According to the Rowland Institute Library Blog, the Chronicle of Higher Education now has rss feeds! Here!

GISUser.com - The complete GIS & Geospatial Resource is, like the name implies, a resource for the GIS/Geomatic community. It looks pretty impressive, especially as a news source. It also has a pretty good data page. via SciencePort.org, an increasingly valuable resource.

Six Steps to LCC@Home by Kendall Grant Clark is the follow-up to his Library of Congress Comes Home from a while back. If we recall, in that article he introduced us to the concept of using XML and the LC classification to organize all of our home libraries. This time he goes into much more depth on the kinds of things we have to do to implement his scheme. His six steps are:

1. Survey (get an impression of the size and subject distrubution of your collection.
2. Allocate (the physical space in your home taking into account what you have and expected growth)
3. Gather (labeling materials)
4. label (put labels on your stuff, using the LCC in the CIP data)
5. Punt (fugure out what to do with stuff not found in 4)
6. Arrange (the labeled stuff in your physical space)

Next time he promises real, implemented code to help us get started.

Yet another science librarian blog here. This one's called On Christina's Radar and is by Christina L. Pikas, Technical Librarian at the Johns Hopkins Univesity Applied Physics Laboratory. She's recently published Trends in Blog Searching in the March/April 2004 b/ITE. Not surprisingly, the blog seems to mostly concentrate on physics & astronomy. There is no evidence that she is Canadian ;-) (unlike, of course, Catherine, Randy, Geoff and myself.) via SciencePORT.

A long interview with usability guru Jared Spool here at Infomation Design. When asked what he's currently thinking about, Spool replies: "Well, lately, I've been thinking about chocolate chip cookies. I really like them. I probably don't get enough of them." My kinda guru. via CurrentCites.

Character Sets and Character Encoding: A Brief Introduction by Ardie Bausenbach is about Unicode, although why it's not mentioned in the title is a bit of a mystery. This is from the most recent RLG DigiNews (v8i2). via CurrentCites.

Salon's Everyone is an editor by Sam Williams is an interesting look into the world of collaborative content projects, particularly the Wikipedia project. For those that don't know, the Wikipedia is a giant collaborative encyclopedia that basically anyone can contribute to. It's range of entries is shockingly diverse and of surprisingly good (if sometimes uneven) quality. Check out the definitions of computer science, software or computer engineering or electrical engineering to see what I mean. The linking between terms is fantastically useful, definintions practically serving as portal pages to an entire subject area -- and if you see a term that not fleshed out, you can do it yourself. And it's multilingual, both in terms of multiple main entry points for the encyclopedia and each term linking sideways to definitions in other languages. What the heck: Physics, Astronomy, Math,

SciencePORT.org is a scientifically-oriented blog directory site. It covers all the main areas of science (and other fields too) but usually only a handful of blogs listed in each area. It's fairly academic in orientation, also with strong international, non-English content. Well worth checking out, a site that will hopefully grow and evolve. They even have a feed of new sites added here.

Looking for those other kinds of confessions of a librarian? Try Diary of a Librarian for something a little closer than what I traditionally provide. Discovered it via the "recently updated" list on the Blogger home page. BTW, have I ever mentioned that one of the most frequent search engine queries leading here is just "confessions?"

This little pointer to another article from About (If You Haven't Loved Math.....) is interesting. I'm always facinated about the teaching (or not teaching) of math in a mathophobic culture.

If you are of a certain age (or perhaps a historian of technology or culture), you might want to check out the Classic Computer Magazine Archive. via ResourceShelf.

If it seems like forever since I last blogged something from the O'Reilly site, it's because it has! In any case, here's an interesting bit from Tim O'Reilly on the State of the Computer Book Market.

The British Library's Turning the Pages digitization project brings to life a number of interesting historical works. The quality of digitization, the audio track, the interface, the ability to easily magnify the images are all unbelievable. This is absolutely worth taking a look at. Relevant to us here are (via ResourceShelf.):

• Leonardo's Notebook
• Vesalius' Anatomy
• Blackwell's Herbal

The lastest issue of the INASP Newsletter from the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications. This newsletter is a valuable window into the library community in the developing world.

A couple of articles from the most recent IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (v26i1):

• Finding a history for software engineering by MS Mahoney.
  
• Four editions and eight publishers: a history of the Encyclopedia of Computer Science by A Ralston.

So, how do we all keep up to date in science and librarianship? A complex question with a lot of different answers. Recently Michael Leach of Harvard surveyed the PAM membership to get a idea. Michael has kindly allowed me to post the results of his informal survey as he emailed them to PAM members:

Below is a summary of the replies I received to my posting on "Keeping
up to date" with our fields. I thank the many of you who provided lists
and comments, which I condensed below.

A few notes:

1) It appears that use of blogs are on the increase, especially those
blogs with aggregate information from a number of resources.

2) Many complained about the signal-to-noise ratio on many lists, and
about email spam in general.

3) Finally, many noted the need to read more, but time constraints and the
ever increasing volume of materials make this difficult. It is clear we
will need better tools and resources in the future to deal with these
issues.

Perhaps PAM should examine and then consider the possibility of
creating an information aggregator for the Division membership. RSS feeds
and blogs are certainly two IT mediums to consider for such a project,
after a user needs study is conducted. Although, perhaps, blogs like STLQ
already fulfill this niche for members.

The summary is broken down into two sections: I) LIS Resources, and
II) PAM-SciTech Resources. Within each section, resources are grouped by
medium type. Items with an asterisk (*) indicate a resource recommended
by numerous folks.

If you did not respond originally, but would like to send your
suggestions along to me now, please do so. Thanks.

Michael Leach
Physics Research Library, Harvard University
mrleach@fas.harvard.edu or leach@physics.harvard.edu
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

I) LIS Resources

Blogs:

commons-blog (http://www.info-commons.org/blog/)
Confessions of a Science Librarian * (http://jdupuis.blogspot.com/)
EngLib * (http://www.englib.info/)
Information Literacy weblog (http://ciquest.shef.ac.uk/infolit/)
Internet Scout weblog * (http://scout.wisc.edu/Weblog/)
Lessig Blog (http://www.lessig.org/blog/)
Librarians' Index to the Internet (http://lii.org/)
LISNews * (http://www.lisnews.com/)
LibraryCog (http://librarycog.uwindsor.ca/)
Open Access News * (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html)
Peter Scott's Library Blog (http://blog.xrefer.com/)
ResearchBuzz * (http://www.researchbuzz.com/)
ResourceShelf * (http://www.resourceshelf.com/)
SEPW - Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog
(http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepw.htm)
Shifted Librarian (http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/)
STLQ - The SciTech Library Question * (http://stlq.info/)
TVC Alert - Research News (http://www.virtualchase.com/tvcalert/)

Journals:

Ariadne (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/)
American Libraries
ASEE Prism
D-Lib Magazine * (http://www.dlib.org/)
High Energy Physics Libraries Webzine (http://library.cern.ch/HEPLW/)
Information Research: an international electronic journal
(http://informationr.net/ir/)
Information Outlook
Information Today
Internet Resources Newsletter * (http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/irn.html)
Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship * (http://www.istl.org/)
JoDI: Journal of Digital Information (http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/)
Journal of Academic Librarianship
Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology
(JASIST)
Online
Portal: Libraries and the Academy
(http://muse.jhu.edu.ezp1.harvard.edu/journals/pla/)
Science & Technology Libraries
Scout Report (http://scout.wisc.edu/Reports/ScoutReport/Current/)
Searcher

Lists:

CLIS List (University of Maryland College of Library & Information Science
list)
eld-l
eril-l *
infolit-l
liblicense-l *
reedelsevier
SLA-DC
SLA-PAM *
SLA-scitech
sts-l

----------------------------------
II) PAM-SciTech Resources

Journals:

Annals of Improbably Research (http://www.improbable.com/)
Chemical & Engineering News
Communications of the ACM
Discover
The Engineer
E-Streams
IEEE newsletter
Inspec newsletter
Nature *
New Scientist
Newspapers (a number of different ones, including New York Times)
Physical Review Focus (http://focus.aps.org/)
Physics Today *
Physics Web
Physics World
ProQuest newsletter
Science *
Scientific American *
Technology Review (http://www.techreview.com/) (also has a blog service)

Lists:

National Academies (US) What's New (http://www.nas.edu/mail.html)

Other:

EEVL - Internet Guide to Engineering, Mathematics, and Computing
(http://www.eevl.ac.uk/)
E4 (http://www.e4engineering.com/)
EurekAlert (http://www.eurekalert.org/)
ltsn - Learning and Teaching Support Network (http://www.ltsn.ac.uk/) (See
various "Subject Centres" for specific resources)
PSIgate - Physical Sciences Information Gateway
(http://www.psigate.ac.uk/newsite/)
Science Daily (http://www.sciencedaily.com/)
Topix.net (Science/Technology News)
Wired News Technology (http://www.wired.com/news/technology/)

A couple of fun space science sites discovered via the SF world:

• Planetary Scorecard: Expensive Hardware Lobbing is a site chronicling our attempts to get expensive hardware safely landed on other planets. via SciFi Weekly.
  
• SpaceRef is a general space science news site with an awful lot of interesting content. via SciFi Weekly.
  
• An Astrobiology Magazine article about the recent Astrobiology Science Conference. via Locusmag.

In the March 2004 issue of Technology Review there's an article "Search Beyond Google" about the state of the art in search engines, and especially the kinds of things we can expect in the future from Google and its upstart competitors. Highly recommended.

Today's Toronto Star has a great series of articles on Linux in the business section. You can get to it here. If that doesn't work, most of the articles are by Rachel Ross or Tyler Hamilton, so you should be able to get to the articles via their columnist pages.

Long-time readers of this humble blog know that I'm a chess player and quite interested in computer chess. So this article from Chessbase on the first "chess computer", The Turk, is quite interesting. It seems that the Heinz Nixdorf Museum in Germany has recreated the machine, including finally more-or-less establishing how the elaborate hoax was carried out. As usual, I'm john_d on GameKnot. Any other chess-playing librarians out there up for a challenge?

Ripoff 101: How the current practices of the textbook industry drive up the cost of college textbooks makes interesting if not surprizing reading. I find it interesting that most student don't actually use the cds or other extras packaged in with their textbooks. via Cynthia Archer via ARL-DIRECTORS.

Here There Be Data: Mapping The Landscape Of Science is an article about the most recent PNAS. They have a special section on using maps to represent the ebb & flow of scientific progress. It's a facinating way to see the interconnectedness and interdisicplinarity of the work that's happening these days.

An interesting quote: "The traditional method involved books, reference works and physical materials on library shelves, most of which had been verified for accuracy by one or another authority. Now, we sit at computers and cast our net into a sea of information, much of which is inaccurate or misleading." It's hard to tell which side he's coming out on, but I think he's trying to make the point that maybe the net hasn't quite replaced real, peer-reviewed literature yet. Much of which can still be found in books & reference sets on the shelves or in actual journals that the library still has to pay for. Also a BBC story here. via LISNews & ScienceDaily.

Research Blogs is an online community/blog for masters & PhD students. Nothing posted in the sciences section yet... via OAN.

The following LISNews poll gives you a chance to vote for your favourite librarian web site. Hint Hint Hint. Oh, and vote for STLQ & EngLib too! Scitech librarians of the world, Unite!

Welcome to the newly created Communicating Astronomy With The Public division of the IAU!! via Liz Bryson, slapam-l.

Information-seeking behavior of chemists: A transaction log analysis of referral URLs by Philip M. Davis is an interesting look at how chemists actually end up at the journal articles they read. via SEPW.

Internet Resources: Gray literature: Resources for locating unpublished research by Brian S. Mathews from C&RL News, v65i3, March 2004. Very good and very complete article on grey literature. via Internet Resources Newsletter.

STLQ: It Had to Happen: AIM has a Blog is a posting from Randy. The only thing I can add is that there's a feed too! Oh, and that would be The Annals of Improbable Research, with the blog here.

Why engage in e-science by Tony Hey is from a recent Update. This is a rather interesting slam article about librarians from what appears to be a CS prof:

'Why do all universities need to keep a physical copy of the Physical Review? Maybe one copy, held by the British Library, would be enough. Libraries get a chunk of money from the funds allocated to the universities by HEFCE. There isn't going to be much new money in universities to access new forms of services so we need to take a hard look at the changing rationale for the existing services. Libraries are in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant to students in engineering and science. I recognise that these are difficult issues, but it is obvious that things cannot remain the same. Libraries need to engage with the changing IT landscape and rethink what the library needs to do.

'I am not anti-library. I just feel that there are some technological trends that are inevitable. Putting one's head in the sand is no way to approach them. There needs to be a national debate.'

This is just a sample from the very end of the article. It seems to me that Hey hasn't spoken to a librarian -- metadata? Has he heard of Dublin core? digitization? Has he heard of Instititional Repositories? Data? Do you know of a large institution that doesn't have a Data Librarian? It seems to me that virtually every negative point he makes is actually either exaggerated or totally wrong. Has this guy been to his local library in the last 10 years? He mentions that he doesn't think libraries are that relevant to scitech students -- if he'd ask someone would tell him that practically nothing circulates as much as CS books. Electronics books, too. Scitech students use the library a lot. In fact, my (admittedly anecdotal) evidence would suggest that scitech profs are beginning to understand that the library is more relevant to their students now, not less. Sigh. End of rant. I invite comment. From Catherine, who seems much more restrained.

How to quickly find articles in the top IS journals by Ruth Bolotin Schwartz and Michele C. Russo is from the February 2004 CACM (v47i2). The authors go through a rather convoluted process, no doubt taking months of exhaustive research to discover that ABI/Inform has very good coverage of IS journals. And in full text too. It strikes as rather unbelievable, especially since they could have spent 15 minutes going down to the library in their institution, asked a librarian, and gotten exactly the same answer. But what would be the fun in that? Actually, if I may be serious, the authors do pay close attention to libraries and librarians in their article and the issues we face is deciding what to subscribe to. They also come up with something I didn't know: Ingenta indexes most of the top journals! Good article, worth reading.

Going on right now at the NASA Ames Research Center is the Astrobiology Science 2004 Conference. The program includes a Science Fiction Night and a Mars Terraforming panel with Arthur C. Clarke, Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinson. via LocusMag.

The website for the Engineering Library Division of the American Society for Engineering Education has moved here.

A couple of recent articles from the IEEE on women in computing:

• "Deterrents to women taking computer science courses" by S. Beyer, K. Rynes and S. Haller in IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, v23i1 , Spring 2004.
  
• "Women and gender in the history of computing" by J. Abbate in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, v25i4 , Oct.-Dec. 2003.

Have that massive EndNote file lying around and not sure how to share your extensive bibliographic research with the world? Oh sure, setting up your own searchable web database isn't that hard, who wants to go through it yourself when you can get someone else to do it for you. Biblioserver.com is a new site that will mount your EndNote or ProCite database online for you and make it searchable. Free for now, it will be a for-pay service very soon. As long as the price is reasonable, this is a great idea. There's lots of research in niche areas out there looking for way to make it more accessible, and this could provide it. I sure we all could think of a project that could find a good home here -- computer chess, IL in the sciences....the possibilities are endless. Via LISNews.

A couple of very interesting articles on information seeking behavior in the most recent Journal of Academic Librarianship (v30i1):

• "Factors Influencing Distance-Education Graduate Students' Use of Information Sources: A User Study" by Zao Liu and Zheng Ye (Lan) Yang. The message here is that distance ed grad students tend to follow the path of least resistence when finding information -- tending to use the net as their primary source. Also, the more motivated the student, the more likely they are to use the library.
  
• "Identifying University Professors' Information Needs in the Challenging Environment of Information and Communication Technologies" by Maria Anna Jankowska is a facinating article full of interesting details, mostly broken down by field. From the conclusion:

  The results of this survey clearly confirmed previous findings about the fact that unawareness of the range of databases, the lack of knowledge about electronic resources among faculty, lack of time, lack of training, and instruction were critical obstacles in effective use of electronic resources and services by faculty. The marketing of library e-resources and e-services should be a critical component of academic libraries' activities.

The CAUT Almanac of Post-Secondary Education: 2004 is now available. Prepared by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, this document has all the stats on post-secondary education in Canada that you can shake a stick at. Absolutely fascinating reading, even, I imagine, for non-Canadians as it gives plenty of details of the make-up of students and profs in Canada, including lots of salary information. Most stats on profs are also split by gender. There are a couple of pages on librarians & libraries, which are also very interesting.

Another signal that the academics are getting it, if only slowly: Managing academic e-journals by Hovav and Gray in CACM v47i4, April 2004. From the abstract: "Though e-publishing is relatively inexpensive, e-publisher survival still depends on the age-old virtues of content quality and author credibility." While not actually about Open Access publishing (they're a bit vague on the cost/price issues), this is an interesting piece on what some computer scientists think about the pros and cons of e-only publishing. It's interesting that while they use some of the library literature in their bibliography (almost nothing later than 2000), they don't really seem to mention libraries very much in their article. It's like they haven't noticed what's going on down at their local library that much in the last few years.

Ephemera for Engineers and Scientists by Donald Christiansen is from the IEEE's Today's Engineer (Feb 2004). A common theme for us librarians, it points out that lots and lots of those citations to web sources you see in scholarly papers these days just disappear over time and are thus: ephemeral! From TheResourceShelf.

Better late than never, I'd like to mention the new Engineering Information Literacy discussion list, ELD-ILit.

Want to implement the LC subject headings for your home collection? Using XML? Sounds daunting? Check out The Library of Congress Comes Home by Kendall Grant Clark from O'Reilly's XML.com site. This is sort of a teaser article for next month, when he promises to go into the nitty-gritty, but he does tackle some interesting points, like why LC and not Dewey. In all, this has to be one of the most interesting articles about what libraries really are I've every read outside the library literature. A sample quote:

What can we say about lending libraries from the perspective of information management? Libraries, including some personal ones, are dijalog (simultaneously digital & analog - JD) institutions. Libraries are (1) chunks of physical space, (2) highly organized and regimented, which exist, in part, to facilitate (3) the navigation of a virtual space, in this case, the information space of all (ideally, anyway) recorded human knowledge.

Eventhough I mentioned it last December, I would like to point once again to O'Reilly's Bioinformatics web site. Some recent content includes:

• Java APIs for Bioinformatics
  
• A Chromosome at a Time with Perl, parts 1 & 2
  
• Sequence Analysis Data Formats

We've all seen George Porter's posts on the various listservs (STS-L, ERIL-L, etc...), usually letting us know about another new Open Access journal or set of journals. This is a great service, which I'm sure we all appreciate. But, how does he do it? How does he know all this stuff? Well, he recently posted his secrets to various lists. He has graciously allowed me to reprint his post here:

I've gotten a number of notes asking how I find out about ejournals. There is no single answer to that question. In the case of Amphibian & Reptile Conservation, I received a notification from PMC-News mailing list <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mailman/listinfo/pmc-news>. On the other hand, I scanned the titles on the PubMed Central site to determine that Clinical
Microbiology Reviews had been completed. I'm sure a notification email will be forthcoming in the next several hours/days.

There are several major repositories which I monitor on a weekly basis:

PubMed Central <http://pubmedcentral.com>
SciELo Wirtualna Biblioteka Nauki - Kolekcja matematyczno-fizyczna [Polish virtual library - collection of mathematics -physics] <http://matwbn.icm.edu.pl/>
EMIS ELibM: Mathematical Journals <http://www.emis.ams.org/journals/>
BioMed Central | for authors | Launched and forthcoming journals <http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/newjournals>

Less frequently, I comb through:

Online-Only Journals Monitored by CAS <http://www.cas.org/EO/ejourn2.html>
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) <http://www.doaj.org/>
Sciation: HELP/NEWS <http://scitation.aip.org/servlet/HelpSystem?KEY=SCI&TYPE=HELP/NEWS>
IoP News HighWire -- Free Online Full-text Articles
<http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl>

HighWire provides several alerting email lists (instructions at bottom of free article webpage), as does, FreeMedicalJournals.com <http://www.FreeMedicalJournals.com>.

Many of the titles highlighted have been documented for years in Caltech's Online Journal Database <http://ojdb.caltech.edu>, through the efforts of all of the Caltech librarians (Dana Roth, Daniel Taylor, Jim O'Donnell, Hema Ramachandran, Caroline Smith, Judy Nollar, John McDonald, Kim Douglas, and Sandy Garstang -- to name a few).

Monitoring a wide range of discussion groups is also a key strategy. While I am personally involved with web4lib, lita-l, sts-l, chminf-l, eldnet-l, slapam-l, eril-l, SPARC Open Access Forum, and quite a few others, other Caltech librarians actively participate in still more groups including liblicense-l, serialst, ....

The latest issue of Wired has a long series of articles on Google entitled The Complete Guide to Googlemania!, including such articles as "How to Kill Google!"

And on the subject of ISTL, their latest issue is out as well. This one concentrates on agricultural librarianship and prints the contents of the United States Agricultural Information Network conference from 2003. Unfortunately, of the dozen or so entries on the TOC, only 4 (!) are full text, the rest abstracts only. I really doubt the usefulness of this, other than being able to contact the authors if you want more information. Also, on principle, I hate when journals reprint conference proceedings. Those proceedings really belong in one of the various eprint servers (see previous post). I hate to be negative about a journal that I generally think is the best one out there for scitech librarians, but I gotta call 'em as I see 'em.

As for the other content in ISTL, I would not hesitate to recommend it's high quality. I won't list all the contents here, as would should all be checking it out anyway. I will mention a couple of articles particularly relevant to our mission here:

• "The NASA Astrophysics Data System" by Leith B. Woodall. A database review of a db we already probably all know about, but I always find it useful to refresh my memory with articles like this.
  
• "The Top Ten Things a new Sci/Tech Librarian Should Know: Developing Core Competencies" by Victoria S. Mitchell is actually several lists, my fave point is: "Your colleagues are just as clueless or insecure as you are." Not that I'm clueless or insecure ;-) This is based on a session at the 2003 ALA conference in Toronto.

The latest High Energy Physics Library Webzine is out with the usual array of fine articles, this time concentrating on eprints/archives/preservation. I find it interesting (and instructive) that there exists two such incredibly wonderful FREE, ONLINE journals supporting scitech librarianship. The lesson from HEPLWZ and ISTL is that this is obviously a sustainable model, and I really expect that other similar niche web journals should sprout up in other areas. In fact, I would be interested in hearing about others in the comments to this post.

The most relevant HEPLWZ articles for us here are:

• "The eDoc-Server Project: Building an Institutional Repository for the Max Planck Society" by Gerhard Beier and Theresa Velden.
  
• "EULER - A Real Virtual Library for Mathematics" by Michael Jost and Hans J. Becker

Physics Today March 2004- Publish or Perish--An Ailing Enterprise? by Mohamed Gad-el-Hak and published in Physics Today is about the glut of scitech publishing out there. Be it books or journals or, I guess, even web sites, there is just so much being published today that by necessity much of it must be of little value. All you hear about is new journals being launched to make sure quality work gets published, when maybe what we need is fewer journals with less of the other stuff being published. An interesting perspective from a scholar and one librarians should be aware of. If probably means we should subscribe to fewer but better journals and buy fewer but better books. Easier said than done when it seems to be all about publisher's package deals these days. Get 5 journals you want along with 5 (or 55 or 555) you don't really care about. via Lisnews.

D-Lib Magazine's latest issue is out. The featured collection this month is on Cosmic Evolution. Last month, I neglected to mention an interesting article in Dlib entitled "Supporting Member Collaboration in the Math Tools Digital Library: A Formative User Study" by Shechtman, Chung and Roschelle.

CSICOP On-line: Scientifically Investigating Paranormal and Fringe Science Claims is a great site for those of us that are scientifically rather than supernaturally inclined. CSIOP, by the way, stands for Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. The are also the publishers of Skeptical Inquirer magazine.via SciFi Weekly.

At last - proof that Guinness bubbles sink must be one of the most startling scientific discoveries of all times. via GoogleNews.

Something I would like to bring to all of our attention is the DoIS : Documents in Information Science journal and conference archive. Some of the journals you can find in full text inlcude Computers in Libraries, First Monday, ISTL and IFLA Journal. Some even have RSS feeds! This a great attempt to gather together a rather dispersed online LIS literature and centralize access in one place. I would encourage other publishers, like for the ASLIB Proceedings, to at least deposit their back issues here. The journal list is here and the conference list is here. I'm not sure if this can function as a regular eprint server (like E-LIS), but that would be a great idea too.

The latest issue of the ACM journalinteractions (v11i2) has a special feature on Human Computer Interaction with over a dozen short articles on a wide variety of topics. Well worth checking out for anyone interested.

EEVL-doer Roddy MacLeod informs me that EEVL is looking for your feedback and is drawing four lucky winners from respondants for £25 amazon gift vouchers (I presume for amazon.co.uk). The survey can be filled out here.

The latest issue of the Bulletin of the ASIST (v30i2) has a special feature section on biological informatics including articles on (via The ResourceShelf):

• A Comparison of Biodiversity Informatics and Neuroinformatics by Bryan Heidorn
  
• Publishing Digital Floras and Faunas by Bryan Heidorn
  
• Intellectual Property and Biological Knowledge by Gwen L. Williams
  
• Biological Information Standards by Chulin Meng

One of my favourite thinking-outside-the-box scientists is cellular automata guru Stephen Wolfram (one two). If you've always thought his brick-like tome A New Kind of Science was a little too scary looking to actually buy (or check out, natch) and read, he's put it online here. It I may attempt a vast oversimplification of his ideas, he generally believes that the natural world is better understood through algorithms rather than equations. via OAN

Some interesting (or not, depending on your standards) new blogs or blog directories:

• MedLib, a medical library weblog.
  
• BigBlog is more or less a collection of scitech clipping service blogs. Limited but interesting, similar to the vital ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily also has a feed available, with information here.
  
• Blogarama is another big directory site with a scitech section.via ResearchBuzz
  
• CS Daily is a computer science current events blog that is almost never updated. via STLQ.

York University faculty member Bernie Lightman has scored a real coup with the relocation of the important history of science journal ISIS to York. Isis is published by the History of Science Society.

Following up on my reading habits, I really must mention two annual book series that I absolutely love. The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Science Writing. Both take their selections from popular science and general interest publications. Both are perfect for keeping up with the latest developments in a wide range of fields. The one thing that is too bad is that both feel the need to restrict themselves to American sources, missing out on numerous UK and other sources. Canada is technically included, but I have yet to see anything from here.

A few intesting pointers came out of our blogging session:

• First of all, Art Ryhno's blog LibraryCog is great and I would suggest everyone check it out.
• Reading and the Reference Librarian: The Importance to Library Service of Staff Reading Habits was recommended at the session. I've already ordered it via the York Bookstore. I'm a great believer in voracious reading habits as the best strategy for reference desk sanity.
• Refgrunt is a hoot.

Two recent presentations at the Ontario Library Association Superconference by your humble blogger:

• Creating Dynamic Subject Guides with York colleagues Patti Ryan, Merle Steeves and Jody Nyasha Warner.
  
• Creating a Subject Specific Blog was part of a panel session co-presented with Steven M. Cohen (blog, ppt) and Mita Sen-Roy (blogs 1 2 3, ppt). This one was kinda interesting for a couple of reasons. First of all, I was going to use one of the other participant's laptop for my ppts. Unfortunately, my diskette gave up the ghost and would let me transfer the file. Guess what? I just talked. The world didn't come to an end. The other reason it was interesting was because, of course, the other participants (Mita and Steven) both gave such stimulating presentations. Steven's about marketing ourselves as professionals using blogs and Mita's about what blogs mean for reference service (among other things). Very good energy in the session, from the audience too.

Many thanks to Carolyne Sidey and the Sheridan Park Library and Information Science (SPLISC) Committee for inviting me this past Thursday January 22nd to talk about Blogging for Science Librarians.

Those of us with a few grey hairs have always been shocked (and always have and will be) by the attitudes and frame of reference of callow youth. From lisnews.

Relevant here, both because it's inherently interesting and because It would come under the remote sensing/photogrammetry/geomatics umbrella, is the Aerial Reconnaisance Archives. It was announced a while back but the server was swampled. You can finally get in! What the archive is is recon photos from WWII. From their site: "During World War II, photgraphic reconnaissance played a major part in the intelligence war. The advanced photographic techniques developed, gave intelligence officers the ability to view the enemies activities in 3D, and make highly accurate assessments. Discover a new way of looking at our history, and our future at evidenceincamera." From lisnews.

The arxiv eprint archive has a new section on qualitative biology here, including sections on Biomolecules, Cell Behavior, Genomics, Molecular Networks, Neurons and Cognition, Populations and Evolution, Quantitative Methods and others. There's not much there yet, but this is a very positive development for a growing field. More information here. From George S. Porter via STS-L

Although I have generally and heroically (I hope) resisted the tempation to blog about blogging (Frodo's struggles may be relevant here), this one from the Blogger home page was just too amusing (in a delusion-of-grandeur sort of way). It's about how to squeeze a mega book deal out of your blogging addiction.

Guess what? Engineers work in offices, too, not just in labs or in the field. If engineers understand how offices work, they will be happier and healthier in those environments. An interesting and enlightening exploration of office culture for engineers is in the latest IEEE Spectrum, (v41i1 jan 2004). It is: "Anatomy of the Office - Newly minted engineers will get a leg up if they understand the complex dynamics of the workplace." by Carl Selinger. Spectrum kindly maintains a careers website for young engineers here. The Selinger article is part of the Career Strategies section, archived here.

Lucius Shepard's review of LOTR: ROTK has to be the most sensible I've seen, especially in terms of his esthetic approach to the trilogy as an operatic epic. From Locusmag.

IEEE Software has a special issue (v21i1 jan/feb 2004) on Open Source software with many interesting articles.

The most recent IEEE Spectrum (v40i12 Dec 2003) has a great article with a ridiculously long title: "5 Commandments Some technology laws and rules of thumb have stood the test of time, but not all. Spectrum looks at five to see how they have fared, starting with the grandaddy of them all--Moore's Law." It basically goes through five common "rules of thumb" about how the tech world works and looks at how it compares with reality. They are:

• Moore's Law: The number of transistors on a chip doubles annually.
• Rock's Law: The cost of semiconductor tools doubles every four years.
• Machrone's Law: The PC you want to buy always will be $5000.
• Metcalfe's Law: A network's value grows proportionately to the number of users squared.
• Wirth's Law: Software is slowing faster than hardware is accelerating.

I've been a member of the Electronic Resources in Libraries (ERIL) list for quite some time. It always has good information and discussions. Here's a good list of open access journal collections, part of their very comprehensive resource page.

Let's just say that this one had me checking the calendar to see if it's really April 1st. Digital revolution leaves Google feeling quite flush is an article about Google installing digital toilets. Insert your own toilet joke here. Via ResourceShelf.

"The expert user is dead" by Leo Robert Klein is such a terrific article it's like it smacked me right between the eyes with a two-by-four. We all like seeing articles that agree with our basic assumptions, and I'm no exception. Klein's thesis is basically that the modern user (ie. average undergrad and 90% of grad & faculty) really don't care about the thesaurus or other controlled vocabulary. They rarely, if ever, use advanced search features. They almost never want everything on a topic or even the best information on a topic. The want good enough, fast enough as easy as Google. However, we as librarians usually assume that the users are just like us and want to use all the bells and whistles, that they are being comprehensive, that they enjoy poking around in odd corners of a database. Not! The point being, we should design our websites, out databases, our webguides, our instruction, our reference interviews for who our users are, not who we would like them to be. Sure, there are highly specialized users that are the exception (chemistry & SciFinder comes to mind), but I really think the Google paradigm is the rule. Every librarian, every vendor should take a look at this article. You may not agree, but you will be challenged. Via various sources.

The latest issue of b/ITE (v20i6 Nov/Dec 2003), the newsletter of the SLA IT division, has just been posted. It's a special issue on RSS with interesting articles by Marie C. Kaddell, Greg Kaplan and Stephen M. Cohen. Well worth taking a look at, as are all issues of this newsletter.

The latest portal: Libraries and the Academy is out with, as usual, several very interesting articles for academic librarians. A small sample:

• "Tragedy of the Commons Revisited: Librarians, Publishers, Faculty and the Demise of a Public Resource"
  
• "Assessment with Rubrics: An Efficient and Objective Means of Assessing Student Outcomes in an Information Resources Class"
  
• "Librarians and Link Rot: A Comparative Analysis with Some Methodological Considerations" is on everyone's favourite topic: web guides.
  
• "Social Sciences Literature and Electronic Information"

This is a terrific issue. Virtually every article would have a broad interest for academic librarians.

It's nice to know that medical researchers have a sense of humour, too. Or perhaps this is just a ploy to win an IgNobel? The article, "Head injuries in nursery rhymes: evidence of a dangerous subtext in children's literature " by Sarah M. Giles and Sarah Shea is a hoot. via Google News.

For those of us interested in the Philosophy of Science, there is an eprint server up and running. Looks interesting but not too many documents yet. Come on, you philosphers, get with the open access program. From Robert Michaelson via slapam-l.

Library Bloggers of the world unite! Or at least write about it for The Reference Librarian. This is something I totally support. Blogging is such a new phenom that I think we owe ourselves the opportunity to think deeply about what we do. Do I take my own advice? Let's wait and see. Via Commons-blog.

If you write book reviews as part of your professional persona, here's a survey being conducted on just that topic. via H. Robert Malinowsky.

When an undergrad asks me how to tell if a scientific article is primary or not, I always ask them, "Can you understand the title?" If they answer "no," then I say, "Bingo!" It's simplistic, probably overly so, but my follow-up explanation goes into how the audience for primary articles is other specialists in the same field, so it uses highly specialized language that the non-PhD will probably not understand yet. This seems to work. In the LIS field, I rarely get that feeling, of seeing such highly specialized terminology that I'm not sure what the darn thing is about. This is one of the closest so far: "Using MPEG-21 DIDL to Represent Complex Digital Objects in the Los Alamos National Laboratory Digital Library" from the lastest D-Lib. Every so often, D-Lib publishes something that probably doesn't belong there, more likely in the ACM/IEEE Conference on DLs -- this is a case in point.

What to do if your mom finds out about your blog? From blogger home page.

The Master of EEVL, Roddy MacLeod, has informed me of two new highly EEVL services, OneStep Jobs and OneStep Industry News. Read full details at the press release here. Both are available via RSS feeds, making them as convenient as they are valuable. I certainly plan on subscribing to the Industry News one myself. It's interesting that the name my fingers wanted to type was "OneStop," which, when you think about it, is also a pretty good description of the service.

As long time readers of this blog know, I'm quite interested in computer chess. Well, our friend Garry Kasparov is starting a new match with a program called X3D Fritz next week. The site also has a good intro into the subject here and an interview with one of the Fritz guys, Frederic Friedel here. For those interested in the royal game, my handle on GameKnot is john_d.

A couple more on information seeking behavior:

• "Information seeking behavior: A bibliography" by Anita Coleman. Not quite as up to date as I would like, but still very good. This is a reading list for this course.
  
• Another course web page (by Mary Brown), with lots of links, here.
  
• "Bates' Bibliography of Works on Information Seeking, Indexing, and Information Retrieval System Design" seems to be the ultimate word on the subject, though again maybe not as up to date as is desirable. Nor is the science coverage that great.

Geeks of the world, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your pagers!

From the "OH MY GOD" department: rumours of Google & Microsoft merging. Is this good news or bad news? Would Google turn Microsoft into a kinder, gentler monopoly or would MS turn Google into a meaner, nastier monopoly? Thanks to ResearchBuzz.

Another interesting article, which has been sitting around on my desk so long I can no longer remember where I got the referenfce, is "A brief history of information architecture" by Peter Morville. Morville is a librarian and one of the pioneers of IA. His book with Louis Rosenfeld, Information architecture for the World Wide Web, is one of the all-time classics and belongs in every library. The essay is a concise overview of the development and importance of the field.

Trolling around google, thinking about how scientists communicate, I stumbled across a few interesting sites:

• "Undergraduate learning in science project: Working paper 5" by Leach, Rider and Driver. All the papers from that project are interesting and are here and here. At first glance, this stuff is amazing.
  
• "Learning how scientists work: Experiential research projects to promote cell biology learning and scientific process skills" by DebBurman. From Cell Biology Education, winter 2002.
  
• "GE Informaiton literacy goals and competancies: Area B: Sciences"

Noted without additional comment, the PP slides I used for a presentation in a Professional Writing class for my colleague Scott McLaren. My topic was basically "how to be a science writer," with my focus being that the most basic requirement for being a science writer is knowing a bit about how science works. What doesn't come through in the slides as much as in my oral presentation was the emphasis on finding and interviewing gatekeepers and other members of the invisible college as a key to good science writing. If any of my readers have any suggestions on improving or correcting some of my ideas, I would be more than happy to hear from you.

Sincere apologies for not posting in a while. October/November, as we all know, tends to be a bit hectic. Also, due to various reasons I'm not going to go into here, my posting may be very infrequent from November 18th until the end of the year.

Roy Tennant's "Open-Access Journals" in the Oct 15 Library Journal is a good introduction to (and manifesto supporting) the topic. From OAN.

The fall 2003 issue of the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine (v22i3) is a special issue on "women and minorities in information technology." All the articles look very interesting and well worth checking out. A sampling from the TOC:

• "The computer science pipeline in urban high schools: access to what? for whom?"
  
• "Gender and race in predicting achievement in computer science"
  
• "Women of color in it: degree trends and policy implications"

Another article that's not online that's is worth taking a look at is "Bibliographic Databases in a Changing World" by Jim Ashling. It's in the October 2003 issue of Information Today (v20i9). It's about a subject that interests me greatly, the fate of traditional bibliographic databases in the face of increasing competition from other tools, such as full text aggregated databases, publisher databases, free services (ie. arxiv, NASA ADS) and, of course, Google. Ashling does a good job of outlining the issues, including impacts on vendors and librarians. He continues next month looking specifically at vendor reactions.

From the Recent Atlantic Monthly, "Columbia's Last Flight: The inside story of the investigation—and the catastrophe it laid bare" by William Langewiesche (v292i4 Nov 2003). This doesn't appear to be onlline, but is well worth seeking out. Langewiesche is also the author of the truly excellent series "American ground: unbuilding the World Trade Center" from the July-August, September and October issues of 2002. It was also published as a book.

The latest D-Lib is out and, as usual, has a few very interesting articles:

• "On-line Publishing in the 21st Century: Challenges and Opportunities" by Geneva Henry
  
• "Patterns of Journal Use by Faculty at Three Diverse Universities" by Donald W. King and others.
  
• "Who Uses What? Report on a National Survey of Information Users in Colleges and Universities" by Deanna B. Marcum and Gerald George

Now, a new journal to watch. It might be a bit techie, but it has great potential: The IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries (TCDL) Bulletin. Some sample articles from the first issue: From Open Access News.

• "Usability of digital libraries: A source of creative tensions with technical developments"
  
• "Visual User Interfaces: Challenges and Opportunities"

The latest issue of the High Energy Physics Libraries Webzine is out. As usual, it is full of interesting articles for all science librarians. This time I would like to point out "Documenta Mathematica: A Community-Driven Scientific Journal" by Ulf Rehmann. Basically, it is a specific case study of the economics of open access publishing, interesting for us because it is a math journal. From Open Access News.

A couple of recent entries in the poplar-science-watch category:

• "E-mail is broken: Four Internet pioneers discuss the sorry state of online communication today. The consensus: It's a real mess" by Katharine Mieszkowski is a discussion about why email has gone from the Net's killer app to a pain in the app.
  
• "Net guru peers into web's future" is an interview with Tim Berners-Lee from the BBC. This is a rather "gosh-wow" style interview, with some pretty silly questions. But still, it is very interesting to get up-to-date with the web pioneer. From the ResourceShelf.

It's that time of year again. Nobel winners here. Peace prize to be announced tomorrow. On a lighter note, IgNobels here. This year's favourite, noted without additional comment, is the biology prize: "C.W. Moeliker, of Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck."

ConferenceAlerts.com is a interesting service that keeps you abreast of the conferences in various fields. Some fields seem to have better coverage than others, but overall it is quite good. From ResearchBuzz.

I knew it was only a matter of time until I got to blog something by Bruce Sterling, one of the most realistic and sensible futurists out there. Perhaps also the most amusing. There are terrifically amusing and sensible aspects of "Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die" from the October 2003 issue of Techonolgy Review. The technology I would miss least? The internal combustion engine. From Locusmag.

"IM Interoperability Becoming a Reality!" I shudder even to think about it.