Top 10 reasons why...

I don't like top 10 lists.

1. They are usually meaningless
2. They often have items that could have been left out to make a top 7 list.
3. They remind me of gender specific magazines that list the top this or that.
4. Some of them leave out a couple of items, so it should actually be a top 12 or a top 16 list.
5. They always show up at the end of the year or the beginning of the year, why not March or October?
6. They remind me of David Letterman, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
7. They remind me of my dear departed next-door neighbor's dog -- don't ask.
   

My twitter wordle

This is a twitter wordle from the last couple of years for me. I've seen some other people have their year of Facebook status updates put into a list, and I thought it would be interesting to see what my twitter feed would look like as a Wordle. Even though this covers two years worth of tweets, I bet a wordle of just 2010 would be very similar.

First, I went to tweetstats, clicked on the tweetcloud tab, then I clicked on "Don't like the TweetCloud? Well then, go make a Wordle!"

Draft of the 2010 Science-Technology Division of SLA Strategic Plan

SLA Science - Technology Division
Strategic Plan December 2010

DRAFT

MISSION

To equip science and technology information professionals with the skills and knowledge they need to grow and excel in a changing information landscape. The Division functions as a community that supports the professional development of its members through communication, networking, education and research.

VISION

To be the professional affiliation of choice for librarians and other information professionals who serve communities in science and technology.

GOALS & OBJECTIVES

1. Goal - Membership – increase membership and engagement of existing members
1.1 Maintain active members and recruit new ones
1.2 Encourage participation of current and potential members
1.3 Provide opportunities for participation outside of the annual conference
1.4 Increase interaction with library school students and new professionals

2. Goal - Create a greater sense of community within the Division
2.1 Consider community enhancement when planning any programs, committee work and other activities
2.2 Provide opportunities for people to interact with other members of the Division, inspiring a greater sense of connection, including at the annual conference
2.3 Provide information by and about members through various Division communication channels

3. Goal - Enhance the value of the Division and members through professional development and virtual learning opportunities
3.1 Strengthen and enhance our mentoring program, including mentoring of recent graduates, of mid-career librarians in technological areas, and of librarians new to the Sci-Tech field
3.2 Provide résumé development workshop(s) in multiple formats
3.3 Provide programming outside the annual conference
3.4 Provide negotiation skills training
3.5 Provide activities and opportunities for participation and involvement for people who can not attend the annual conference
3.6 Help members prove their worth to their employers within a Sci-Tech context
3.7 Cooperate with other SLA Divisions where the interests of the members overlap
3.8 Offer leadership in scientific and technical librarianship, including programming both at the annual conference and virtually on emerging and continuing themes in the scientific and technical disciplines


RECOMMENDED ACTIVITIES

• Conduct short surveys of the membership to elicit information about members’ needs – including thoughts on improving member engagement, benefits of joining the Division, and community engagement
• Develop marketing materials for membership recruitment and retention
• Solicit more participation in Division communications, including more writers for Sci-Tech News, blogs, and other communication modes
• Provide more information about members and their achievements: brief announcements of members’ activities within Sci-Tech News and/or our website or discussion list
• Showcase our members with more in-depth treatments such as quarterly articles within Sci-Tech News and/or our website or discussion list
• Cover topics of professional interest in Sci-Tech News, blogs, and other communication vehicles
• Encourage use of social media within the Division
• Provide programs of various types such as webinars or regional meetings
• Address the issue of flux in the STEM publishing industry
• Support Sci-Tech librarians/info professionals as they negotiate content contracts and agreements
• Support Sci-Tech librarians/info professionals as they seek professional job opportunities or professional recognition

Please let us know what you think?

Review of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the etc., etc., etc.

Here is the whole title of the book.

DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education

Some of the book can also be found on Google Books.

If the higher education system changes as much as the author thinks it will, then it will have many implications for academic libraries. Lots of people and organizations are trying to predict the future of academic libraries.

The basic premise of the book is that the internet and alternative educational institutions are providing new and different ways for people to learn.

She (the author, Anya Kamenetz) noted that one of the problems with the higher ed system is that students are treated differently once they transition from high school to college. If high school students are having difficulty passing classes, the teacher or the school is held responsible. If one of those students is having difficulty passing college classes, then the student is blamed. In short, some/many colleges and higher ed institutions do not take [as] much responsibility for helping their students finish their studies. There is not as much accountability for high ed institutions. She also describes a system where colleges are incentivized to increase costs and services to students. If a college costs more money, then it must be a better institution.

Here is the part where I start talking about libraries.

I found the word library mentioned just once in the book, and it was about the Europeana project. The word library isn't even in the index. The free Internet is OK for learning some things, but it takes an institution to provide a well stocked library of resources so students don't have to shell out money (to buy or travel to find) books and journal articles and newspaper archives and conference materials and government documents and microfilms and lots of other stuff. She also doesn't seem to get there is a much bigger and deeper web of Internet materials that are not freely available to students, unless institutions subscribe of course. It also takes an institution to provide laboratory space for students in the sciences. Doing a chemistry experiment on the computer just isn't the same thing as dealing with real chemicals in the lab. It takes an institution to provide places for students to gather for clubs and other interest groups.

David Wiley of BYU (and Flat World Knowledge) shows up on page 83 and notes that "if universities can't find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them, universities will be irrelevant by 2020." (He is also a leader of the open-education movement.) People are thinking the same thing about libraries. They think we need to either innovate or we will be dead. Ummm, I don't think so. People have been saying for the last 15 years that the Internet is going to make libraries obsolete, but here we are. If anything, we are working harder than ever to help our students navigate the complex and evolving information sphere.

The book covers a lot of open education and open access resources. For example, they mention DOAJ on page 85. Libraries are certainly behind initiatives like this.

I did find some of her writing confusing. For example, she seemed to confuse credits with classes in some spots. This article at Inside Higher Ed does a great job of evaluating much of her logic and false assumptions.

On page 88, she provided the wrong title for this article, "Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0." The PDF is here. Instead of reading the book, this article provides a good overview of the open education movement.

I did learn about a lot of new and interesting initiatives that are going on.

• Open Learning Initiative at CMU
• I knew about MIT and their OpenCourseWare Project, but this is part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium
• I've known about the term "personal learning network" for a year or two. Here are some resources to get more information on that topic.
• The School of Everything
• "AcaWiki is like a 'Wikipedia for academic research' designed to increase the impact of scholars, students, and bloggers by enabling them to share summaries and discuss academic papers online."
• "Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is an online community of open study groups for short university-level courses."
• "University of the People (UoPeople) is the world’s first tuition-free online university."
• Hacking Education event in NYC.

Overall, it was an interesting book. However, she seemed to miss the point that a lot of the education one receives at an institution is not just from taking course and reading the readings, it is from the socialization process. This is very important for younger undergraduate students, but graduate students also learn about their field by socializing with other graduate students, and from learning how their faculty mentors do research. The institution provides the "personal learning network" all in one place for the students, and they get an official certification (degree, or whatever you want to call it) of their learning. For edupunks, they might be able to build great personal learning networks and be able to learn about the topics they desire, but they may not have the same kind of certification. This may not matter as much in some fields of inquiry, but it matters quite a bit in other fields. I'd rather not go to a dentist who learned about dentistry on the open web. I'd rather not hire a lawyer who didn't have a law degree. I wouldn't trust a research article in biology, if the author didn't have a biology degree.

Next Generation Science Librarianship

Yesterday, I went to the "Next Generation Science Librarianship Panel Presentation." It was at the NCAR facility up in Boulder. Unfortunately, I could only stay for the first hour, but was able to hear from all three speakers:

• Dr. Jian Qin, Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University
• Jamaica Jones, Special Projects Librarian, NCAR Library
• Jack M. Maness, Assistant Professor and Director of the Engineering and Math-Physics Libraries, University of Colorado at Boulder

Some of the documents, reports and websites they mentioned were:

• http://eslib.ischool.syr.edu/(Syracuse University eScience Fellows Program)
• http://sdl.syr.edu/(Science Data Literacy (SDL) project)
• e-Science and its implications for the library community by Tony Hey, Jessie Hey
• Global Interdisciplinary Research by Daniel Atkins
• E-Science and Data Support Services: A Study of ARL Member Institutions, Aug. 2010 [PDF] by Catherine Soehner, Catherine Steeves, and Jennifer Ward
• Developing a Vital Research Library Workforce by Mark A. Puente, Director of Diversity Programs, ARL
• Using Personas to Understand the Needs and Goals of Institutional Repository Users, by Jack Maness, Tomasz Miaskiewicz, and Tamara Sumner

Happy reading!

Social Media Research on Companies

I attended this "Virtual Lunch Webinar on Social Media Research" by Scott Brown two days ago. He did a great job of talking about how to use social networking services to look up information (dig up dirt) on various companies. He used LinkedIn a bit to show how to get more information on Sports Authority, which is a Colorado Company. The presentation is archived at: http://connect.cboces.org/p11547709/

I also learned about some new databases:
http://samepoint.com
http://yauba.com
http://crowdeye.com
http://tweetfind.com

Good stuff. Thanks Scott.

Brick and Click Report

I attended the 10th Annual Brick and Click Conference last week. It was at NW Missouri State University. One of my colleagues was not that impressed with the location for some reason. There was a dearth of Starbucks for her, I guess. We also "enjoyed" driving all the way through Nebraska.

The best session I went to was by Eric Jennings and Kathryn Tvaruzka of UW-Eau Claire on "Quick and Dirty Library Promotions"

In today's economy, money for promotion of library services is at a premium. Find out how the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire's McIntyre Library has inexpensively changed the atmosphere and has broken stereotypes typically associated with the library and librarians through library promotions and activities.

Some of the best ideas included:

• The "How I met my Valentine" Contest.
• Secret Post community art project.
• "Last Call" event before classes begin. Here are some videos of "Last Call".
• Give away fortune cookies to students and faculty. They recommend this place as a supplier. They are not just boring pens or bookmarks. Some of the fortunes go something like: Ask a librarian for help, get an A on your paper. Or -- You will find the love of your life on the 2nd foor, it is a history book.
• Youth and family programs. Have a summer reading program like public libraries. Invite children in for story time. The college kids will also enjoy it when the tots walk into the library.
  

I also went to some other sessions such as:

• Getting Ready to Go Mobile: A Primer for the Uninitiated
• The Library Through Students' Eyes: Exploring Student Research Needs in the Brick and Click Space
• Making Significant Cuts to an Approval Plan without Drawing Any Blood
• Embedded Librarianship: A Briefing from the Trenches
• Carrie also grabbed the handout for Mobile Patrons: Better Services on the Go

Carrie and Sandra also had presentations, and I think they went pretty well.

• Getting Started with Assessment: Using the Minute Paper to Find Trends in Student Learning
• Access to Video Material in Academic Libraries

The best part was being able to meet and chat with online and real-life friends at the pizza place when the conference was done.

My thoughts on Open Access

It is now near the end of Open Access Week, and I want to get some thoughts down in electrons.

I went to a presentation by Dr. Keith Seitter from the American Meteorological Society (AMS, not to be confused with the American Mathematical Society...), Wim van der Stelt from Springer, and Heath Joseph from SPARC/ARL speak at the UCAR facility up in Boulder on Weds the 20th.

I was struck by the fact that the AMS revealed how much revenue they get from publishing their journals, and that they take in about 10% "profit" to help support some of the other activities in the society. Pretty much, the publishing is the only thing that brings in revenue, so they have to use some of that money to support those other activities. I think the amount of revenue is on the order of $8 Million, but don't quote me on that. They do have a fully OA journal, and many/most/all of their journals where they provide free backfile access. Here are their OA policies, from Sherpa Romeo.

Author's Pre-print:	author can archive pre-print (ie pre-refereeing)
Author's Post-print:	author can archive post-print (ie final draft post-refereeing)
Publisher's Version/PDF:	author can archive publisher's version/PDF
General Conditions:	[A bunch of conditions are listed...]

In short, they are in favor of Open Access, but they want to see a smooth and balanced transition to OA so the society can survive.

Wim from Springer approached the topic of OA from a commercial standpoint. Most of what he talked about was their commercial author-pays model of OA. They own and manage the BioMed Central OA journals. I applaud them for venturing into OA, but I think they are too tied to the author-pays model. There are many other financial mechanisms for supporting OA.

In the far future (maybe 10-25 years out), I see academics and scholars taking back publishing from the commercial realm. Someone will invent a system where peer-review can be done in a wiki or blog-like fashion, and in a way that displays who commented on what or who modified what. These systems exist now, but there isn't very much uptake. A lot of the scholars are slow to use these new systems because there is a great deal of inertia that makes it difficult to change course. Faculty want to publish in Nature or Science (Note: they do allow for various forms of OA, but they are not Gold OA journals.) or Whatever Journal that has the highest supposed impact. Once faculty begin to realize that they can have a greater impact by publishing in OA sources, the name of the journal will not matter as much. The names of the authors with high prestige will draw in the readers regardless of the name of the journal that the article has been published in. This will be the new academic whuffie economy. How will authors and researchers earn high whuffie scores, high prestige, high esteem from colleagues and a great reputation? They will write great articles, and share their knowledge with the most people possible through OA. They will not write articles in closed-access journals where only a few people can read them.

That, and they will probably also learn to calculate their own h-index score instead of just using the impact factors of the journals they happen to publish in.

Open Access Week Kick-off Event

Happy Open Access Week!

Open Access Week 2010 from SPARC on Vimeo.

More info about this can be found at this blog post, Momentum continues: Open Access Week 2010 begins.

Here are some notes from Cameron Neylon who is in the video.

CoALL / RMSLA brown bag on Wednesday, Sept. 29

I went to a brown bag talk and lunch last week. We talked about cool, little unknown libraries in the Denver area. Here are some of the libraries we talked about...

• Office of Surface Mining Technical Library
• Water Resources Data System Library in Wyoming
• While this is not really a library, the Colorado Geological Survey sells many maps and other items at their main office.
• Information Bridge: DOE Scientific and Technical Information
• Western History and Genealogy Collection at DPL
• Colorado Supreme Court Library
• Colorado State Archives provides an excellent library
• University of Colorado Denver Health Sciences Library
• Bureau of Land Management Library
• Dept of Interior Libraries, such as the Bureau of Reclamation Library?
• CSU Water Resources Archive
• National Enforcement Investigations Center (NEIC) Environmental Forensic Library
• National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Library
• National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Library
• I talked a little bit about visitor access to the Penrose Library with a referral card and a pass
• http://www.askacademic.org/
• Helen Fowler Library at Denver Botanic Gardens
• Bailey Library at the DMNS
  
• There is a list of many special libraries in Colorado on the Dept. of Education Website
• http://creatingcommunities.denverlibrary.org/
• http://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/

We also talked about what was great about each library, but I just wanted to remember which libraries we talked about. I figure I can now go back later and investigate their websites and resources to see what they have.