's made my reading wider and more interesting to me. And this results in me reading more.

So, without further ado, here's a list of all the books I've read this year with links to my reviews:

Ambient Findability by Peter Morville
Year's Best Fantasy 6 edited by David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer
Slide by Ken Bruen & Jason Starr
Farthing by Jo Walton
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2007 edited by Richard Preston & Tim Folger (Series Editor)
The Keeper by Sarah Langan
A Century of Noir edited by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins
Einstein: A Life by Walter Isaacson
Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks And The Masters Of Noir by Geoffrey O'Brien
Supercrunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart by Ian Ayres
Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke
40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, Oxycontin, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania by Matthew Chapman
Year's Best SF 11 edited by David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer
Infected by Scott Sigler
Pyramids by Terry Pratchett
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky
Free as in Speech and Beer: Open Source, Peer-to-Peer and the Economics of the Online Revolution by Darren Wershler-Henry
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr
The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages
Big City, Bad Blood by Sean Chercover
Complications: A Surgeon's Note on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande
Best New Horror 17 edited by Stephen Jones
Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson
The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet by Daniel J. Solove
The Best of Technology Writing 2007 by Steven Levy
The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy
Wrinkles in Time: Witness to the Birth of the Universe by George Smoot and Keay Davidson
The End of the Beginning by Harry Turtledove
Clapton: The Autobiography by Eric Clapton
The Ruins by Scott Smith
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
Comrades of War by Sven Hassel
Solomon's Vineyard by
Pursuit of Genius: Flexner, Einstein, and the Early Faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study by Steve Batterson
Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them by Clifford Pickover
Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design by Michael Shermer
Triptych by Karen Slaughter
Dark Crusade by Karl Edward Wagner
Little Girl Lost by Richard Aleas
The Wraparound Universe by Jean-Pierre Luminet
Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 by Sarah Lacy
Bad Moon Rising by Jonathan Maberry
The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier
The Best American Science Writing 2008 edited by Sylvia Nasar & Jesse Cohen (series editor)
Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008 edited by Jerome Groopman and Tim Folger (series editor)
The Quantum Ten: A Story of Passion, Tragedy, Ambition, and Science by Sheilla Jones
The Dime Detectives: a Comprehensive History of the Detective Fiction Pulps by Ron Goulart
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens
Mafiaboy: How I Cracked the Internet and Why It's Still Broken by Michael Calce and Craig Silverman

I should mention that there are a significant number of books I've read that aren't on the list. I'm not recording the books I read for the Sunburst Awards as I don't think the list of books actually submitted for consideration are made public anywhere.

One book that I did read that's not on the list is The Open Laboratory: The Best Science Writing on Blogs 2007, edited by Reed Cartwright and Bora Zivkovic. Since I was on the advance screening panel of judges for the book, I did read all the posts that are reprinted in it during the judging period at the end of 2007; I also ordered and received the book in 2008. But I never actually cracked the cover and re-read all the posts during 2008. I did re-read a few, but not all.

Notable non-fiction, in no particular order:

Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008 edited by Jerome Groopman and Tim Folger (series editor)
Content by Cory Doctorow
The Canon by Natalie Angier
Einstein: A Life by Walter Isaacson

Notable fiction, in no particular order (Note that this doesn't include Sunburst books, which would make the list quite different):

The Keeper by Sarah Langan
Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke
Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages
The Ruins by Scott Smith
Triptych by Karen Slaughter

As a side note, I really do love reading other people's lists of books they've read. So, those of you who are so inclined (and who are odd enough to actually record each and every book they read during the year), consider this a meme and consider yourselves tagged.

Review-wise, I still have to figure out what to do with the growing backlog of annual essay collections that I haven't reviewed yet. I may end up doing a mass review with one-liner comments at some point. Of books that deserve full-length treatment, I still have Groundswell, Doctorow's Content and Mafiaboy, but it might be a while before I get to any of those. FWIW, I probably won't be reading too many non-Sunburst books for at least a few more months.

(I've been recording every book I read since 1983 and on my other blog I've been occasionally transcribing the list on a year by year basis. I've stalled of late, but I'll probably do a few more during the holidays this year. This list will also be re-posted there eventually.)

Best Science Books 2008: The London Times

2008-12-21T16:42:00.000-05:00

Books from the Science, Nature and Gardening lists. This list is particularly interesting since it's not centred on the US publishing industry.

In Defence of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan
The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology by Tim Birkhead
Consider the Birds: Who They are and What They Do by Colin Tudge
Southern England: The Geology and Scenery of Lowland England by Peter Friend
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
Dry Store Room No 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum by Richard Fortey
The Making of Mr Gray's "Anatomy": Bodies, Books, Fortune, Fame by Ruth Richardson
Bedlam: London and Its Mad by Catharine Arnold
Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

The Twittermonster has claimed another victim

2008-12-18T16:23:00.003-05:00

Just a couple of weeks ago I was talking with a colleague here at York and I remember him mentioning, "You know, I just don't get Twitter."

I remember agreeing, and even stating something to the effect that hell would freeze over before I joined Twitter. I also distinctly remembering thinking to myself that such a definitive statement was sure to prove my undoing.

No sooner had I decided that I was never going to join Twitter than I seriously began to think about what it is and what it can be used for. And the more I thought about it, the more I began to think that I needed to give it a try.

Today, while at a meeting where only a couple of people showed (holidays, strike, etc.) we were talking about creating dynamic presences for academic libraries on the Web. Of course, Friendfeed and Twitter both figured prominently in those discussions.

Needless to say, combine all those with a rather uneventful desk shift (between the Cupe 3903 strike and normal December slowness, it's dead here), and I decided to take the plunge.

So: http://twitter.com/dupuisj

Follow me, tweet me, whatever. It should be interesting.

(And more to follow on creating dynamic web presences for the York Libraries...)

IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine

2008-12-18T10:37:00.004-05:00

A relatively new magazine from the IEEE, one that I just heard about the other day in the most recent What's New @ IEEE in Libraries. It looks very interesting and has the potential to be a great showcase for issues surrounding women in engineering and science in general.

There have been three issues so far: v1i1, v2i1 and v2i2.

From the Letter from the Editor, Karen Panetta, in the first issue.

The goal of this magazine is to be your resource for helping to attract, retain, and sustain women in the engineering and science fields. For parents and educators, IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine will showcase the exciting career opportunities in the IEEE fields of interest and provide you with access to successful outreach activities that will help encourage children to pursue engineering. The magazine will also provide networking and career support whether you are a student, young or seasoned professional, or reentering the workforce.

*snip*

Oftentimes, I am met with questions about the need for the existence of groups such as WIE. Less than 30% of all engineers are women, with the majority of this number falling in the chemical and biomedical engineering fields. Electrical engineering and
computer engineering still continue to be the most underrepresented engineering fields for women. The attrition of women in the electrical engineering profession also shows that women are leaving the discipline at extremely high rates. Women are a valuable untapped resource that makes up 50% of the world’s workforce. This, coupled with the fact that there are so few women pursuing engineering, is evidence that a problem exists and demands action. Furthermore, we often forget that places in the world still exist where women are not allowed to pursue education, never mind the possibility of pursuing an engineering career. There are countries that have IEEE chapters, yet women are still not permitted to present their work due to cultural issues. IEEE WIE is committed to overcoming the barriers that have kept women from pursuing and advancing in their careers.

I couldn't have said it better myself!

Some highlights from the first three issues:

Women engineers fight numbers lag by Ionescu, C.
Building a strong: foundation for the future: Monkeys, machines, and museums all playing a part in education
Looking at the Big Picture: Joan “JPEG” Mitchell Battles the Gender Divide by Keller, J.C.
For the love of engineering by Salim, N.
Bringing real-world relevance into engineering classrooms by Peress, R.
Blending technology and the law for cyber security [Women to Watch] by Wax, H.
Guarding ethics in engineering [The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly] by Wax, H.
Becoming leaders [Career Advisor] by Prives, L.

Best Science Books 2008: The Economist

2008-12-18T09:42:00.002-05:00

Here are some books from the business, history and science categories of The Economist's list.

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford
Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
American Rifle: A Biography by Alexander Rose
The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters by Rose George
The Princeton Companion to Mathematics edited by Timothy Gowers, June Barrow-Green and Imre Leader
Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Duelling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population by Matthew Connelly
Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets by Sudhir Venkatesh

Best Science Books 2008: Some Best Business Books lists

2008-12-17T11:40:00.000-05:00

Some of the Best Business Book lists I'm seeing definitely have books on them that would interest either the library crowd, the science crowd or both. In general, these lists are very interesting because the books are about placing technology in a social or organizational context.

Here's some highlights from a couple of the lists.

Business Week

Hell's Cartel: I.G. Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine by Diarmuid Jeffreys
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives by Michael Heller
Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America by Thomas L. Friedman
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

Financial Times

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness
by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
The Logic of Life: Uncovering the New Economics of Everything
By Tim Harford
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig

Fast Company

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr
Earth: The Sequel: The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming by Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn
Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently by Gregory Berns
The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company by David A. Price

Social Networks that make me scratch my head

2008-12-16T13:18:00.000-05:00

Sometimes things just don't seem to make sense to me. Social networks seem to sprout like mushrooms on a damp log and I wonder if they're used, useful and sustainable.

Nature Blogs

Take Nature.com Blogs as a first example. It's supposedly a place where users can keep up to date on what's going on in the science blogosphere, but to my mind it's not very good. It mostly features Nature's own blogs with only cursory coverage of everything else. At least on the home page. The Browse Blogs and the Top Stories pages are a little better, but not much. Really, the other two Nature blog aggregators, Scintilla and Postgenomic, are both way better. It's hard to imagine them needing two, never mind three. You can also log in with your Nature Network password and suggest new blogs or moderate new blogs that others are suggesting.

What were they thinking? Fortunately, they have let us peak into their inner workings.

First, a post on Nascent:

We launched a new blogs portal on nature.com earlier this week. It's part of a general overhaul of blogging at NPG which amongst other things involves link backs from articles to the blog posts writing about them (bloggers get traffic, our readers get conversation around papers - works for us both) and improving the blogging experience for users on Network.

It also seems that they use Scintilla as the engine. They also point out that the list of blogs in moderated by the community and that it is connected to Nature Network, something that is new and interesting.

Also, there are a couple of conversations on FriendFeed (1,2):
As Euan says:

Yeah, Nature Blogs should eventually match Postgenomic in functionality. Essentially NPG IT can't support Postgenomic for various reasons. Nature Blogs is a cleaner rewrite anyway (and more stable: needed for the link backs work). IMHO we should open source the code, but we'll see.

Also from Euan:

We'll be using it to put link backs on our papers - if you write about a paper publishing in an NPG journal on your blog and you're in the blogs index then you get a link back from the article itself. The blogs index is open to other publishers too to use as a spam free whitelist.

Overall, it does seem that the Nature folks have interesting and useful plans for the new site, that it does and will have functionality and integration that will surpass and perhaps replace both Postgenomic and Scintilla. I just find it odd that they didn't make that more clear from the beginning and more obvious on the Nature Blogs site itself. This is a transitional life form, in a way, and we are just waiting for the right features to evolve. Really only a little head scratching involved.

Library Networking Group

Considerably more head scratching involved is the case of Library networking Group, a kind of join venture of the Ontario Library Association and Networking Groups, Inc that is being promoted quite heavily by OLA (I've gotten at least 4 or five emails from OLA about this).

From their promotional emails:

Welcome to Canada’s newest online community for Library Professionals - the Library Networking Group.

The Library Networking Group is a collaboration between Networking Groups, Inc. and the Ontario Library Association to bring full social networking to library staff, library trustees and those who support libraries of all kinds everywhere. It is a new meeting space in which you and your colleagues initiate and join in dialogues and other collaborations through forums, blogs, articles, podcasts and more. It is a straightforward and easy way to share ideas and practice with your fellow subject matter generalists and specialists in the library community.

Share ideas and ask questions while establishing new contacts and increasing your networks. Membership is free.

What’s in it for you

The Library Networking Group gives you instant access to hundreds of individuals with a passion for libraries. This professional networking site can unlock new opportunities for you and your colleagues to further your knowledge, to meet developing attitudes and trends that are shape our outlook, even improve skills through the sharing of best practices.

It looks really interesting. It has blogs, forums, podcasts, groups and even recent articles by well known authos from various publications. In conception, it reminds me of Nature Network or even the Palinet Leadership Network. In a very good way. Here's a place that librarians can gather and share their experiences.

What's the epic fail? It's all behind a registration wall. Sure, registration is free and appears fairly painless if somewhat intrusive. But nobody can read any of it unless they're registered.

I had a brief email conversation with a couple of people involved in the LibraryNG project and here's what I had to say about that:.

These were my intial thoughts:

Just to let you know, I did go to the site and was extremely disappointed that none of the content is available without registration. I would never join a site like that or recommend it to anyone else.

The profession needs to be open and transparent and the bloggers and others that contribute to the site deserve to have their thoughts be part of the open professional record, both to be part of the larger professional conversation and to be recognized for their contributions.

You should take a look at the Nature Network site as I think it has a better model for participation. Anyone can read but only the registered can blog, comment or participate in forums.

Walled garden professional social networks are the wrong path and I don't think that they'll be attractive enough to be sustainable.

My second email was in reponse to someone from Neworking Groups, Inc, who emailed me back to mention that some of the other communities they've designed are fine with the restrictions. This is what I had to say:

First of all, to compare to the other community sites you have might not be applicable. Although I don't know those communities that well, I suspect that your site wasn't an entry into a community with already many hundreds of active bloggers and commenters. Check here for a list of *active* library community bloggers.

And just one of the FriendFeed librarian rooms.

This is an open, vibrant community with lots of back and forth and discussion. Taking a librarian and putting their ideas behind a wall, any wall, will hurt their "brand" and "reputation" building because the most important thought leaders in the field are already out in the open. Being behind the wall means that far fewer people in the community will be able to read them and comment.

Same with articles and forums. Your article writers and other contributors will want the broadest audience possible.

As for the fear of spam and email pirates, access to personal information can still be behind the sign-on barrier and subject to the privacy profile of the members.

I think two good examples of mostly open communities are Nature Network for
scientists and the Palinet Leadership Network, which is a librarian community.

In Nature Network, anybody can read anything, but you have to be signed up to blog or comment.

I have to admit, the thing that surprises me the most about this is that OLA didn't see the problem with having this kind of closed social network and that it would not be as advantageous to the careers and reputations of their members as an open one. Many of the arguments for open access apply to this case as well. So the arguments we would use to promote open access to faculty have to be the same arguments we would use to advocate for open discussion within our own community.

Needless to say, I haven't signed up for LibraryNG yet. If any of you out there have, I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.

Best Science Books 2008: Library Journal

2008-12-13T14:42:00.002-05:00

Wow, another disappointing list:

The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight To Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird by Bruce Barcott
Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators by William Stolzenburg
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Library Journal did a dedicated scitech last year and I hope they do it again later on for 2008.

Best Science Books 2008: Booklist

2008-12-11T14:51:00.004-05:00

Here's the Top 10 Sci-Tech Books for 2008:

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters by Rose George
Beyond the Zonules of Zinn: A Fantastic Journey through Your Brain by David Bainbridge
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach
Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds about Animals and Food by Gene Baur
Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis by Rowan Jacobsen
Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others by Marco Iacoboni
The Parrot Who Thought She Was a Dog by Nancy Ellis-Bell
The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret by Seth Shulman
Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound by David Rothenberg
The Universe in a Mirror: The Saga of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Visionaries Who Built It by Robert Zimmerman

Interview with Michael Nielsen

2008-12-08T13:16:00.004-05:00

No, not me interviewing Michael Nielsen (although I'll probably get around to it one of these days).

It's my older son Sam who is in grade 10. It's for a Career Studies assignment because he's thinking that theoretical physicist is a possible career path. Check out the interview here.

Recently, I had to do an interview of someone who was on, or had been on, a similar career path to the one we want to pursue (being in grade 10, there's some growing up left to do, but it doesn't feel right to say 'when we grow up'). I've been thinking theoretical physicist as of late (have I mentioned that before?) and I was hoping to interview someone who's... in theoretical physics. At first, it seemed like a hopeless journey; how could I reach someone who's in physics and actually convince them to do an interview? I didn't even know where to start to find a physicist, unless one counts asking my dad. Of course, he said something along the lines of 'Michael Nielsen! He was a physicist and is now writing on the future of science as a whole. He's famous and his career path is extremely relevant.' My curiosity was piqued.

Best Science Books 2008: No Love for Science

2008-12-08T11:58:00.004-05:00

Here's some more from the Fimoculus list, these ones notable for not having any science books mentioned when you would think that they could find at least one:

As I see more science-free lists, I'll probably just add them here. Fortunately, I do have a bunch of great lists to blog about over the next few days.

Update 2008.12.13:

Update 2008.12.21:

NPR -- no science list or any science books appearing on any of the other lists.
Slate -- the medical editor chose Stalking Irish Madness by Patrick Tracey but it seems too marginal for me to count as a science book

Best Science Books 2008: The Globe and Mail Gift Books

2008-12-06T11:52:00.002-05:00

After the depressing LA Times, one of my favourite annual lists -- Globe and Mail Gift Books. There's an incredible array of fantastic suggestions here, both from the scitech world and arts, culture and history. There's tons of stuff here that I wouldn't mind finding under the tree in a few weeks.

Here's the science-y ones from the History, Nature and Miscellaneous categories:

The Atlas of Exploration Foreword by John Hemming
Animals: A Visual Encyclopedia edited by Carrie Love and Caroline Stamps
Mission Space: A Full-Throttle Tour of the Universe by Carole Stott
Hubble: Imaging and Time by David Devorkin and Robert W. Smith
Antarctica: Secrets of the Southern Continent by David McGonigal
The Owl and the Woodpecker: Encounters with North America's Most Iconic Birds by Paul Bannick
Arctic Visions: Pictures from a Vanished World by Fred Bruemmer
Aviation Canada: The Pioneer Decades by Larry Milberry
Cool Stuff Exploded: Get Inside Modern Technology by Chris Woodford

And here's some really cool-looking ones from the various categories (hint, hint):

Battle at Sea: 3,000 Years of Naval Warfare by R. G. Grant
Horror Cinema Edited by Jonathan Penner and Steven Jay
Marvel Chronical: A Year by Year History Foreword by Stan Lee. Afterword by Joe Quesada
Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko by Blake Bell
Historical Atlas of Toronto by Derek Hayes,
The Beer Book Edited by Tim Hampson
Drinks: Enjoying, Choosing, Storing, Serving and Appreciating Wines, Beers, Cocktails, Spirits, Aperitifs, Liqueurs, and Ciders by Vincent Gasnier

Best Science Books 2008: Los Angeles Times + Book Covers

2008-12-05T14:30:00.000-05:00

Wow, the most catastropically disappointing list so far. A major paper like the LA Times can't find even one science book worth mentioning. The only one close is a nature title. From the non-fiction list:

The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West by Deanne Stillman

Interestingly, there are science fiction and mystery lists, something many other papers don't bother with.

On a more cheerful note, Joseph Sullivan's list of the best book covers of the year does have a few really nice examples from science books.

Friday Fun: A Super-Geeky Christmas List

2008-12-05T11:32:00.001-05:00

Nuff said.

The one that most intrigues me:

Space opera cookie cutters – I recommend a rocket ship, stars and a moon. And spacey sprinkles. ’Cause I’m one of those feminists who likes to bake. Plus you can spread the geek gospel more easily with holiday food.

Best Science Books 2008: Christian Science Monitor

2008-12-04T15:52:00.004-05:00

Decent list:

The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret by Seth Shulman
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer by Shannon Brownlee
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan
The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded and Gladwell's Outliers are two marginal science books that seem to be getting a lot of mentions.

(Thanks for Mita for pointing me to this site!)

Best Science Books 2008: The New York Times

2008-11-29T21:22:00.003-05:00

This year's list of notable books is a very slightly better than last year's total of just 3. Stretching my definition of science book gives us five this year.

Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene by Masha Gessen
The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson.
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Thomas L. Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America is a related book that I think a lot of people will be selecting this year.

Best Science Books 2008: The Globe and Mail

2008-11-29T15:28:00.000-05:00

This year's Globe and Mail Globe 100 is quite a disappointing list, first of all because I only really identified 5 science books this, about half of last year's tally. I sort of thought that the Globe was deemphasizing science in the book review section this year, but this comes as a real confirmation of that trend.

But first, the science books that made the list (and a few interesting outliers, too):

Soul of the World: Unlocking the Secrets of Time by Christopher Dewdney
Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood by Taras Grescoe
The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS by Elizabeth Pisani
The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Portrait of Your Head by Raymond Tallis
Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis by Rowan Jacobsen

Some interesting related books, including two novels with scitech themes:

Who's Your City? How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life by Richard Florida
The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek by Sid Marty
Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey D. Sachs
Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America by Thomas Friedman
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
The Origin of Species by Nino Ricci

It's telling that that the non-science outliers are more numerous than the core science books. What's missing? Even from the books I reviewed this year, I would say that The Quantum Ten is really glaring in it's omission, especially since it's by a Canadian author. Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody is probably the best book about the impact of technology on society in years and it's really embarrassing it's not on the list. Equally embarrassing is that there were really no non-environmental books that dealt with technology and society. It's also odd that they chose Dewdney's book on time rather than Canadian Dan Falk's similar title. They both got good reviews -- Dewdney even reviewed Falk's book for the Globe a few weeks ago.

It's also disappointing that the Globe did not see fit to include any sf, fantasy or horror books aside from Doctorow's rather obvious YA choice. Mysteries and thrillers get their own dedicated column and maybe sffh deserve the same treatment.

Gisele Dupuis, 1926-2008

2008-11-29T13:40:00.004-05:00

Some of you may have noticed a bit of a blog silence around here since last Friday. Well, last Saturday night we got the very sad news that my mother had passed away very suddenly earlier that day. I spent the last week in Montreal with my family, cleaning my mother's apartment with my sister, attending the funeral, buying a new suit and other assorted activities. And mostly being offline.

Needless to say, it's been a difficult time.

And the last day or so, as things have approached normalcy, I've struggled a bit with whether or not to mention my Mom's passing here. After all, I've tended to post very little of such a personal nature here and that's been on purpose. On the other hand, I've been very happy to be part of both the library and science online communities and have "met" (and/or met) many people here who I consider true friends. As such, I do feel that I can occasionally talk a little about what's going on in my personal life.

Besides, I asked my wife what she thought about me posting here and she said, "Sure! Your Mother would have gotten a kick out of being on the Internet!"

In any case, I'm including a great picture of my mother with my two sons below. It was taken about 18 months ago and really captures both her spirit and her love for her grandkids and, by extension, her whole family.

Some links: newspaper notice, online memorial, Kane & Fetterly funeral home, who were a great help to my sister and I through this whole process.

Please feel free to leave a note here, on Friendfeed or the online memorial site.

Friday Fun: Dominoes!

2008-11-21T11:12:00.004-05:00

I love those domino toppling displays -- I think they're so cool in a Rube Goldberg kind of way. When my sons were younger, we used to set up little domino toppling displays around the house. We only had a hundred or so dominoes but it was still a lot of fun.

Anyway, the World Domino Record was recently set on TV.

A world record for the number of dominoes toppled was set when 4.3m fell during a two-hour TV show.

More than 85 people from 13 countries took part in the challenge, which took eight weeks to set up and was a year in the planning.

Acrobat and former Miss Finland, Salima Peippo, toppled the first domino while suspended from the ceiling by ropes.

The aim of Domino Day 2008 was to break ten world records made in previous years.

According to the organisers the 2008 attempt required 9,500 sq m (31,168 sq ft) of space, more 250 different types of domino, 300 mechanics, 100 decor pieces, 1500 turning fences and more than 5,000 square m (16,404 sq ft) of floor paint.

Check out the link above to see a video of the display.

(Weekly Typealyzer test for CoaSL: INTP)

Jones, Sheilla. The quantum ten: A story of passion, tragedy, ambition and science. Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2008. 323pp.

2008-11-19T22:05:00.000-05:00

Enough with the physics books, already! After a summer of more or less nothing but physics books, I should have probably tried something a bit different. On the other hand, this book is about one of the most interesting periods in all the history of physics -- that transitional time in the first third of the 20th century when some of the greatest minds of all time worked out the foundations of quantum physics. Back when I read Isaacson's Einstein book, that was one of the periods that fascinated me the most, especially because it was so instructive to see a brilliant mind like Einstein be so doggedly wrong. In a way, it gives hope to us all.

But, back to the book at hand.

Canadian journalist Sheilla Jones is basically telling the story of the rise of quantum theory through the stories of ten men: Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, Erwin Schrodinger, Louis de Broglie, Pascual Jordan and Paul Ehrenfest. It is through their interactions up until the Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927 that the story is told.

Jones does an admirable job of telling those 10 interrelated stories in a clear and comprehensible way. Some are highlighted more, such as Einstein, Bohr or Born and some less, such as Jordan or Dirac. However, if one person can said to be the main lens through which Jones tells the story, it is the tragic, troubled Paul Ehrenfest, the confidant of Einstein who ultimately committed suicide while also taking the life of his disabled son. His doubts and insecurities concerning his own abilities as a physicist are a perfect mirror in many ways for the perceived doubts and insecurities of the new quantum reality that those men had to come to grips with.

Jones does a fine job of telling a scientific story through biographical details, weaving in the darkening tale of pre-Nazi-era Europe in the tale as well. If I have any complaint, it's that the actually recounting of the Solvay Conference was a bit of an anti-climax. This is easily one of the best science books of the year and I would certainly expect it to make many of the year's best lists, especially in Canada.

I would easily recommend this book to any academic library that collects in popular science or the history of science. It would also be suitable for any public library. With the holiday season upon us, there would be worse gift ideas for the historically or scientifically minded.

Science blog meme: Why do we blog?

2008-11-18T19:50:00.001-05:00

As usual, late to the meme party...

I'm not a huge fan of taking part in memes, but this one seems to be sweeping the science blogosphere. It's generated a lot of very interesting responses so far, so I thought I'd give it a try. It's also been quite a while since I did a navel-gazing post, so I'm probably due.

The meme was started by ~~Richard Grant~~ Martin Fenner on Nature Network. The only other science librarian one I've seen so far is by Frank Norman.

What is your blog about?

Lots of things, mostly revolving around the issues I face as a science librarian. The particular focus changes quite often as my momentary facinations and obsessions shift -- science 2.0 seems to be it right now, not surprising as I have a presentation in January. On the other hand, I've always posted a lot about the culture and scholarly communications practices of computer science and engineering. Science books are also a pretty predictable constant.
What will you never write about?

I've tended to avoid overly personal stuff, politics, religion as well as commenting too directly about what's going on at my institution.
Have you ever considered leaving science?

This one has a two-part answer.

First of all, at the undergrad level I studied computer science and ended up working as a software developer for an insurance broker from 1986 to 1998. In that sense, I did practice "science" in an industrial setting for over 12 years and left that to become a librarian. More information on that transition here.

Of course, I'm still not really a working scientist but as an academic science librarian I guess I'm part of the broader culture of scientific education and practice. I'm actually pretty happy in my current role and haven't considered leaving it.
What would you do instead?

Own a used book store, definitely one that specialized in any genre with science in the name: popular science, history of science, science fiction, science biography.
What do you think will science blogging be like in 5 years?

It will probably be bigger and more diverse. As the younger generation of scientists and science people advance in their careers, they'll just expect that blogging is a normal and even valuled part of what some scientists do. I hope that in this time frame, tenure committees will start to recognize that blogging can be a legitimate aspect of a scientist's publishing and outreach portfolio.

Another thing to watch out for is the professionalization of science blogging. Will more and more of the best and most popular blogs get recruited into the commercially run stables? I think that's a generally positive development as it can only increase the credibility of blogging.
What is the most extraordinary thing that happened to you because of blogging?

A couple of cool things have happened at least in part because of my blog. I've served on the IEEE Library Advisory Council, I've gotten a couple of speaking invitations, a few free books and mostly connected with a lot of great people in both the science and librarian communities.
Did you write a blog post or comment you later regretted?

Not really.
When did you first learn about science blogging?

Probably 2002, around the time I started blogging myself. In those days, I mostly followed library blogs and only a few (computer) science blogs. I didn't get into science blogs in a big way until Seed started up the Scienceblogs.com in early 2006 and since then I would say I follow the science and library blogging worlds with about the same level of attention.
What do your colleagues at work say about your blogging?

We don't really talk about my blogging that much, so it's hard to know what they would say if we did talk about it. I think most are aware that I blog and some have commented or had encouraging words over the years. Actually, we're quite an active blogging university library, when you get right down to it.

ISTL Web 2.0 Special Issue

2008-11-17T18:07:00.003-05:00

Yes, Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship has a special web 2.0 issue (i55, Fall 2008). Much amazingness ensues:

Science Experiments: Reaching Out to Our Users by Maureen Nolan, Lori Tschirhart, Stephanie Wright, Laura Barrett, Matthew Parsons, and Linda Whang
Web 2.0 as Catalyst: Virtually Reaching Out to Users and Connecting Them to Library Resources and Services by Norah Xiao
An Undergraduate Science Information Literacy Tutorial in a Web 2.0 World by Jeanine Marie Scaramozzino
Chat Widgets for Science Libraries by John J. Meier
Making Research Guides More Useful and More Well Used by Michal Strutin
Geospatial Technology Support in Small Academic Libraries: Time to Jump on Board? by Carrie M. Macfarlane and Christopher M. Rodgers
Podcasting the Sciences: A Practical Overview by Eugene Barsky and Kevin Lindstrom
An Old Fogey Looks at the Reference (R)Evolution by Linda Shackle

D-Lib, November/December 2008

2008-11-17T17:38:00.003-05:00

A bunch of interesting articles in an ejournal I haven't mentioned in a while (v14 i11/12):

The Future of Repositories?: Patterns for (Cross-)Repository Architectures by Andreas Aschenbrenner, Tobias Blanke and Mark Hedges, Ben O'Steen
Social annotations in Digital Library Collections by by Rich Gazan
Electronic Journals and Changes in Scholarly Article Seeking and Reading Patterns by Carol Tenopir, Donald W. King
A Study of Institutional Repository Holdings by Academic Discipline by Peter A. Zuber

The Open Laboratory 2008 -- December 1st deadline coming fast!

2008-11-14T09:00:00.000-05:00

I've been a bit remiss in not mentioning the looming deadline for the annual collection of the best blog postings of the year, this year edited by Jennifer Rohn and Bora Zivkovic.

I'll cut to the chase -- here's what Bora has to say:

We are busy preparing for The Open Laboratory 2008. The submissions have been trickling in all year, and a little bit more frequently recently, but it is time now to dig through your Archives for your best posts since December 20th 2007 and submit them. Submit one, or two, or several - no problem. Or ask your readers to submit for you.

Then take a look at your favourite bloggers and pick some of their best posts - don't worry, we can deal with duplicate entries. Do not forget new and up-coming blogs - they may not know about the anthology - and submit their stuff as well.

As we did last year, we encourage you to also send in original poems and cartoons.

Keep in mind that the posts will be printed in a book! A post that relies heavily on links, long quotes, copyrighted pictures, movies, etc., will not translate well into print.

The deadline is December 1st, 2008. - just half a month to go!

The submission form is here.

It's an annual collection, published by the print-on-demand publisher Lulu.com. The books from the last two years are here and here. Both are excellent, well worth reading and acquiring for your library.

The first two have perhaps overemphasized life sciences blogs a bit, so it would be great if all the computing and other people out there could nominate their own or other's posts to help get a bit more diversity in the collection.

Although I haven't done my nominating yet, I have been collecting some worthy posts around the blogosphere on del.icio.us here. I'll probably pick a few for nominating over the next week or so. The post I link to above has everything that been nominated to date.

Michael Cairns on Publishing in a Digital Age

2008-11-13T22:40:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Michael Cairns of Information Media Partners for bringing his recent presentation to my attention. It is one he delivered at the Frankfurt Bookfair Supply Chain Meeting and the full title is Publishing in a Digital Age: How Traditional Publishing is Leveraged.

Slides here and video too.

I like what Michael says in the speaker's notes at the end, for slides 22 and 23:

So I ask the following: Do we want to hang on with our finger tips operating in an increasingly unfamiliar business environment? Or, do we embrace the opportunities that digital publishing offers and endeavour to influence and manipulate the publishing environment of the future to our advantage? The answer is obvious but it connotes significant change.

*snip*

Lastly, I hope you will not begrudge me for not mentioning supply chain once in this presentation. Frankly, the changes I have discussed will change everything about our supply chain and that much should be obvious.

As Michael points out, he doesn't really mention supply chain anywhere in his presentation and I think that's probably very appropriate from the academic library perspective. What's the supply chain for getting book-like information from the producers/publishers to our patrons? In a world of Google Books, big ebook collections that we can buy directly from publishers, torrent sites and Wikipedia, there are very nearly an infinite number of supply chains out there. And academic libraries do have roles in many of those supply chains, but not all of them.

Or perhaps we can imagine a world with just one (important) digital supply chain -- maybe Google, the 800 pound gorilla of the online (publishing) world, will become that ebooks supply chain in the future. I think with their latest announcement they may be setting itself up as a kind of supply chain by selling to individuals and licensing to libraries. As I said in that post, it's a potential game-changer for the ebook business for academic libraries.

Science Education in Computational Thinking

2008-11-11T17:49:00.003-05:00

Just like last year, Eugene Wallingford (CoaSL interview here) of the blog Knowing and Doing has written up some pretty detailed workshop session reports from the 2008 NSF Workshop on Science Education in Computational Thinking. Here's his Table of Contents post, which I'll be reproducing below along with some excerpts from each post.

Primary entries:

Workshop 1: A Course in Computational Thinking -- SECANT a year later
Teaching CS principles to non-CS students required the CS faculty to take an approach unlike what they are used to. They took advantage of Python's strengths as a high-level, dynamic scripting language to use powerful primitives, plentiful libraries, and existing tools for visualizing results. (They also had to deal with its weaknesses, not the least of which for them was the delayed feedback about program correctness that students encounter in a dynamically-typed language.) They delayed teaching the sort of software engineering principles that we CS guys love to teach early. Instead, they tried to introduce abstractions only on a need-to-know basis.
Workshop 2: Computational Thinking in the Health Sciences -- big data is changing the research method of science
In addition to technical skills and domain knowledge, scientists of the future need the elusive "problem-solving skills" we all talk about and hope to develop in our courses. Haixu Tang, from the Informatics program at Indiana contrasted the mentality of what he called information technology and scientific computing:
- technique-driven versus problem-driven
- general models versus specific, even novel, models
- robust, scalable, and modular software versus accurate, efficient programs
These distinctions reflect a cultural divide that makes integrating CS into science disciplines tough. In Tang's experience, domain knowledge is not the primary hurdle, but he has found it easier to teach computer scientists biology than to teach biologists computer science.
Workshop 3: Computational Thinking in Physics -- bringing computation to the undergrad physics curriculum
...Further, many students do not think that computational physics is "real" physics. To them, physics == equations.

This is a cultural expectation across the sciences, a product of the few centuries of practice. Nor is it limited to students; people out in the world think of science as equations. Perhaps they pick this notion up in their high-school courses, or even in their college courses. I think that faculty in and out of the sciences share this misperception as well. The one exception is probably biology, which may account for part of its popularity as a major -- no math! no equations! I couldn't help but think of Bernard Chazelle's efforts to popularize the notion that the algorithm is the idiom of modern science.
Workshop 4: Computer Scientists on CS Education Issues -- bringing science awareness to computer science departments
Next, Tom Cortina talked about Teaching Key Principles of Computer Science Without Programming. In many ways, Cortina was swimming against the tide of this workshop, as he argued that non-majors could (should?) learn CS minus the programming. There certainly is a lot of cool stuff that students can learn using canned tools, talking about history, and doing some light math and logic. Cortina's course in particular covers a lot of neat material about algorithms. But still I think students miss out on something useful -- even central to computing -- when they bypass programming altogether. However, if the choice is between this course and a majors-style course that leaves non-majors confused, frustrated, or hating CS, well, then, I'll take this!
Workshop 5: Curriculum Development -- some miscellaneous projects in the trenches
Bruce Sherwood reported a physics student comment of his own: "I don't like computers." Sherwood responded, "That's okay. You're a physicist. I don't like them either." But physics students and professors need to realize that saying they don't like computers is like saying, "I don't like voltmeters." If you can't work with a voltmeter or a computer, you are in the wrong business. That's just the way the world is.

My favorite line of Landau's is one that applies as well to computer science as to physics:

We need a curriculum for doers, not monks.
Workshop 6: The Next Generation of Scientists in the Workforce -- computational thinking as competitive advantage
How does computational thinking help the company do more better and faster? By...
- ... letting scientists spend more time doing what they love.
- ... eliminating low-value-add transactional activities in the business process.
- ... boosting the speed and scalability of their systems.
Notice that these advantages range from the scientific to business process to the technical. It's not only about techies sitting in front of monitors.

Ancillary entries:

This and That -- the inevitable miscellaneous thoughts
The buzzword of this year's workshop: infiltration. Frontal curricular assaults often fail, so people here are looking for ways to sneak new ideas into courses and programs. An incremental approach creates problems of its own, but agile software proponents understand its value.
No One Programs Any More -- a timely conversation the week before the workshop
In the time since I joined the faculty here, many departments have dropped the computer programming requirement from their majors. Part of the reason is probably that the intro programming courses were not meeting their students' needs, and our department needs to take responsibility for that. But a big part of the reason is that many faculty across campus believe as the Math faculty do, that their students don't need to learn computer programming anymore. Not too surprisingly, I disagree.