Phoebe

Yesterday's Astronomy Picture of the Day is the new wallpaper on my desktop. To say the least, it is rather striking. APOD has been the source of all my wallpapers for the last couple of years -- they never disappoint.

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

Some highlights from v23i1 and v23i2:

• Can engineering ethics be taught? by Stephan, K.D.
• Deterrents to women taking computer science courses by Beyer, S.; Rynes, K.; Haller, S.
  
• Technology management for corporate social responsibility by Brennan, L.; Johnson, V.E.
  
• Just ask! Why surveyed women did not pursue IT courses or careers by Weinberger, C.J.
• Making computer professionals and other engineers low-priced commodities by Unger, S.H.

SciTech bloggers of the world, unite in Toronto!

Christina also suggests that the lot of us find a way to get together next year in Toronto. Sounds like a great idea, there must be a way. Informal get together at a local watering hole? Perhaps some sort of panel discussion? Time to start planning!

Winner's Circle of Best Science Websites

Every year, the SciTech division of SLA has a session on the newest, best sites out there. Every year, they also highlight different disciplines. I was planning to blog the presentation sites, but Christina has already done it for me, so why reinvent the wheel.

Remind me not to go to work at Drexel

From this ResourceShelf story I get the following quote from Constantine Papadakis, "My understanding when I was first hired was that in three years I did not want any professor or graduate student to walk into the library to find a book, because this is a waste of your time unless you love books and are going to look at them" and that abandoning print books for eresources is "the philosophy that we follow, right or wrong." The ResourceShelf story also points to varios Drexel University student newspaper articles massively rejecting this path.

Open Source Special Issue of Queue

The ACM's Queue is generally quite an interesting online journal to follow, particularly for discussions of trends. The current issue (v3i2) focuses on open source software with the following articles as highlights:

• Open Source to the Core by Jordan Hubbard
  
• There's No Such Thing as a Free (Software) Lunch by Jay Michaelson
  
• Desktop Linux: Where Art Thou? by Bart Decrem

Information literacy website

This is a really solid site on IL, including lists of websites, articles, bibliographies and mailing lists. It's by Ola Pilerot, at Skövde University Library, Sweden.via IL Weblog.

The Week In Chess 500!

TWIC, the mother of all chess sites, is about to celebrate it's 500th issue. Bravo, with a little history from About.com!

Web Citation Index

This article (Thomson ISI to Track Web-Based Scholarship with NEC's CiteSeer) is about ISI & CiteSeer's collaborative project to do citation search and tracking on the web, combining what CiteSeer does with what Web of Science already does to make something bigger and better. ISI demo'ed a very early version at SLA a few days ago and it was very interesting looking. My only question is what will become of CiteSeer in this collaboration? If the WCI includes all the content and services that CiteSeer includes for free...

Virus-proof your PC in 20 minutes, for free.

A few simple, free things we can all do to make our lives a little more secure and less hassle-free: A Simple Plan - Virus-proof your PC in 20 minutes, for free. By Paul Boutin via BoingBoing (hey, I read'em all!)

Results of a brief survey of PAMnet participants

Christina recently polled PAMnet members. The results and her observations are here. I find it interesting that she received negative comments on blogs and blogging from the members. Hello? Science librarians? Wake up and smell the coffee.

I'm back from SLA

The SLA conference in Nashville was, once again, a great conference. I attended a number of great sessions, particularly the various roundtable discussions for physics, astronomy and math. The computer science roundtable was scheduled too late in the conference for me to attend, Wednesday at 3-4:15 when my flight was at 5pm. Ah well. As it happens, I "volunteered" to moderate the CS RT next year in Toronto...

As usual, one of the best parts was networking/hanging out/having a beer (or three) with colleagues. This year, I was able to see both Catherine and Christina (and here) in an informal scitech library blogging meeting. Unfortunately, I was somehow unable to find myself in the same room with Randy at any time during the conference.

Grey goo probably not a problem

According to the article Safe exponential manufacturing in Nanotechnology v15, Aug 2004 by Chris Pheonix and nanotech guru Eric Drexler, the threat of nanotech turning the world into a indistinguishable mass of grey goo isn't as bad as they had thought, at least by accident. Oh well, there goes the plot of half the SF novels of the past few years...

The conclusion:

Early proposals for manufaturing systems based on molecular nanotechnology inlcuded devices that had some similarity to runaway self-replicating machines, in that they were, at least, self-replicating. It has since become clear that all risk of accidental runaway replication can be avoided, since efficient manufacturing systems can be designed, built, and used without ever making a device with the complex additional capabilities that a hypothetical "grey goo robot" would require. However, this does not mean that molecular nanotechnology is without risks. Problems including weapon systems, radical shifts in economic and political power, and aggregate environmental risks from novel products and large-scale production will require close attention and careful policymaking.

Play chess, get better math results

Improved Math Scores Through Chess? is an interesting little article posted on About.com.

MathForge

From browsing around Wikipedia, just discovered MathForge.net--Power Tools for Online Mathematics, an extremely cool math blog.

Yes, that Springfield

One of the great accomplishments of map making has to be the creation of maps of imaginary places. For example, this Map of Springfield. vis lisnews.

Coming Soon: The Death of Search Engines?

This is a great article by Rita Vine from LLRX. It's basically about how search engines are getting harder to use as they get bigger and more comprehensive.

For serious web searchers more interested in search engines as information seeking tools rather than investment vehicles, the current buzz surrounding search engines disguises the fact that, despite persistent attempts by the search engines at promoting their indexes as better than ever, search is getting worse.

via LibraryStuff.

Statistical flaws found in top journal studies

As this CBC story indicates, don't always believe what you read.

And on that cheerful note...

It seems that the University of California at Santa Barbara is finding that more and more students are cheating using the Internet. via The Chronicle.

Cheaters will never prosper.

So, here's the story. A student at the University of Kent has mostly been cheating for the three years of his degree -- copying material from the Net and passing it off as his own. Finally he is caught and turfed. Fine. Well, it seems, this fine young man is suing the university. What for, you ask? For not catching him soon enough.

FreePint article on the Semantic Web

So what is this "semantic web" thing that Tim Berners-Lee is always babbling on about anyway? If you've been wondering, take a look at this article in the latest FreePint (i160). The article, "The Semantic Web is Your Friend," is by Libby Miller and Simon Price.

Out with the old, in with the new

The Next Step in Scholarly Communication: Is the Traditional Journal Dead? makes a rather common, almost obvious, case these days: that open-access ejournals are the way to go. In all, it's a very good review article on the state-of-the-art, with a thought-provoking last sentence: "The item of exchange in scholarly communication will become the dynamic idea rather than the static article and impact will become the measure of success." Isn't that sort of what blogs are all about? Maybe blogs will be the future of scholarly communication? via Open Access News

Patent Retrieval

PatentFetcher is a free service to get pdf versions of US Patents. The free service claims to be a bit slow, but it was pretty good when I tried it. They also provide similar access to many European patents. Downside: you have to have the patent number of the document you are looking for. via Carolyne.

History of Computing

A few highlights from the most recent IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (v26i2):

• Datamation's glory days by R.V. Head. Ah, a magazine I remember well...
  
• Computer sciences at Purdue University-1962 to 2000 by Rice, J.R.; Rosen, S.
  
• People, languages, and computers: a short memoir by Smillie, K.

Engineering Conferences International Symposium Series

The Engineering Conferences International Symposium Series is a site that publishes open access conference proceedings in engineering. Only a few are available so far, including some that are of interest here (via Open Access News.):

• e-Technologies in Engineering Education: Learning Outcomes Providing Future Possibilities
  
• Enhancement of the Global Perspective for Engineering Students by Providing an International Experience
  
• Teaching Entrepreneurship to Engineering Students

GIS Librarians

A brand new blog for GIS Librarians. So new, it only has one post. No name or location information, only the name Mapz. Good luck. via LIS Blogsource.

Joining the modern world

Two new bits on the blog. Finally added titles to the posts. Not sure why I never did before, but I have them now. Also, switched to the newish Blogger comments feature rather than using HaloScan, so all old comments are gone. Coming up, I will be adding an Atom feed a bit later on.

The May/June 2004 b/ITe is available. b/ITe is the newsletter of the IT division of SLA. The table of contents includes:

• Search engines in an iconic age: Using search engines to find images by Chris Tighe
  
• Targeted science searching on the web by Britt Mueller. This article is absolutely fantastic -- it talks about using Scirus, CiteSeer and Google to find real scientific content. Particularly interesting is the section on using Google to find IEEE and ACM publications. When will the day come that we no longer need the traditional A&I services? Sooner than we think, and a real challenge to those providers to keep adding more and more value to their services to compete. I'm still waiting for Google Academic.

Why open source works by Steven Weber from the most recent issue of ACM's Ubiquity (v5i11).

MSNBC - Can Star Wars: Episode III be saved? is my "gratuitous SF posting" for the month of May. Priceless quote of the month: "In many ways, Phantom and Clones were the answer to the unasked question “What would the director of Plan 9 From Outer Space have done with a talented effects crew and a $200 million budget?” Ouch. But deserved as, in my opinion, Episodes I & II were two of the dullest movies ever made.

Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures from NIST.

Papers are up for the Informing Science + IT Education Joint Conference InSITE 2004. There is quite a wide range of topics at this conference, ranging from philosophy of science, to science & society, to IT educational & curriculum issues. There are five pages of topic & paper listings and I can't imagine that there isn't something for everyone here. A small selection interesting-looking ones (via the Information Literacy Weblog):

• A Contribution to Defining the Term "Definition"
  
• The Human-Computer Interaction Gearing Up for Work
  
• Challenge or Chaos: A Discourse Analysis of Women’s Perceptions of the Culture of Change in the IT Industry
  
• The Evaluation of a Computer Ethics Program
  
• Connecting with the Y Generation: An Analysis of Factors Associated with the Academic Performance of Foundation IS Students
  
• Critical Thinking and Reasoning for Information Systems Students
  
• Returning the ‘I’ in the ‘IT’ Education of MScIS/MBA Professionals
  
• Students’ Pedagogical Preferences in the Delivery of IT Capstone Courses
  

The New Journal of Physics from IOP has an RSS feed broadcasting table of contents information. When you think about it, why wouldn't every journal do the same thing? If I follow a bunch of journals, wouldn't the publishers want me to know when new articles come out? Wouldn't I want to know when they come out without having to actively check somewhere (like the library, for example)? BTW, a quick and partial check tells me about half the IOP journals have feeds. via SciencePORT.org.

Wired News: A Scan of the Headline Scanners is exactly what it sounds like: a review of the various RSS readers/aggregators. Here at COASL we use Bloglines.

Peter Morville, information architecture guru and author of IA bible Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites with Louis Rosenfeld, has a new website on usabilty/findability/IA/whatever: findability.org | links about findability + the design of findable objects. At first glance, this looks pretty good. There's even a section on Libraries & Literacy. On the must-visit-often list. via ResourceShelf.

FreeFullText.com, however, bills itself as "A supplement to every library catalogue on the planet!" A decent list of free, online journals. Not sure who created and maintains the list, though. And I couldn't find when it was last updated either. It's interesting that this site claims 7000 items while the Directory of Open Access Journals claims 1096 -- no doubt due to the fact that FreeFullText.com will list a journal even if it only has one issue available for free! via Good Stuff of interest to a Canadian chemistry engineering corporate librarian, which may need a shorter name.

Research Information seems to be a mouth-piece for the STM publishing industry, so take it for what it's worth. There's probably a nugget or two buried among all the coal.

Some interesting articles in the latestCommunications of the ACM (v47i6):

• A paradigm shift in computing and IT education by Hal Berghel, David L. Sallach
  
• An analysis of research in computing disciplines by Robert L. Glass, V. Ramesh, Iris Vessey
  
• Toward universal literacy: from computer science upward by Hartmut Wedekind, Erich Ortner

The May 2004 D-Lib Magazine is a special issue on georeferencing and geospatial data, with contents as follows:

• EDITORIAL: A Special Issue on Georeferencing and Geospatial Data by Bonita Wilson
  
• EDITORIAL: Georeferencing in Digital Libraries by Linda L. Hill
  
• The Alexandria Digital Library Project: Review, Assessment, and Prospects by Michael F. Goodchild
  
• Issues in Georeferenced Digital Libraries by Greg Janée, James Frew, and Linda L. Hill
  
• Georeferencing in Historical Collections by Gregory Crane
  
• Combining Place, Time and Topic: The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative by Michael Buckland and Lewis Lancaster
  
• Spatial Data Infrastructures and Digital Libraries: Paths to Convergence by James S. Reid, Chris Higgins, David Medyckyj-Scott, and Andrew Robson
  
• Determining Space from Place for Natural History Collections: In a Distributed Digital Library Environment by Reed Beaman, John Wieczorek and Stan Blum.

This commentary The Crisis In Scholary Communication, by George Porter on STLQ also includes few links on journal prices in math as well as some cogent commentary about the serials crisis in general.

The Information Literacy Weblog has a link to a paper "Integration of information literacy training into engineering and technology education" by Barry Tucker. It's from the Vala 2004: 12th Biennial conference and exhibition in Melbourne, Australia. The rest of the proceedings are here.

Good Stuff of interest to a Canadian chemistry engineering corporate librarian is yet another scitech library blog by a Canadian, this time Carolyne Sidey of Xerox in Toronto. I've got to say that I've had a bit of a hand in this one, as Carolyne tells my that the blogging presentation I did at the Sheridan Park Library and Informtation Science Committee a while back inspired her. Good luck Carolyne! Here's the feed.

According to this article from the Online Journalism Review, blogging is a legitimate form of communication. I'll have to remember this article when my next tenure file has to be handed in... In any case, Here it is: Scholars Discover Weblogs Pass Test as Mode of Communicationvia OA News.

The Humbul Humanities Hub is a rather impressive looking directory for online resources in the humanities. Two of the portals that are of interest here are (via SciencePORT.org):

• History & Philosophy of Science
• Humanities Computing

Resources: Assessing student learning by Amy Mark is a good webliography from the most recent C&RL News (v65i5) May 2004.

The ALA/ACRL/Science & Technology Section Information Literacy in the Sciences Task Force is looking for input into drafting a set of standards. From the website:

We want this document to describe information literacy in the sciences and technology as completely as possible. We seek the collective knowledge representative of the broad background and experiences of the STS membership. Please look through the proposed standards at the link below and make comments and suggest additions relative to your discipline and experiences.

This quite a good idea. The site comes with a pretty comprehensive bibliography, focusing a lot on engineering. Also, it appears that the Sciencelibrarian.org domain name has been snapped up by Catherine Woodworth Wong. via Virginia Baldwin on eldnet-l.

Yes, there is now a Google Blog. via SciencePORT.org.

Thanks to Pat Viele, some audio/video lectures by noted physicist Hans Bethe, given at the age of 93 to his fellow retirees. Enjoy, here.via slapam-l

Christina's LIS Rant is Christina Pikas's other blog, about general library issues. Thanks to Christina for reminding me to mention it. Christina's main claim to fame here is On Christina's Radar.

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.