Science in the 21st Century conference recap

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was at the Science in the 21st Century conference at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario for the week of September 8th. The conference location was terrific. The PI's building is a great site for a small conference, the food in the Black Hole Bistro was fantastic and the PI library is small but very nice and really starting to grow.

Overall, it was a fantastic experience, one that will take a long time to properly digest. I'm not going to bother with session summary posts for a couple of reasons. First of all, videos of nearly all the sessions are available; second, the FriendFeed room has an amazing amount of really good microblogging about the conference. You can really get the essence of the sessions. Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles has also blogged a bunch of very good sessions summaries. There was hardly one single bad or even mediocre presentation at the entire conference; it's well worth the time to watch several of them. The organizers should be proud of assembling such a fine roster of speakers.

There's also a good compilation of blog reactions on the conference site.
Before I forget, there's a really nice photo of most of the conference attendees available.

Since summary isn't that useful at this point, I thought I'd maybe talk a little about some of the main impressions I got out of the conference.

First of all, science 2.0/open science still are pretty minority interests and movements, with not much happening in the broader community yet beyond the early adopters. This seems to be mostly due to issues in incentives and workload. On the other hand, there's some very interesting stuff going on in some disciplines and with some scientists. I think there's enourmous possibilities for a sea change in the way science is both done and communicated over the next decade as the current crop of young scholars become the senior scholars in their various fields. In particular, today's undergrads and grads see open content and social networking the way fish see water.

So, everybody is grappling with the 2.0 stuff and it's hard to say if the science community is ahead or behind the curve. In some ways libraries and librarians are perhaps a bit ahead of the curve, if only because we see a train-like light at the end of the tunnel and are reacting by innovating and experimenting. You'd be hard pressed to find many large- or medium-sized academic libraries that aren't at least experimenting with some of the tools; some are even experiencing some success. On the other hand, if a library news blog posts in the forest and nobody reads it, does it really exist.

One thing that was pretty apparent at the conference was that libraries aren't really on most faculty members' radar, something that may be somewhat more true of the science 2.0 savvy types at the conference. But that's something we knew already. If faculty don't come to the library anymore -- and we've worked very hard to make sure that they really don't have to -- we might have to find other ways to let them know what we're doing and to engage them in what we have to offer.

As a result of our success (or joint success with publishers and OA advocates), faculty can tend to be somewhat unaware that their students still use and value the library. This trend may be more prevalent in disciplines with generally small numbers of majors, but I think is also be pretty widespread. It's going to be a challenge to both find our roles in the evolving context as well as make a case for that role with faculty and administrators.

Are we in danger of being shut out from the research process unless we find a way to be relevant -- research support, curation, advocating for and building the arxiv equivents for other disciplines? A difficult question without an obvious answer; I think part of it will be to continue to build on our relationships -- with information literacy and undergraduate education, moving into the ebook space, hosting journals, and as the place for good study space on most campuses. The good news is that for the most part people are willing to listen and give us a chance if we can get their attention. Since everyone is grappling with the implications of the web for science, there's certainly an openness to contributions from all quarters. There was about 20% librarians at the conference, something that I think most people noticed, even if they were somewhat mystified by our ubiquity. Perhaps some will go back to their institutions and drop by and see their own librarian to see what he or she is thinking about. A bunch of people asked me questions about the future of libraries and if my answers were a little fuzzy, well, there was a lot of fuzziness about the future of science and science institutions in the 21st century. In retrospect, I probably should have asked them what they thought libraries had to contribute.

The above may seem a bit pessimistic, but I can't say that I really feel that way at all, in fact if anything I'm optimistic. Sure, there are challenges but we would be mistaken if we thought that the scientists have raced past us and totally embraced all the possibilities of the web. Some them have perhaps raced past, some of them haven't embraced the web, some of the stuff we've done in the past is just just gone, some of the things we could do in the future will elude our grasp. But, change brings possibilities.

I like to quote myself sometimes from a long ago post on the future of science libraries:

I want to facilitate a future, one that is good for our patrons but one that also has me in it. And I think that's what we should all aspire to in our professional lives, to bringing about the best future we can imagine, for ourselves and our patrons.

(Still to come -- I might possibly get around to some brief session notes. I definitely have a post in the works with some more concrete ideas on engaging the science communities in online library social spaces but a lot of that stuff is still percolating.)

Science in the 21st Century reading list

I spent the past week at the Science in the 21st Century conference at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, ON. It was a heck of a conference, an intense five days of workshops, discussions and social events. I'm still digesting what went on and trying to make a bit of sense of it, especially how it all relates to libraries. However, I'm not quite up to the task of getting all that down on pixels yet. I thought I'd first start by arranging some of my "to be read" list that I gleaned from various of the discussions.

As you can imagine, lots of books, articles and web sites were mentioned at the conference, which is no surprise, of course. A lot of the web sites and articles that were mentioned are listed in the various FriendFeed threads in the Science21 room. A bunch of books were also mentioned in a thread that Mark Tovey started. I thought it would be interesting to take Mark's thread as well as some notes that I made during the conference and make a nice list here. (Thanks to everyone who contributed to Mark's thread!)

You could do a lot worse job of preparing for the present and future of science and scientific communication than reading these books:

• The Dream Machine : J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop
  
  
• Libraries of the Future by J.C.R. Licklider
  
  
• Rethinking Expertise by Harry Collins and Robert Evans
  
  
• Gravity's Shadow: The Search for Gravitational Waves by Harry Collins
  
  
• American Physics and the Cold War Bubble by David Kaiser
  
  
• Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives edited by David Kaiser
  
  
• The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union by Loren Graham
  
  
• Scientists in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science Education by John L. Rudolph
  
  
• The Sputnik Challenge by Robert A. Divine
  
  
• Brainpower for the Cold War The Sputnik Crisis and National Defense Education Act of 1958 by Barbara Barksdale Clowse
  
  
• Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics by Peter Louis Galison
  
  
• QED and the Men Who Made It by Silvan S. Schweber
  
  
• The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial Complex at MIT and Stanford by Stuart W. Leslie
  
  
• Towards 2020 Science
  
  
• Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves by Adam Hochschild
  
  
• Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson
  
  
• Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge
  
  
• Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky
  
  
• The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers by Tom Standage
  
  
• Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace edited by Mark Tovey
  
  
• Anything by Lawrence Lessig
  
  
• The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler
  
  
• Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe
  
  
• The access principle: The case for open access to research and scholarship by John Willinsky
  
  
• Ambient Findabillity by Peter Morville
  
  
• Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger
  
  
• The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet by Daniel J. Solove
  
  
• The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr
  
  
• Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block
  
  
• The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary by Eric S. Raymond
  
  
• Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg
  
  
• The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups by Mancur Olson
  
  
• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
  
  
• Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet by Christine L. Borgman

Of course, a similar list or lists could be compiled for articles, web sites, videos, etc, but I'll leave that task to some one else. Books lists seem to be more my thing.

In any case, feel free to suggest more books either here or in the FriendFeed thread, especially if there were items from the conference, the FriendFeed or the video that I've forgotten.