Science Librarian at Penn State

I wanted to tweet about this but it started to get over 140 characters.  Plus Twitter is about to get hammered by #LDSC09 soon.

I have found 3 citations of the paper I wrote with Tom Conkling over a year ago in the Journal of Academic Librarian.  The first to show up was in JAL and an alert came from Web of Science by Thompson Reuters, and the same citation showed up a few weeks later in Scopus by Elsevier.  If use Google Scholar, however, you can find two other citations: one in Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship and the other at an IEEE conference, both significant and scholarly.

It points back to the central problem as often asked of me as a librarian, "Is there one way to track citations for a paper or a person?"  And my answer is "No, not yet."

This is the beginning of what I hope will be a consistent, short, personal debrief after most of my teaching experiences.  This will supplement student and faculty surveys about my teaching.  Today I taught about 35 high school students in the Upward Bound program the basics of doing science research at Penn State.  By basics it was important to cover details that many freshmen already know, either from the Open House or a general English or Communications library session.  This time I prepared for 50 minutes, though since it was not a true class I actually had 60 minutes and even some extra, but no extra material.  I was told that they would not have access to the computers, but some did and shared with their neighbors, so I had no exercises and didn't come up with one on the fly.  In addition to being useful for a teaching portfolio, perhaps I could gather some of my successful activities into a portal toolkit.  I believe I am still going too fast in speaking, perhaps skipping around a bit, and definitely not waiting long enough for questions when I ask "Are there any questions?"

Looking at a recent photo of the 2009 Emerging Leaders I noticed, as I did in previous years, the few men in the background of the picture.  Granted the profession is predominately female, though I didn't know it was as low as 19.4% male (ALA Demographics) when I started a short study.  Using the wiki and Google Image Search I got some rough numbers.

Emerging Leaders 2007 - 25% male
Emerging Leaders 2008 - 22% male
Emerging Leaders 2009 - 19% male

You can check my numbers, but what will be shown even with small error is that rather than disproportionately representing women, emerging leaders is actually proportionally representing them.  This is great, since historically even librarianship has given men favor in leadership positions despite the predominance of women in the profession.  Just another day for me in a dramatic gender minority.

Tonight Cham will be speaking at Penn State in the HUB Audtiorium at 7:30pm.  He is the creator of the very funny Piled higher and Deeper (PhD) that includes satire and insight into such academic pursuits as:

Teaching
Academic Paper Abstracts
Invited Talks
and my favorite Impact Factor

It was impressive to hear from Dr. Abraham Nemeth, the historic mathematics professor who developed the standard system of Braille used for math in the sciences.  Recording of the lecture available online.  He worked on Computer Science projects at Penn State in 1968 and 1969.  He had a map of Penn State in cloth with embroidered routes and notes of braille posted on locations in code for look up in another braille book.  After studying it he could get to McAllister with no trouble on his own.  A very amusing lecturer, I would have enjoyed sitting in his math courses.  He had some comments about the lack of air conditioning at Penn State dormitories.

He started from the beginning - born blind, he grew up in NYC (New York Jewish Guild for the Blind).  He had many experiences growing up blind - learning NYC, writing letters with rubber stamps, touching objects including neon lights.  He went on errands and made change as a boy, and even today keeps up in math by solving problems in physics/chemistry/math textbooks as recreation.  He has electrician skills, like installing wiring, which started by circuit diagram drawing.  It was interesting how he practiced using a soldering iron (used a pencil to direct the soldering iron, melting solder smell is indication it was done)

Arithmetic was a problem already in elementary school, because the method for working was slow.  In high school he tutored someone as a 9th grader in math and took as much math as possible.  Then in Brooklyn College he took lots of math again during the depression years.  He was told that a Math Major is out of bounds, since there were no materials and a reader would need to be very skilled.  So he did a psychology major instead, even a Masters from Columbia.  First job was with the American Federation for the Blind as unskilled labor.  Then his wife worked while he pursued an advanced Math degree, asking him "Wouldn't you rather be an unemployed Mathematician than an unemployed Psychologist."

The existing Taylor code was only good for elementary algebra. He had to figure out all these things - his experience with print letters helped since letters are used to reference SO many things in English "t-square", etc.  Nemeth code uses such print oriented references.  It was only for his use, until someone else blind needed a integral table and this person was on a international committee (1952).  While teaching math, he would tell students stories of inspirational mathematicians or problems.

When asked about his favorite branch of mathematics (by our local Diane Henderson) he said calculus and analysis because it is so precise (though his dissertation was in topology)  If you are teaching a blind math student, would you as a teacher need to know the Nemeth code? Yes, you need to check his work.  Also if he came across an expression he didn't know you would need to explain it.  You don't have to learn the whole code, just learn the part that is in your area of interest (for example, only the signs for the expressions you use)

The reviews from Educational Media Reviews Online has been integrated into WorldCAT, so now some of the science DVDs I have reviewed are on WorldCat.org.

"Relative National Membership and Self-Reports of Professional Activity Among Academic Science, Engineering and Medical Librarians Some Hypotheses on Why SLA Is Mentioned So Often" by Tony Stankus - read it if you subscribe to Science & Technology Libraries

Three reasons are "proximity to academic SLA STM librarians, an awareness of the general success of SLA members in attainment of elective professional office, and success in SLA member recruitment by elite institutions."

Let me posit a fourth point that comes from attending STS Council and other ACRL meetings along with a recent personal experience trying to get a STM program accepted for ACRL Conference.  "In efforts to meet the needs of all its sections and members ACRL winds up giving STS and perhaps other sections very limited opportunities for impact and significance."  This plays itself out at ALA Conferences, of which ACRL is only a part, in limited
time slots of programming and multiple conflicts in those slots.  Also this may be my first year to attend SLA so I will see if the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence.

Education department class with Cole and Scott - course based instruction techniques are very difficult to adapt to library instruction methods.  Graduate students can drive last third of the course (probably wouldn't work for undergrads)  Big idea -> community of practice, open environment, Blog is their space.  "Data" says convergence of technologists and theorists in what they had difficulty with (technology of discussion vs. theory of reading literature) Pligg creates a community from a group of blogs, which can function like Digg and the highly voted posts would be discussed. For each disruptive technology, a group had to explain it to the class, develop an assignment, and present to the class.  Non-veterans of a technology like twitter were less engaged, but eventually the class come together around Twitter.  Very "high level" discussion of theory went beyond "social" interactions.  Course design -> you can't pick the "winner" like Twitter in this case, that emerged as the most effective course tool.  Social posts versus intellectual rigor -> was a bit intimidating, but turned into a very supportive tool.  "Distributed technologies cause distributed communication" and you "give up control" which is "very complicated and intimidating" for an instructor.

Every Library’s Nightmare? Digital Rights Management, Use Restrictions, and Licensed Scholarly Digital Resources Kristin R. Eschenfelder - Eh.  An intriguing examination of "soft" DRM, such as warnings or limitations on use that have workaround or obfuscated solutions.  The paper does categorize these "soft" restrictions for later researchers.  Engineering was one of the subjects studies, but only a few specific instances were noted (one old) and no quantitative list was presented.

Status of Approval Plans in College Libraries Beth E. Jacoby - This would have been useful required reading before the PSU Libraries Collection Development retreat where we looked at coordinating our approval plan among one main campus and 23 college campuses (one university, geographically distributed), but I got behind in my C&RL reading.  I found out Penn State used to have a "Ogontz" campus, name changes keep my mind boggled.

What’s in a Name? Using Card Sorting to Evaluate Branding in an Academic Library’s Web Site Peter Hepburn and Krystal M. Lewis - Shocking reality check about library branded services.  A must read for any library web committee (at least the Findings and Table 1 sections for the time challenged)

Adjusting to the Workplace: Transitions Faced by New Academic Librarians Joanne Oud - Best Article (for me and Russ anyway)  Though it is about University Librarians in Canada, this will be a landmark study in my research agenda.  Great survey of new academic librarians that impacts mentoring, job training, hiring, collection development, and instruction (Russ!).  The questions were well contructed and the results are sometimes surprising and always quantitative.  I would love to duplicate this survey in the U.S. or at Penn State.

Transition to Electronic Resources in Undergraduate Social Science Research: A Study of Honors Theses Bibliographies, 1999–2005 Leslie Kriebel and Leslie Lapham - co-writing my own article about electronic resources in a subject area has taught me not to skip an article if it doesn't directly address your subject area.  This is a good study of undergraduate theses that reinforces our expectation that Websites are increasing in student citations, E-journals are trumping print, yet perhaps surprisingly e-Books are a flop (only 1% of citations where almost 9% of the citations were available as e-Books).  This reminds me to look at habits of grad students and not just faculty in my own citation studies.

Better than Brief Tests: Coverage Power Tests of Collection Strength by Howard D. White was the last article in the March 2008 C&RL issue that I didn't get to in my last review of the journal.  This was a pretty long article on a topic that I am recently interested in exploring: assessing collection development.  It does open with the disclaimer "When this article was first submitted, WorldCat users could easily perform coverage power tests as described below.  They cannot now...", which leaves me wondering if I can try to repeat the Methodology at all.  I hope so, this is a very good article on what comparing holding lists with OCLC really can mean, when the quantitative data is most meaningful, and the author is an experienced expert on the process.  A good background read, but perhaps less a less practical example.