My job in 10 years -- Further thoughts on books & journals

I seem to be having a lot of further thoughts on these things....I hope all this isn't too tedious for my patient readers. It looks like all this is going way longer than I thought. In any case, there are a couple of things I wanted to elaborate on a bit more:

Open Access. This is a really tough area to prognosticate on, both in terms of where the OA movement will go in 10 years and in terms of how that evolution (revolution) will actually affect my job. No question, far more of the world's scholarly output will be available via scholar's home pages where they will self-archive their work. Also no question, institutional and discipline-based repositories will also pick up steam and make available an awful lot of the work that is being produced, both in terms of articles and other materials like presentations, datasets, media files, and whatever. I imagine that the commonly used search tools 10 years from now will pick all this self-archived/repositoried stuff up. I think my role in this process will be to facilitate and organize access to these repositories via the search tools as well as to facilitate and organize the scholars at my institution getting their stuff into the various repositories. Bringing this stuff together in a coherent way is where I see the role of overlay journals.

As for OA journals, they too will no doubt multiply. As for whether they will replace journals with a toll access, I doubt it, at least in the 10 year timeframe. I think the (inflation adjusted) overhead will be drastically lower than the $500-$1000 per article we see mentioned a lot these days, but someone will still have to pick up that cost. I think that there will still be a variety of business models around in 10 years, some author pay, some institution pay for author, some regular subscription journals, some where journals are hosted by institutions that pick up the tab. At the same time, I think the 10-15 year time frame will see a kind of tipping point. As the current generation of undergrads & grads become the senior researchers and administrators, their expectations will start to shape the academy more and more. The expectation that everything be free and instantly available will totally transform scholarly publishing, to the point that I don't think journals will even exist as we know them now. My role in all this? Mostly getting out of the way, riding the wave, facilitating the transformation and making sure faculty & students are on board and coping. Redirecting journal subscription funds to supporting various repostitories and other OA-related initiatives. Support my institution's efforts at repositories & hosting.

Aggregated Content. One trend we are seeing quite a lot of will continue to explode, and that's aggregated content, both in terms of ebooks and full text journal content. Already, companies like Books24x7 take the "drudgery" out of selecting individual book titles, with the idea that if you buy all the books they have, at least some of them will be the ones you need. The point being that it's somehow cheaper to choose everything for one (large) price than to pick and choose and only take the most relevant. It's interesting, because it goes against what we librarians hold dear: that we are qualified and professionally obliged to choose the best materials for our patrons out of a vast array of choices. If we can just choose everything, where's the skill in that? Of course, what do our patrons care when they find the thing they're looking for if it was skillfully chosen or included as part of a one-size-fits-all package. As long as there are books and journals to buy, publishers will market these massive content packages. It will be my job to check my ego at the door and decide which ones are good for my patrons, and let serendipity take it's course.

My job in 10 years -- Collections

I've divided this part into a few distinct areas: books, journals, databases and other. Databases and other are coming next.

Books. Will I still be buying anything in print in 10 years? It'll be close, but I think so. I'm pretty sure that the stuff I buy in the History and Philosophy of Science will still mostly be real monographs, intended to be read from start to finish. That stuff will certainly be still available in print format. I may buy dual format, print & online, but there will still be print versions. Technical manuals for operating systems and programming languages and the like will mostly be online only, the Safari and Books24x7 model taking over that particular niche.

Two models I like a lot that I think will become much more important in the book world are the new Safari University system where profs can cobble together course textbooks from a wide variety of existing content modules. The other model is the Synthesis model from Morgan & Claypool, where we see medium length (ie 70-100 pages) essays on various topics in depth. This is what our students really need from us -- that kind of concentrated knowledge, that they can use to get up to speed on a particular topic fast. Getting that kind of concentrated dose will be a lot easier than pulling together information from a bunch of different web sources. The key to these two models is that print is secondary with online being the primary mode of delivery.

Who needs to read an 500 page book on classical mechanics or 20 books on signal processing? The real knowledge encapsulated in these books will be broken down, recombined and focused on specific needs. Break the 500 pages down into usable chunks, extract what's really interesting from the 20 different books to make one really good one -- the one fitted to a particular student's or course's needs. That's what I think I'll be buying for my scitech collection in 10 years. Reusable, interchangable content pieces that can be really focused on both broad and niche topics. I think that these content objects will be increasingly visual and interactive, constantly updated, perhaps with blog- or wiki-like feedback loops. I think that's what the net generation will want from their scitech "books." What will happen to the 10s of thousands of books currently on our shelves? A lot of them will stay there, a lot will go into fast retrieval storage locations. Availability online (ie. via Google Print) will probably decide each book's fate. In 10 years, I'll probably only be buying a couple of hundred real print books per year, maybe even less.

Another model that I think will become dominant is the kind that Knovel has, a big database of a lot of factual information, ie. chemistry and engineering tables. This data will still be very important for students and researchers to get quality information, but these kind of databases will make the most sense.

Journals. Will I be buying anything in print in 10 years? I suspect almost nothing. Perhaps I'll still get stuff like Scientific American and Wired in print becuase they're fun to flip through while sitting in the comfy chairs drinking a latte. As for scholarly publishing itself, looking into the crystal ball 10 years into the future is very murky. By then I suspect that virtually all journals will have abandoned the "issue" model and will be article-based. Probably many will be overlay journals, providing peer review services to articles in various eprint servers. For these, I'll pay a certain amount to cover the costs of peer review and the technical infrastructure for publishing and archiving. I imagine that the scholarly societies will be heavily into this model, somehow having figured out their business model for both publishing and non-publishing society activities. I'll still also pay more traditional subscription costs to the various commercial and society publishers, who I think will still be very active in 10 years. Those publishers will continue to publish their peer reviewed journals in 10 years from now. By that point, though, the net generation will start making their influence felt as scholars. I think that this will really begin the transformation of scholarly publishing in the 10 years after that.

The rise of blogs, wikis and other social software will start to have an important impact on scholarly publishing in the next 10 years. Important articles will start virtual conversations that will bounce back and forth. Conferences will probably see the same sort of transformations. While face-to-face networking will still be important, a lot of the true exchange of ideas will happen after the conference has ended. By then, we'll probably figure out a way for libraries to contribute to the infrastructure of this process, and that will be part of my job.

In conclusion, I think our biggest challenge in 10 years will be marketing to students the resources we do purchase -- convincing them that we have something to offer that beats what they can get for free online. It will have to be much better quality and at least as good convenience. Part of this challenge will even be getting any message in front of their eyeballs at all, getting some small piece of their attention. And I guess that leads into the Instruction section next.

I am a statistic

Charles W. Bailey, Jr. -- A Look Back at Sixteen Years as an Internet Electronic Publisher

By Charles W. Bailey, Jr. of Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography and Weblog fame (as well as Digital Koans) gives us A Look Back at Sixteen Years as an Internet Electronic Publisher.

Reference -- a few more thoughts

I was thinking. Maybe one of the things I couldn't imagine is a kind of reference wiki. Maybe my job will be to initiate and manage wiki-like things for our patrons to use. Maybe another of the things I couldn't imagine was using threaded discussion lists for reference interactions. No reason why either of those things couldn't be possible. How about blog-like things or other kinds of social software? I think I was also sort of assuming IM would get sucked up into another service platform and would really be a unique service anymore, but I'm not sure that is what's going to happen. Maybe there are possibilities there too. It's always interesting to think about what you can't imagine.

My job in 10 years -- Reference

Reference service is here to stay. It will always be a core mission of academic libraries to help our patrons find the information they need to do their work. However, I believe the nature of the questions we get and how we deliver the answers will change quite radically.

There are a couple of factors at play here. First of all, will our patrons continue to believe that we can help them with anything? Our patrons will become increasingly comfortable with online tools, online tools will become increasingly comprehensive and comprehensible. Currently, we often see at the reference desk that students' confidence in their abilities to find information on the web lags quite a bit behind their actual ability. Will this gap continue as search tools get better or will they truly be much more successful in their self-directed information seeking behaviors? In other words, will they continue to need us? Actually, I think (hope) the answer is yes. Resources will continue to multiply, single purpose tools won't be able to keep up, relevance ranking will continue to be imperfect, integration of functionality and information from various sources into coherent documents will be a challenge. Questions will be harder and more challenging, but there will be questions. At the service point, we will still be able to help students navigate and integrate. (I think we're seeing a lot of this already -- it will only accelerate.)

Next, the continued importance of libraries as places on campus (and really, the continued importance of campuses as places to attend university). To the extent that we are still valued as places on campus to work, study and socialize, f2f reference will continue to be an important service. Whether we provide that service behind a desk, from our offices, roaming around a commons area, consulting in a group study room or from remote locations around campus such as dorms or academic departments, the f2f service will continue to be valuable to our patrons. Will in be closer to a consultants' role than a quick answer service? Probably. But the value of sitting down with someone and talking out their problem will continue to play an important role.

Is f2f the only way to deliver reference service? Of course not. There are already several alternatives to f2f reference, with phone, email and now chat reference. Chat reference is still in its infancy, with wonky software and a mixed overall experience. Its still slow and clunky, commonly with reference interactions for the simplest things stretching over 30 minutes as you and the patron multitask. Some places are moving to simple IM. Assuming phone reference won't go away and email will largely wither away, is what we currently have as VR the future or is it a blind alley, an embarrassing mistake that we'll all try and pretend didn't happen in 10 years. Probably both. What we currently offer will seem a bit misguided. But, the software will mature, browsers will become better able to handle the complex functionality and increased bandwidth will make video streaming possible. As online education becomes more popular, students will demand that online courses be richer and more varied than f2f courses, with better interaction on all levels with instructors and fellow students. Certainly interactions with research consultants (or whatever) can be part of that mix. Bizarrely, I can almost imagine that audio and video streaming technologies will make these online reference interactions strangely similar to sitting at the reference desk and having a student walk up with a question. You know, maybe with the way phone technology is maturing, phone reference and video reference will actually be the same thing too.

So, in 10 years, I will sit at a desk in a physical library and answer questions from patrons. I'll probably also roam around the library and perhaps have "office hours" some other place. Not any different than what is possible now. However, my virtual self will also be highly available in a variety of different ways which are not possible now. Are there any changes I can't currently imagine? I hope so.

Latest CACM

Interesting items from the latest Communications of the ACM (v48i7) with the ACM-provided taglines:

• Viewpoint: Instant messaging and the future of language by Naomi S. Baron.
  

  The writing style commonly used in IMing, texting, and other forms of computer-mediated communication need not spell the end of normative language.

  
  
• Metadata lessons from the iLumina digital library by Barbara P. Heath, David J. McArthur, Marilyn K. McClelland, Ronald J. Vetter
  

  They follow from the five-year effort to implement metadata standards for learning objects in the iLumina digital library of undergraduate teaching resources in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education.

  
  
• Scientific web intelligence: finding relationships in university webs by Mike Thelwall
  

  Methods for analyzing university Web sites demonstrate strong patterns that can reveal interconnections between research fields.

  
  
• The internet-based education bandwagon: look before you leap by Rudy Hirschheim
  

  Online students may perform as well as those in traditional classrooms, but what about the quality of their learning experience?

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

As usual, a highly stimulating issue (v24i2):

• Engineers without borders by Stephan, K.D. Ethics in international engineering practice. Check out the site for Engineers Without Borders International and the Canadian chapter.
  
• Internet skeptics: an analysis of intermittent users and net dropouts by Kang, H.; Bagchi-Sen, S.; Rao, H.R.; Banerjee, S. About the digital divide.
  
• Teaching engineering in a social context by Warhaft, Z. A must-read article about integrating social context issues in engineering education, particularly through the use of case studies on topics like ballistic missle defence.
  
• Professional licensing and the social transformation of software engineers by Laplante, P.A. Should SE's be licensed like other engineers? Interesting article relating the evolution of the concept of SE licensing to the evolution of the licensing of doctors.
  

Neal Stephenson on Star Wars

Cool article by Neal Stephenson on why we love Star Wars eventhough it's so stupid. For our purposes, though, an interesting comment refering to a scene in Episode I. I'm not completely in agreement with what he says -- I'm definately not as alarmist or negative -- but it's certainly worth reading as a comment on geeks, nerds, science, technology and society:

Anakin wins that race by repairing his crippled racer in an ecstasy of switch-flipping that looks about as intuitive as starting up a nuclear submarine. Clearly the boy is destined to be adopted into the Jedi order, where he will develop his geek talents - not by studying calculus but by meditating a lot and learning to trust his feelings. I lap this stuff up along with millions, maybe billions, of others. Why? Because every single one of us is as dependent on science and technology - and, by extension, on the geeks who make it work - as a patient in intensive care. Yet we much prefer to think otherwise.

Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out.

If the "Star Wars" movies are remembered a century from now, it'll be because they are such exact parables for this state of affairs. Young people in other countries will watch them in classrooms as an answer to the question: Whatever became of that big rich country that used to buy the stuff we make? The answer: It went the way of the old Republic.

via The Website at the End of the Universe.

My job in 10 years -- Introduction

Change is a constant. I've been an academic librarian for about 5 years now and I've seen things change quite a bit over that time period. Eresources have come to take on an all-encompassing role in our institutions. They've passed the tipping point from nice-to-have to only-thing-that-matters in that short period of time. Google has gone from a cute little niche search engine to the eight hundred pound gorilla. Yet, there are a lot of things we still seem to do the same old way -- we still buy an awful lot of books, the vast majority of our reference interactions are face to face, a not insignificant portion of most of our journal collections are still print + online or even (gasp) print only. This is obviously still a period of transition.

I think it's a useful exercise to try and imagine the future. If we think about where change will take us, try and anticipate the newness of the future, when it comes, we will be better prepared. It may not end up anything like we imagined, but at least we were prepared for something.

So, over the next little while I will try and imagine what my job will be like in 10 years. I'll be looking at reference, instruction, collections and scholarship in an academic science & engineering library.

IEEE Spectrum issue on China's Tech Revolution

The latest issue of Spectrum (v42i6) has a large section on China. Some of the article titles:

• Wiring Small-Town China
  
• Steal This Software
  
• The Panda Connection

Joint Conference on Digital Libraries

The JCDL '05 proceedings are up on the ACM site. Something for everyone, I imagine.

ASEE blog

Jay Bhatt over on the ELD lists informs us that the American Society for Engineering Education conference in Portland has a blog. Jay mentions that the first entry in the blog is for a session by Lawrence Lessig sponsored by the Engineering Libraries Division. I've only ever attended the ASEE conference once, in 2002 when it was in Montreal; it was a great conference with ELD being a mini-conference of about 100 librarians embedded in a larger conference of about 2500 engineering profs. The friendly vibe of ELD is very similar to that in PAM. I would certainly not hesitate to attend the ASEE conference again if the opportunity arises.

And why I'll miss it

Here's hoping that the new incarnation will be just as good:

• The Computer Vision Homepage because by some huge coincidence, there's a vision research conference going on at York even as we speak.
• Chronology of Personal Computers
• WikiHow "wikiHow is a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest how-to manual"

No! Please don't go!

From the most recent Scout Report on Math, Engineering and Technology:

1. Internet Scout Project Says Goodbye to NSDL Scout Reports

Dear Reader,

With this edition, the Internet Scout Project ends the NSDL Report for Math, Engineering, and Technology after four years of publication. We are very excited about our newest NSF National Science Digital Library-funded effort, the Applied Mathematics and Science Education Repository (AMSER), a new four-year project that will link community and technical colleges to online applied math and science resources via a web portal and complimentary services. Our goal is to make AMSER-- http://amser.org/ -- the same kind of high-quality source of information about online resources that the NSDL Scout Reports have been.

List of SLA 2005 Bloggers

Check out this wiki for a list of bloggers that have posted on the Toronto conference.

Recent items from InsideHigherEd

• Joy of Stacks by Scott Jaschik. Concentrating on the humanities & social science, an article about how books are still the core of our research collections -- browsing in the stacks is still a useful research strategy. I don't think the idea applies in the same way in the STM fields, but there's still a lot of value in our stacks that we shouldn't forget about in our e-rush.
  
• Report from the Academic Committee on Plagiarism by David Galef. Funny.
  
• Silence in the Stacks by Scott McLemee. A fairly controversial post in the academic librarian world (lotsa comments with the article itself, plus here on LISNews). Basically, McLemee's thesis is that academic librarians haven't embraced blogging as much as librarians in other sectors, especially in regard to having a "what is academic librarianship all about" kind of philosophical, thinking outside the box kinda blog. First of all, I don't agree that such a community doesn't already exist amoung scitech librarians. We're a pretty tight bunch, to the degree that I think we've achieved what McLemee thinks we should, or that at least we're trying. Did he not research enough to know that we existed, as we would certainly be an interesting case study in exactly what he's talking about? I also don't agree that what he thinks is a problem is really a problem. If the academic librarian blogging community is a bit more distributed & diffuse that some other communities, who cares. Steven Bell, both in his comments in the article and snarkily dismissive after, adds fuel to the fire:

His answer came as a surprise: “When you ask specifically about blogs maintained by academic librarians,” Bell wrote earlier this week, “the list would be short or non-existent.”

He qualified the comment by noting the numerous gray areas. “There may be some academic librarians out there with an interesting blog, but in some cases I think the blogger is doing it anonymously and you don’t really even know if the person is an academic librarian. For example, take a look at Blog Without a Library. I can’t tell who this blogger is though I think he or she might be an academic librarian. On the other hand Jill Stover’s Library Marketing blog is fairly new and pretty good, and she is an academic librarian — but the blog really isn’t specific to academic libraries.... Bill Drew of one of the SUNY libraries has something he calls BabyBoomer Librarian but it isn’t necessarily about academic librarianship — sometimes yes, but more often not.”


But, like I said, I'm not sure they're paying as much attention to what's going on out here as they think they are. And even so, who says every community needs to blog the same way or with the same intensity. Ever heard the expression "herding cats?" End of rant.

Update: Technorati will point you to even more commentary. One of the best conversations here.

Back from SLA

SLA was as usual a great conference, with many highlights.

• One of the real highlights was the chance to raise a cold one with my fellow scitech bloggers at the All Science reception at the Steam Whistle Brewery. Check here for Christina's pictures. It was the first time we had all been in the same place at the same time! Last year, we were somehow never able to get more than 2 or 3 of us at a time. Philosophical conversation of the night was Randy, Christina and I musing about blogger fame.
• The Gary Hamel closing keynote. He was inspiring to say the least. His message was that change is inevitable, that we need not so much embrace it but learn to accept and anticipate it, to challenge ourselves to survive by transforming our organizations into what they need to be. Believe me, I'm not one to go out and buy those cheesy businessy strategy books, but I picked up one of his on the way home -- Leading the Revolution. And he was funny too and a great storyteller. The story that had the most resonnance for me was about how he and his colleagues worked with some hospital administrators. First what they did was get people from all across the institution and sent them on trips. Any where they wanted, they had to choose places with the best customer service experiences. Disneyworld, First Class flight to Europe, anything. They gave the travellers digital cameras to take a picture anytime they felt that frisson of superior customer satisfaction. Then, after that stage, they took these same people and made them experience their own hospital. Crowded emergency room, lying on a gurney in the hall for 12 hours, walking the halls pulling an IV stand with your butt hanging out the little hospital robes. And they used their digital cameras there too, to take pictures when they felt awful. It really struck me. Maybe we need to walk a mile in the shoes of our students sometimes.
• As usual, the chance to meet with and exchange ideas with vendors was great. This time around, the people at Morgan & Claypool were particularly receptive, but I also had a chance to give some good feedback to IEEE, SPIE, SIAM and others.
• Hanging in the PAM Hospitality suite was a lot of fun, a good chance to meet & greet the fun folk from the division. The Open House on Sunday was a blast. Thanks to Barbara for inviting me onto the Hospitality Committee.
  
• This was the first time I moderated a round table, this time for Computer Science. It was great fun and an interesting challenge. The CS RT is a bit different from the others in that more traditionally it's open discussion rather than a series of presentations. Check out a fine set of notes over at the PAM Blog.
• Low lights? Well by Wednesday I was wiped. What with IATUL last week and SLA this week, by Wednesday afternoon I should have just gone home. Totally conferenced out. The other somewhat disappointing this has to do with the changing nature of the SLA conference itself. I understand completely that the conference needs to be run so it breaks even financially, if not generating a bit of a surplus to make up for ones that may sometimes end up in the red. But, and a big but, I feel sometimes that the conference is run a bit more for the sponsors and exhibitors than the attendees. More and more, the emphasis is on sponsorship opportunities and networking time with the exhibitors. Used to be that there were two plenary sessions, now with three each of the big sponsors gets that branding time with the whole conference. Used to be that there was only one "no conflict" time so everyone would have a chance to visit the exhibitors, now there are three, one each day. The two extra "no conflict" times and the one extra plenary mean that there's three fewer slots for programming. Result? Monday at 11:30 the simultaneous scheduling of the CS RT, the All Science Poster Sessions, the Standards Rountable, one of the Blogging/RSS panel and the session on Who Owns Scientific Knowledge. Again, I understand that the exhibitors pay a lot for their booths, but who's conference is this, anyway? Oh yeah, apparently the opening plenary is going to be on Sunday night next year. We'll have to see how that affects programming. I'm hoping it means another slot for sessions.
  
• Rant over. More session summaries coming from IATUL and SLA both here and at the PAM Blog.

Over at the PAM blog...

Check out some extensive reports by all the various PAM bloggers.

IATUL: Opening Plenary Session: Monday, May 30, 2005

Hacking Innovations and the Impending Digital Pearl Harbor by Hal Berghel, Director, School of Computer Science, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. (http://www.berghel.net)

Hal Berghel began his talk by promising he would try to scare us all with his tales of hackers, crackers and script kiddies and he was mostly correct. Imagine, he encouraged us, that all our private information was public. If everything on our computers, in our emails, our PDAs, everything, was vulnerable. The cartoon he put up was captioned “The modern firewall” – simply a picture of a barrier in the road that all the cars are able to drive around. Internet security, he said, was mainly the art of risk management: defending, detecting intrusions, repairing and remediating the inevitable damage, but mostly just praying. Inevitable, because the real hackers out there, not the high school kids that get caught and show up on tv, are just as smart as the high-priced academic security experts. Berghel also contrasted computer forensics with internet forensics. On simple desktop computers, forensic analysis is a matter of employing a few standard tools to recover deleted files or reconstruct lost folders. On the internet, however, the situation is far more complex, with the latest generation of MALware, polymorphic and metamorphic intruders being almost impossible to detect… Rootkits are able to take over the kernals of the latest operating systems, website spoofing is very easy and, according to Berghel, all the various wireless network security protocols have been cracked. Berghel’s presentation was sobering and scary. A call to action to all security professionals at libraries and other organizations to be on our toes.

Building Scholarly Information Infrastructure through Partnership by Alex Byrne, University Librarian, University Librarian, Sydney, Australia.

Byrne’s task was simple: outline the main themes of the conference. As an introduction, he did a great job of touching on the various trends, challenges and issues that libraries face surrounding scholarly communications. His main focus was the transformation of the scholarly publishing world by various disruptive technologies. Beginning from that infrastructure itself of scholars, libraries, publishers and third party databases and indexes and their influence in the world of big science, super computers, data mining and data visualization tools, he pointed out the disruptive technologies facing that infrastructure: the internet, smart phones, PDAs, iPODs, wikis and blogs. The behavioral consequences of these technologies are profound for libraries: the movement from print to online information, the formation of internet based communities, the availability of research information to the general public, the new phenomenon of information overload, which manifests itself in ways such as “Google & grab” or overly selective browsing, the growth of multimedia content, open access publishing, Libraries can respond to these imperatives by serving our patrons 24x7, with multi-level assistance, contextual IL – by finding a way to continue to be the trusted source. We must foster collaborative communities among our patrons, move beyond text-only systems and help transform the scholarly information system.

At this point, Byrne moved on to discuss his ideas of information inequality among developed and developing economies, a term he prefers to the more standard “digital divide.” He approached from several points of view: infrastructure, hardware, software, skills, cost of content and publication system. To tackle these issues, he suggested the library and publishing communities move to a model of partnership, collaboration and cooperation, involving faculty, IT experts and other institutions such as archives and museums. Some of the global challenges this kind of collaboration would face include intellectual property issues and trade policies but that they should strive to overcome these issues. Scholarly information should be a public good; it should come from trusted souces and should be shared as if all countries are part of one world, not many.

At this point, he pointed to the declaration of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and it’s case study on open access publishing. His perspective was not that the Elsevier’s of the world are somehow evil – they are successful, in part, because they do a good job at providing products and services needed by the scholarly community. But the OA movement provides ways to look to a future where the opportunities to both produce and consume scholarly research are more equitably spread across the globe. He pointed to the practice of self-archiving and institutional repositories as a disruptive technology that could provide an interesting quick fix to some of the longer term challenges of getting OA up and running.

In conclusion, Byrne noted that this is a time of flux, with much change and uncertainty. The way forward to face the challenges of the digital divide, cost of infrastructure, finding a sustainable OA business model and finding value added services for libraries to provide is to continue in a spirit of partnership and trust. To embrace disruptive technologies, to move beyond text, embracing data and multimedia as new formats, to push for standardization and interoperability.

SLA next week

I'll be at the SLA Annual Conference here in Toronto next week. I expect I lot of my posting while I'm actually at the conference will be at the PAM Blog. Take a visit over there and see what my PAM colleagues and I are up to -- it promises to be quite a lively blog.

IATUL session summaries

I'll be posting some IATUL conference summaries over the next while. A couple today, followed by some SLA summaries followed by more IATUL. I'm obviously not doing all the sessions, just the ones I found particularly interesting or thought provoking. Eventually, I intend to post here summaries of all the interesting sessions I attend from both conferences. It may take a while, but that's the plan.

Off to IATUL

I'll be at the IATUL conference in Quebec City next week. I hope to be able to post some notes from that conference, but I'm not sure how much time or opportunity I'll have. They seem to schedule you to within an inch of your life at this conference with a wide variety of tours, receptions and field trips.

CS Roundtable Final Agenda

Here's the final agenda for the Computer Science Roundtable at the SLA Annual Conference in Toronto. It's Monday June 6 from 11:30am to 1:00pm.

1. Introductions
   
2. IEEE Announcement
   
3. The incredible shrinking Computer Science Department: the effect of declining enrollments on collections and services
   
4. Information Literacy Instruction for Computer Science students: is it needed, how to convince faculty and students of its value
   
5. Open Access, Google and CS scholars’ information seeking behavior
   
6. Safari and other technology ebook packages
   
7. Lecture Notes in CS: print or online only?
   

I would be very grateful if someone could volunteer to help me take notes.

EEVL Xtra

The Embodiment of EEVL, Roddy MacLeod, tells me about EEVL's new database search tool EEVL Xtra. It lets you search for articles, technical reports, websites and other documents in engineering, mathematics and computing. A good explanation of what it's all about and what databases it searches is here. The press release, including a the list of sponsors, is here. Sponsors, who should be heartily congratulated and supported, include: Emerald, CSA, IHS, Jobs.ac.uk, Morgan Claypool, Inderscience and Pro-Talk.

I used to read but it's faster to make stuff up

A great line in today's Dilbert. There was also a great one a couple of weeks ago that really struck a chord -- about when organizations like to talk about their "culture."

ISTL

The theme of the latest ISTL is Open Access Journals, with three very fine articles in the section as well as articles on GIS in small libraries, marine science literature, book reviews and database reports.

Most interestingly, however, is the Viewpoints article Instruction: Teaching or Marketing? by Susan B. Ardis. Ardis's thesis is that we don't really do information literacy instruction as a way of actually teaching our students to be information literate but as a way of marketing our library services to them. To quote her last paragraph:

To sum up, information literacy instruction as it is typically practiced is not truly teaching. Rather, it is a form of marketing where the action takes place in a classroom and librarians are guest lecturers demonstrating and marketing our resources, expertise, and utility. This activity is marketing because we make potential users aware of what their science and engineering libraries can do for them. We demonstrate to users that there are places to go for help when they get stuck or when the public web doesn't give them what they need. My favorite definition of marketing is "the delivery of a standard of living." Life is definitely better when you have some "smarts." A good place to get them is at the library. And, I don't mind going around and telling people so.

Interesting, but I think limited. Sure, some (much? most?) of the instruction we do is really glorified marketing, letting students know that the library does actually provide a useful and worthwhile alternative to Google. When I show keyword searching in the catalogue, do I do it thinking that students don't understand the concept of keyword searching? In part, yes. But mostly as a stealthful way of showing them that we have books that can actually help them with their assignments. So, IL as marketing is a concept I'm comfortable with. But, Ardis seems to me to be promoting the idea that we can offer nothing else to our students, that we should not even aspire to offer something more.

Part of a student's higher education should be to engage the literature of their field, to become familiar with its patterns of scholarly communication, to learn how to become a life-long learner, to understand the social context of the information they produce and consume both during and after their time in school. (And really, see the IL Standards from a few posts ago...) Frankly, as students become more familiar with online searching and as their expectations shift towards the idea that only online information is worth bothering to use, isn't that deeper, more complex understanding what we really have to offer them? If we want to integrate our IL concepts more closely with the academic programs themselves, aren't those concepts what we can bring to the academic table?

Why Women Shy Away from Careers in Science and Math

From the latest Scout Report:

21. About.com: Why Women Shy Away from Careers in Science and Math
http://psychology.about.com/od/psychologynews/a/news040705wom.htm

This article from About.com provides a psychological perspective on Why Women Shy Away from Careers in Science and Math. The article begins, "Girls steer away from careers in math, science and engineering because they view science as a solitary rather than a social occupation." The article reports primarily on a talk that University of Michigan psychologist, Jacquelynne
Eccles, gave at the Society for Research in Child Development conference on how parents and teachers influence children's academic and career choices. The psychologist suggests that teachers tell parents that their daughters are talented in math and science and "provide girls and their parents with vocational and intellectual reasons for studying math or science." One major problem to address, according to the psychologist, are children's understandings of what scientists do. Rather than leaving young people with the impression that scientists are "eccentric old men with wild hair, smoking cigars, deep in thought, alone," we need to promote a richer, more nuanced vision of who scientists are, what they do and how they work. [VF]

Safari U textbooks

The Future of Textbook Selection: An Interview with Jon Preston
discusses an IT profs use of the "build your own" textbook feature of O'Reilly's Safari ebook product. Basically, the prof is able to pull together bits and pieces from various O'Reilly titles and set his own text for a C# class. And not just online versions either, but a real print textbook. I can imagine this facility would be absolutely perfect for programming language or operating system courses, even for more advanced database or application oriented courses.

O'Reilly was a bit slow tapping into the academic library market for Safari (and the product is still less than perfect for us -- poor quality MARC records being an example) and I haven't see anything about how libraries with Safari subscriptions could give access to the custom texts. I hope that's something that's coming down the line.

Information Literacy Standards for Science and Technology

And speaking of IL, check here for the latest draft of the STS IL standards for science & technology.

WILU @ The Information Literacy Weblog

There doesn't seem to be an official (or even unofficial) conference blog for WILU (or at least I can't find one), the The Information Literacy Weblog is covering it a bit.

Revitalizing Computing Science Education

An article from the most recent Computer (v38i5) by Qusay H. Mahmoud, Revitalizing Computing Science Education is a very stimulating read. The core of Mahmoud's thesis is that the decline in CS enrollments actually has many reasons. For example, he points out that CS grads aren't actually having any more problems than some other science grads getting jobs. Also, the enrollments and job situation isn't as bad in Europe and Australia as in North America so off-shoring mustn't be the only issue driving enrollments down or they would be similarly affected.

His reasons for the decline basically boil down to two things: image and image. Image in the sense that everyone thinks CS is only about programming, so someone not interested in programming would automatically not be interested in CS. Image also in the sense that the public thinks that the job market is saturated when in fact there continues to be lots of opportunities. Some of Mahmoud's suggestions are:

• Offer multidisciplinary and crossdisciplinary programs. This would take advantage of hot fields such as bioinformatics.
• Fix CS's image. In the sense that computing isn't only programming but can encompass a wide range of activities, some even involving interaction with other humans.
• Move towards a Bachelor of Arts program. This would give students greater latitude in setting up their programs of study.
• Increase women's enrollment.
  
• Train high school CS teachers. Get 'em young.
• Make CS courses fun. This will attract a wider range of students and make it easier to retain them
  

History of Computing

Thanks to Zbigniew for pointing out a couple of good resources:

• The Charles Babbage Institute:

• Newsletter
• Oral Histories
• Interations: An interdisciplinary journal of software history
• Software History Bibliography

• Computer History Museum:

• Core (a computing history journal)
  

Effect of Guided Research Experience on Product Design Performance

The above titled articled has appeared in the Journal of Engineering Education v94i2, p255-262. It's by Gul E. Okudan and Bonnie Osif. Preprint here.

It's a great article about how a bit of library training can make a difference to the quality of student engineering projects. I plan on distributing photocopies at the next Engineering Program faculty meeting I'm at and perhaps other departments as well. A quote from the abstract: "First, the approach for incorporating guided research into curriculum is explained, and then the results of the study are presented, which indicate that a higher design performance can be achieved when guided research is added to design teaching."

Unfortunately, their argument is weakened somewhat by the actually statistical analysis they do on the data they've collected. It shows that the correlation between library training and project mark is almost but not quite statistically significant. The explain this by various factors including small sample size. Mostly good news but not quite the ringing endorsement you would hope for. via Joe Kraus on eldnet-l.

Something useful for a change -- graph paper pdfs

Via the MAKE blog, here's a great little site that lets you print off a wide variety of graph paper samples from pdf files. There's also a bunch of cute little forms that let you generate your own graph paper to custom specs. At the ref desk, we fairly often get requests for sheets of graph paper and this page will certainly be useful to students looking for a quick sheet or two.

SLA 2005 Conference Blog

The countdown has begun! As has become SOP at most conferences these days, SLA has set up a conference blog here. And what do you know, this humble blog has been selected for the Blogs of Note blogroll sidebar. Oh, the pressure...

I'm pretty sure there's going to be a PAM conference blog, and possibly other scitech ones as well, and I'll post here when I have more details. I also plan on posting my own impressions of the conference as it unfolds.

What CS means to me

For this post, I thought I'd continue with more resources on the human side of CS. The following is a list of books that I've read over the years that have given me a deeper and more human understanding of the CS field and the people that make it up. Along the lines of Ellen Ullmann's The Bug that I reviewed a while back, these books give an insight into what it's like to work as a software developer or CS academic. Of course, this round is all non-fiction, rather than a novel like The Bug. There are certainly other books out there that I haven't read (or have forgotten I've read) that I don't mention here, and any notes left in the comments about some of those would be appreciated. One that I know I haven't read but should is Douglas Coupland's Microserfs. I would really appreciate hearing about newer books from all of you out there, as these mostly date from my own initial explorations in the field when I was a CS student and later a professional software developer.

• Lammers, Susan. Programmers at work, 1st series: Interviews. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1986. This is the best of them all, with interviews with many of the pioneers of the personal computing industry: John Warnock, Bill Gates, Wayne Ratliff, Bob Carr, Jaron Lanier and many others. Read this book.
  
• Weinberg, Gerald M. Understanding the professional programmer. New York: Dorset House, 1988. Really, any of Weinberg's books on the life of the programmer are good.
• Weinberg, Gerald M. Becoming a technical leader : an organic problem-solving approach. New York: Dorset House, 1986. Like this one too.
• Weinberg, Gerald M. An introduction to general systems thinking. New York: Dorset House, 2001. Or this one, a recent edition of a book that taught me a lot about thinking like a programmer.
• DeMarco, Tom and Timoth Lister. Peopleware: Productive projects and teams. New York: Dorset House, 1987. A classic.
• Yourdon, Edward. Decline and fall of the American programmer. New York, Prentice Hall, 1992. Yourdon was amongst the first to raise the spectre of outsourcing & off-shoring. This is a great book about the field. Haven't read the sequal Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer.
• Glass, Robert L. Software conflict: Essays on the art and science of software engineering. New York: Yourdon Press, 1991. Great book on why building systems is hard.
• Brooks, Fred. The mythical man-month : Essays on software engineering. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995. New edition of a classic.
• Shasha, Dennis Elliot and Cathy Lazere. Out of their minds: The lives and discoveries of 15 great computer scientists. Another book of interviews, this time mostly with academics. Featured are big names like Donald Knuth, Edsger Dijkstra and Fred Brooks. Cool web page by one of the authors here.
• Stephenson, Neal. In the beginning was the command line. New York: Perennial, 1999. See my post on this book here.
• Shore, John. The sachertorte algorithm: And other antidotes to computer anxiety. New York: Viking, 1985. A fun book.
  

Latest What New @ IEEE for Students

From the latest issue:

4. HINTS FOR EFFECTIVE PRESENTATIONS
Effective technical presentations are vital to engaging an audience of non-experts. Writing in the IEEE Professional Communications Society newsletter, Jean-Luc Doumont identifies three simple steps can help to improve technical presentations: the ability to communicate concisely; to orient an audience with visual cues; and to define the objective of the research. Such steps can make even the most complex theories accessible to non-experts. Read more:
<http://www.ieeepcs.org/newsletter/archive/apr2005/pcsnews_apr2005_askexpert.php>


12. WHY DID U.S. FARE POORLY IN ACM PROGRAMMING CONTEST?
The United States placed 17th in the annual Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Programming Contest, the worst ranking in the last 29 years. In an interview with CNET, ACM president David Patterson points to several possible reasons why the U.S. fell behind. Unlike other countries that have fewer computing resources, he says, America is used to being at the forefront of technology, and so students see little recognition for a win. In Russia, for example, finalists get to meet their country's president, while in America, that honor goes to sports players who win championships. Patterson also argues that because poorer countries are struggling to compete in today's technological marketplace, many of their funds and grants go toward implementing and promoting programming education. Conversely, in America, there is little encouragement for college students to pursue IT research. Read more:
<http://news.com.com/Can+Johnny+still+program/2008-1036_3-5675770.html>

The first item is of course very useful, as more and more emphasis is placed on interpersonal and communications skills in science and engineering programs. The second item is, of course, much more important in the long run. The News.com interview talks a lot about the declining status of CS in society and is a useful addition to the posts I've made in the past about declining CS enrollments. Really interesting is the reader comments at the end of the story where students and practitioners get to vent a little. Canada? North American champion Waterloo placed 4th. See the contest results here. Of course, perhaps the two items are really related. Maybe if CS and related disicplines were seen as less geeky and more "human" then more people would be interested.

Ever wonder how LOCKSS works?

Over in the ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, v23i1, is a long article explaining just that: The LOCKSS peer-to-peer digital preservation system by Petros Maniatis, Mema Roussopoulos, T. J. Giuli, David S. H. Rosenthal, Mary Baker. Much of the article is very accessible to non-CS academics and is a very interesting explication of the LOCKSS project. Oh yeah, Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. Preprint here.

What it's really like

Via InsideHigherEd, being a female faculty member in a computing department still ain't easy.

JERIC special issue on gender-balancing computing education

The latest issue of ACM's Journal on Educational Resources in Computing is a very welcome issue on gender-balancing computing education, or more specifically, bringing more women into computing. An important topic, and this is a significant contribution. For this one, I'll list the whole TOC:

• Introduction: Special issue on gender-balancing computing education by Bettina Bair, J. McGrath Cohoon
  
• Communication in computer science classrooms: understanding defensive climates as a means of creating supportive behaviors by Kathy Garvin-Doxas, Lecia J. Barker
  
• Voices of women in a software engineering course: reflections on collaboration by Sarah B. Berenson, Kelli M. Slaten, Laurie Williams, Chih-Wei Ho (tech report version)
  
• Pair-programming helps female computer science students by Linda L. Werner, Brian Hanks, Charlie McDowell (OA version)
  
• Creating gender parity: an instruction aide's influence by Cynthia Y. Lester, Marcus Brown
  
• Gender and black boxes in the programming curriculum by Peter McKenna

I found a few online, but it's too bad the rest aren't there too especially since CS people have a reputation for getting their stuff up on their own web sites. Also, here's a reading list I found on women in CS.

Why I became an engineer

Not me, actually, but six other people. The March 2005 issue of ASEE's Prism profiles six different engineering educators (4 men, 2 women), exploring why they chose the profession. My favourite pull quote from the article: " I like to tell people that I used to want to be a lawyer but then I decided to do something useful for society, so I became an engineer." I sure lawyers tell similar stories... In any case, the full text is here.

Latest ACM Interactions

The v12i3 issue of ACM's Interactions is a theme issue. The theme is basically "Who owns the UX field" with UX being User eXperience, ie human-computer interaction, interface design, usability, information architecture, human factors, whatever you want to call the range of inquiry involving how people interact with systems. It's quite an extensive selection of articles, a small selection of which are:

• Building positive team relationships for better usability by John C. Ferrara
  
• Success with user-centered design management by Jeremy Ashley and Kristin Desmond
  
• Why engineers own user experience design by Bruce Tog Tognazzini

Don't Panic

This Slate article compares the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to the Wikipedia. via Locusmag.

CAS conspiracy

To follow up on Catherine's post here, I'd like to quote three relevant sections from the CAS Information Use Policy:

III. Authorized Use of CAS Information

2. The building of searchable Project directories or Databases for use by individuals and Project teams is permitted. Each User is permitted to download 5,000 Records for personal use or to share within a Project team for the life of the Project. These Records may be obtained from more than one CAS product as long as the 5,000 limit/User is not exceeded.
   
   
5. Metadata from CAS Records may be downloaded for an Analysis or Data Mining procedure in compliance with CAS or STN Product licenses. The User or Information Professional must use CAS or STN Analysis or Data Mining tools (with the exception of standard office software such as Microsoft® Excel, Word, and PowerPoint®). Any Records retained from the task are subject to the limits specified in these Policies. CAS Records retained as a result of the analysis must be consistent with these Policies and display the ACS copyright.

IV. Unauthorized Use of CAS Information

3. A User may not use CAS Records or Metadata with non-CAS or non-STN tools with the exception of standard office software such as Microsoft® Excel, Word, and PowerPoint®.

As Catherine notes, item IV.c seems to indicate that CAS will no longer allow people to use citation management software such as RefWorks or EndNote to look after their citation information and prepare their papers. This is insane. You can still find lots of information on the CAS website about how to get your records into EndNote and other programs here. Is this rather helpful information going to come down?

Item III.e seems to imply that CAS will allow people to use their own citation analysis tools, of course. Is is also a subtle hint that they'll be coming up with their own management program too, that may be integrated more closely with upcoming versions of SciFinder than SciFinder is currently with the EndNotes of the world?

York can't be the only place that teaches chemistry students to use RefWorks (the product we license) or EndNote or whatever. It would certainly be a very bad idea if they wanted us to stop doing that. I definately think CAS should clarify what IV.c means -- are chemists allowed to use citation management software with CAS database products.

Latest from InsideHigherEd

Some recent highlights from this increasingly indispensible read:

• Building Student Interest in Science by Doug Lederman. Talks about one university's efforts to inprove student retention via a multipronged approach.
  
• Sending Signals to Students by the indefatigable Doug Lederman. Interesting comments about Advanced Placement courses in the US that are also relevant to general education requirements at many schools.

SciTech Achievement Award

A hearty congratulations to Catherine Lavallée-Welch for being awarded the SLA SciTech Division SciTech Achievement Award for her work on EngLib.

Hopefully it's over: Moore's Law issue update

BoingBoing via the BBC is claiming that Intel has paid the bounty to a UK packrat. The BBC article is a very good overview of the whole story, with some nice info on the bounty-hunting engineering who won the prize. It would be interesting to know how many library copies of the mag have gone missing, all for no good reason. I'll keep our bound copy in my office for a little while longer.

Scout Reports

I don't usually post items from the Scout Reports because I sort of assume we all get them. But just in case, here's the links to the various reports that they do: life sciences, physical sciences and math, engineering and technology. All three reports contain a wealth of great links and you can have the reports emailed to you: subsribe here. Another fave this week is the NASA: How Does This Work? set of videos.

Game programming: The (next) big thing

From the most recent Scout Report on Engineering, Math & Technology:

13. How Games are Reshaping Business and Learning
http://www.academiccolab.org/initiatives/accelerate.html

This website features presentations made at a conference sponsored by eInnovate and held on January 20, 2005, on "How Games are Reshaping Business and Learning." The conference presenters discussed the "gamer generation" and explored the "profound ways in which 'games' are forever reshaping teaching and learning in the business environment." Other questions addressed through the paper and video footage from the conference include: "Why are video games setting a new standard for learning?"; "How, and why, do modern video games reflect cutting-edge research on learning?"; and "What are the implications for the workplace and learning?" The paper, written by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Laboratory, describes "an approach to the design of learning environments that builds on the educational properties of games, but deeply grounds them within a theory of learning appropriate for an age marked by the power of new technologies."

The last couple of years I've been buying quite a bit in the game development area, telling myself that it's not frivolous, that game development is really at the cutting edge of what CS people do -- create environments. That those environments can have many different applications, including learning and entertainment, is really important to keep in mind. The CS students checking out books on AI game developments (and the books do circulate quite a bit) aren't just trying to program Jakked Doom of the Vice City, they're pushing the edge of virtual environments. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Moore's Law

April 19, 2005 is the 40th anniversary of the publication of Moore's Law in Electronics magazine. Gordon Moore's article was prosaically titled "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits." Intel has a nice site promoting the anniversary here; it features lots of cool content, including pdfs of various articles including the orginal article, posters, images and video of Moore. There's also a Moore's Law section in the Intel Archives and Museum.

Apparently, Intel, where Moore is now Chairman Emeritus, no longer has an orginal copy of the article in their archives, only photocopies. As such, they are offering $10,000 for a copy of the original magazine. I couldn't find any mention of this on the Intel site, but did hear of it in an interview with Howard High from Intel last night on the CBC show As it Happens. The CBC has streaming audio of the show so you can listen to it too. Intel's Want-it-Now request on eBay is here.

Karen Grieg had a message on the eldnet-l list today with the subject "Is your copy safe?" -- wise words when there's $10K on the line.

Publication and the Internet: Where next?

Publication and the Internet: Where next? in the most recent APS News by high engery physicist Michael Peskin is causing a bit of buzz in the scitech community. Basically, Peskin advocates an online publishing system for physics where most commercial publishers and indexers are mostly cut out of the process and what libraries are currently spending on those organizations be used to fund an expanded and more comprehensive version of what currently exists in arxiv and the SLAC HEP database. Peskin does see a role for products like Google Scholar in joining up the various physics community data & metadata repositories. There are also some really good insights into how physicists view their field and it's literature in the article.

How close are we to making this a reality? I think physics is already well on its way: who knows how much longer the journals will continue to play an important role in providing peer review services if the actual articles are mostly read in the eprint servers. I suspect that the kids who are now physics ugrads will ultimately see very little reason to use the journals at all. By the time they are the senior figures in the field, the landscape could be very different. Is this model going to translate well to other fields? Perhaps CS will slowly develope a highly decentralized version of the same basic idea. Other fields? I think it's an inevitable evolution. Whether we librarians like it or not, the kids we see at the reference desk are just going to be less wedded to the concepts of peer review and centralized, commercial publishing than preceeding generations. When they inherit the academy, things will change. via pamnet: Robert Michaelson for mentioning the article, Carol Hutchins for the link to full text.

CodeZoo

O'Reilly has launched a new site called CodeZoo. It's a repository of open source Java components that can be downloaded and incorporated into programming projects. This ia a great idea for hobbiests and people in industry and I wish them all the luck in the world. I'm just glad I don't have to teach (and mark) any kind of Java programming courses. Java teachers of the world, make sure you know what's in here before you set your programming assignments. Some resources here, here, here and here.

Weblogs: Their Use and Application In Science and Technology Libraries

"Weblogs: Their Use and Application In Science and Technology Libraries" is the latest by Randy Reichardt and Geoff Harder of STLQ fame. It's in the most recent Science and Technology Libraries. The self-archived eprint is here. The article provides a solid historical introduction to what blogs and what they are used for in the library context, particular as reference desk communication aids and tools for keeping up with professional developments. For those of use who have passed beyond the beginner stage, Randy and Geoff talk about their experiences using blogs as a tool to engage mechanical engineering design students. Bravo!

Podcasting

Ok, so what's this podcasting thing all about? First of all, it has nothing to do fishing for aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It actually has to do with iPods or other portable digital music players, usually known as mp3 players, although they can usually play other formats as well. Remember radio? From the listener's perspective, the annoying thing about radio is that once the show you want to listen to has aired, it's gone. No reruns or anything, usually. From the potential broadcaster's point of view, the main annoyance of radio is that it's expensive to broadcast and the limited broadcast spectra are regulated. How to solve these problems?

Of course, the Internet has a solution for both and it's podcasting. Basically, podcasting is radio in mp3 (or other digital) format. So, a regular radio show could make available mp3's of its shows and you could download them and listen to them whenever you want, either on your computer or portable device. Similarly, since it's just an mp3, the hardware and software requirements to create a reasonably professional sounding show are quite basic. Voila! Your own radio show.

Now, mix in rss and you have a simple way to notify interested listeners that the new show is ready to be downloaded. As well, there is also software that'll automatically download the new shows for you so you can transfer them to your device. All this is nicely summarized in a recent LISNews post, with links to all the various bits of software. My favourite directory site is Podcast Alley; I also use Bloglines to manage the podcast feeds. It doesn't download automatically (or if it does I haven't figured it out yet) but I like using one application to manage all my feeds.

Now, what podcasts would a science librarian want to listen to?

• Science@NASA has a cool little show, with the rss feed here.
  
• The CBC is doing a pilot project podcasting two of their shows, Quirks and Quarks and /Nerd. /Nerd's Todd Maffin has a little podcast where he explains the pilot.
  
• I also quite like the SF podcast from Dragonpage called Cover-to-Cover. The feed for all their shows is here.
  
• SciFi.com has a SciFi Wire podcast, with the feed here.
  
• Chess.fm doesn't really do podcasts, but they have really cool flash lectures.

Interview with Alison Farmer

The ubiquitous Doug Lederman has an interview with "rising star" astrophysicist Alison Farmer here on InsideHigherEd.

Technology and teaching

InsideHigherEd has a couple of recent items on technology and teaching:

• Spreading the Wealth by Doug Lederman is about the success of MIT's OpenCourseWare project which has made so much of their course material available for free on the web. OpenCourseWare is a great idea, and the site itself is very interesting and well worth a look.
  
• Duke’s iPod Experiment Evolves by Doug Lederman. At Duke, they tried a pilot program where they gave all the incomming freshman an iPod. Apparantly, it was mostly a success and the program will continue.
  
• Hypertext 101 By Will Hochman and Chris Dean is about how to approach using technology in the classroom. There's a bit in here where they talk about how to approach teaching their students to do Internet research as a way to complement their regular library research.

Ok, this is kinda cruel...

But kinda funny too. ViaMaking Light, a link to the Tolkein Sarcasm Page's Homework Done for Free page. The premise is that students at various levels are always caught at the last minute with a book report that needs to be done and a book that isn't read yet. So, said students frequently send requests to various online locales for help in summarizing the book. Needless to say, there's going to be some mighty amused profs and disappointed students...

Walt Crawford's new blog

Drop by and visit Walt's new blog, Walt at Random. One of the things I like most about Walt's writing is his tone -- friendly, engaged, committed, not afraid to say what he means. Not confrontational, but direct. You feel like you're talking to him at the bar or something when you read C&I. I think we all owe Walt a beer (or whatever) at the next conference as a way of saying "thanks for joining the blog party."

April 1 APOD

Thanks for Jane Holmquist on PAMNET for pointing out today's Astronomy Picture of the Day. Note that I'm pointing to the permanent link rather than the revolving "of the day" link.

As an added value, here's the links to all the April 1st APOD's since the first in 1998. Before that, they either didn't bother or the jokes were so subtle that I can't tell. Same with 2000. I have to say, this year's the best so far, followed by 2003.

• 1998
  
• 1999
  
• 2001
  
• 2002
  
• 2003
  
• 2004

Girls Get IT

Following up a bit on the previous post, this link from the Eductional Technology blog is about a Florida Dept of Education program to encourage girls to pursue IT careers. Here's a Cisco press release describing the program in more detail.

The Physics Pipeline

From Doug Lederman at InsideHigherEd on The Physics Pipeline. According to a study by the AIP, it seems that most women leave the physics career pipeline between high school and college, but once they get to college drop out of the pipeline at about the same rate as men. Interesting, and from the looks of it there may be a lively discussion on the InsideHigherEd comment section for the article.

SLA CHE/STS/PAM 2005 Toronto Conference Poster Session

Information here on the posters. The theme is "Better Understanding your Users" which is something we all strive to do better. It's interesting, but I just came back from checking out our 4th year engineering students' Design Fair where they present the result of their capstone project. I did an informal poll to see which teams used the library to help research the project. A little less than half the teams did and I'm not sure if that's good news or not. Probably good, especially since the ones that did said that they info they found was useful. Next year, I'm going to try and see if I can work with the course director to make the students more aware of what we have. Since this is the very first graduating year for the York engineering program, building the collections and services for the program is a work in progress.

Young scientists are perceptive readers of science fiction

That's a cute little quote from the article Science Fiction and Science Fact by literature professor John Sutherland. It's an interesting article exploring the reading habits of Caltech students and how those habits reveal their core assumptions about the relationship between science and society. via Locusmag.

More on Is Computer Science Science

I intend to follow up on my original post a few more times with little bits I've found here and there.

Via Richard Paul Gabriel's website, I found a couple interesting editorials he and Guy L. Steele Jr. wrote for Lisp and Symbolic Computation.

• Gabriel RP; Steele GL. "Is computer science science or are computer scientists scientists." Lisp and symbolic computation. 2(2):101-104. 1989.
  
• Gabriel RP. "The art of computer programming." Lisp and symbolic computation. 3(2):109-111. 1990.

Note to scholars: please put complete citations to all your publications. To find these, I literaly had to check all the issues edited by Gabriel & Steele.

Pearls Before Swine

Ok, not exactly like a conversation at the reference desk we've all had, but close enough. via Blog of a Bookslut.

Dangerous Visions

It's been quite some time since I last made a purely science fiction related post here, so I thought I'd point out this interview with Harlan Ellison. It's a great interview, giving a good feel for what the man and his work are like.via Locusmag.

Looks like Gorman had a point...

Not sure if this is something to brag about:

I've been lamenting lately how difficult it has become for me to read books these days because a) I think my brain is getting used to the shorter snippets of blog reading and b) because they don't have any links. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to click on a word to see what it means or get more information from a primary source.

Well, there looks like there might somewhat of a solution to problem b) from Atlantic Monthly which has woven the hypertext idea into the cover article about talk radio. If you're quick, you can see the entire .pdf of what it looks like. I like the concept, but I think I'm more into the digital book idea, with hypertext built in. I love reading on my tablet. But I haven't had a chance to do the digital book thing to any great degree yet. Probably should hurry up and get there before my brain starts shutting down on anything longer than 5 or 6 paragraphs...

My apologies for not including all the internal links, but I have a hard time concentrating on snippets more than one or two words long.

The Bug by Ellen Ullman

I don't usually have fiction book reviews here, but for this one I'll make an exception. The Bug by Ellen Ullman is quite simply, a novel about how crazy it is being a software developer. It revolves around the a software project in the mid-1980's and a huge, impossible bug that creeps into the user interface code. The bug only appears sporadically and unpredicably, make it very difficult to figure out the underlying cause. The main characters in the novel are the programmers, Ethan Levin, and the tester, Berta Walton. Each of them have troubled personal lives that parallel the progress of the bug, while the view each other with distrust and suspicion. The soap opera aspects of their lives doesn't work as well as the portrait of the programmer's life; at about page 300 (of 350) we learn something about Ethan's relationship with his girlfriend that totally changes our view of him and the root cause of their breakup, which I think is unfair to the reader. Nevertheless, the characters and plot are certainly strong enough to support the more interesting aspect of the novel from our point of view here. For those of you who want to understand what it's like to be a programmer, working with flakey systems, uncertain requirements, killer deadlines and and the limitations of the human capacity to understand very large and complex systems, this is the novel for you. Ullman is a former software developer and it shows. Having been a software developer myself for 12 years, it rings very true.

Latest from EEVL: CSA Hot Topics

EEVL Incarnate Roddy MacLeod informs me that EEVL will be publicizing (and hosting/mirroring on their own site) CSA's new Hot Topics feature. The press release giving more detail is here. The Hot Topics site itself is here. The CSA Hot Topics page is here, and it includes not just Engineering/Technology but Natural Sciences, Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences.

The current list of technolgy topics is:

• Columbia Shuttle Tragedy
• Nanomaterials: It's a Small, Small World
• Rapid Manufacturing
• Global Positioning Systems (GPS) Technology and Cars
• The Space Shuttle and Its Replacement
• Titanium
• Plastic Highway Bridges
• MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS)
• Solid Oxide Fuel Cells
• Hydrogen Storage
• Quantum Cryptography: Privacy Through Uncertainty
• Lost in Cyberspace : The BBC Domesday Project and the Challenge of Digital Preservation

The only one I read in detail was the space shuttle one, and I have to say I'm impressed with the solid overview and the range of resources. Each topic has a very good list of refernces, mostly journals, conferences and magazines. Fortunately, they also offer a bunch of web resources without the access barriers common to the above mentioned formats.

Is Computer Science Science?

A must read article from the latest Communications of the ACM (v4i8) is this one by Peter J. Denning. He makes the case that, yes, CS is a science and it investigates natural and man-made information processes. This issue also has an extensive feature section on IT in China. Oh yeah, and an "interesting" little piece Self-plagiarism in computer science by Christian Collberg and Stephen Kobourov. It tackles the issue of scholars "reusing" their ideas and basically publishing the same result over and over with slight modification.

Computer Science Roundtable at SLA Toronto Conference

I posted the following on PAMNET today:

Hello everyone,

I’m the moderator of the Computer Science Roundtable this year at the Toronto conference.

This year we will all be sitting in a circle to facilitate an open and lively discussion on topics that CS librarians feel are important. I would certainly encourage anyone who has a topic they would like to discuss to let me know so I can add it to the agenda.

To get the ball rolling, some of my ideas for topics are:

1. The incredible shrinking Computer Science Department: the effect of declining enrollments on collections and services

2. Information Literacy Instruction for Computer Science students: is it needed, how to convince faculty and students of its value

3. Open Access, Google and CS scholars’ information seeking behavior

A couple of topics from previous RT’s that people might want to revisit:

1. Safari and other technology ebook packages
2. Lecture Notes in CS: print or online only?

Please feel free to make all the suggestions you want. In particular I would welcome ideas from outside the academic world.

Vendors: I don’t plan on having formal vendor presentations, but if you would like to make specific short announcements, they will certainly be welcome. As well, please feel free to suggest topics for discussion if they are relevant or if you want some quick and dirty input on a fairly broad issue. Just let me know.

We will have an overhead projector available.

For suggestions, you can either post as a comment here or email me at jdupuis at yorku dot ca. Don't feel you have to attend the event to suggest topics. The RT is on Monday June 6, 2005 from 11:30am to 1pm. I hope to see you all there. The conference website is here.

Latest from Inside Higher Ed

A couple of good ones:

• New Honor Codes for a New Generation By Donald L. McCabe and Gary Pavela. Can making students promise not to cheat make a difference in how often they actually do? It seems that it just might.
  
• The Lecturer's Tale By Scott McLemee. Is the academic lecture dead? Recent wisdom suggests that active learning techniques and a more open and less static classroom are good things, but is there still a place for those long-winded, formal, boring lectures? Maybe so, this article suggests. From our own experience, we can all remember profs whose lectures were electrifying as well as those who were spiritually deadening. Most, of course, were average: neither terminially dull nor unbelievably facinating. Is there a real answer to this question, or does each situation/personality/subject need to find there own solution. Personally, I'm not convinced either way. My favourite (somewhat cruel) line from the article: "The abolition of lecturing is not simply a matter of meeting the expectation of students for whom the talk-show host is the embodiment of discursive authority." It goes on to explain that life is easier on the profs too if lectures don't need preparing.

Women in Computer Science & Engineering

Today I thought I'd highlight the WiCSE page here at York. Also worth mentioning is the book Doing IT: Women Working in Information Technology by York faculty member Krista Scott-Dixon.

NASA image of the day

Wandering around the CNN Science & Space area, I noticed a link to a NASA Image of the Day site. It is as cool as you would expect, but I sort of wonder why they feel they need to have a swanky Image of the Day site and a plain jane Astronomy Picture of the Day site.

SciTech library recruiting

The STS-L list has an extremely interesting thread going right now about recruiting non-librarians with science degrees into library careens. It's a very wide-ranging discussion with many posters talking about their own career paths. You can follow the discussion so far in the February and March archives.

Darwin stickers & bookmarks

Just got an email addressed to "science librarians" from Colin Purrington of Swarthmore College. He's created a series of pdf and jpeg sticker and bookmark templates that you can download and print out as a way of promoting science literacy amongst the general public, particularly of Darwin and evolution. I think this is a great idea that should be promoted as widely as possible. Any other sources of this sort of thing out there -- freely available materials that can be used to promote science literacy?

BTW, Colin informs me that he built his initial mailing list just by googling "science librarian" and "biology librarian" and looking for email addresses.

Number calculations & conversions server

This cool little calculator takes any positive, whole number you input and outputs the sine, cosine, tangent, square, cube, natural log and square root. It also converts the number into binary, hex and (oh! the memories) octal. A few others too. via ResearchBuzz