Science Librarian at Penn State

But at least I can take part by feed...

This post is just to see if it shows up in Google Reader during Ellysa Cahoy's presentation on readers.

Also, Lawrence Lessig loves AMVs, which you can all watch now

Clicking above will open another browser window (shaped like a traditional Chat application) and attempt to connect to my Gtalk. This code only seems to update when I refresh the window.

We have a good number of books on Computer and Video Games from design to programming to marketing. But there are all over the place, and I don't just me at the College Campus libraries though their collections often hold more copies than University Park.

GV1469.17 3rd Floor Paterno - Business Library
QA76.76.C672 4th Floor Paterno - Life Sciences Library
Hammond Bldg - Engineering Library

I'll add more to this post as I find them, but if you want a really good example do a CAT search on keyword "nintendo".

Undergraduate Use of Federated Searching: A Survey of Preferences and Perceptions of Value-added Functionality should be subtitled "Count the number of times 'Google' is mentioned in this article" and has some good data for both those that like federated searching and that don't. The listed methods and rubrics are thorough, though they produced small statistical significance. To the visually inclined I challenge you to compare Figures 1&2, which are ratings of federated vs. non-federated search as given by undergraduates & predicted by librarians at a conference.

My "should be" sections are dedicated to Russ Hall. Should I start individually blogging each article?

Attitudes of Presidents and Provosts on the University "provosts' and presidents' newly stated indicators of centrality - such as innovation, campus visibility, and acquisition of outside funding - and then linking the library's strategic issues and actions to them"

The Development and Validation of the Information Literacy Test should probably be read by those responsible for general information literacy or coordinate those efforts at their university

The University Library and the Problem of Knowledge should be called "Libraries involvement with university program reviews and the impact on collection development"

Finding Information in a New Landscape: Developing New Service and Staffing Models for Mediated Information Services should be called "How to staff your information commons" and will be a useful read to some of my colleagues working on the Knowledge Commons, but Science Librarians should pay special attention to their Reference and Circulation study and findings. Also has an interesting review of real dollar $$ savings from Chat reference. Best article in the issue and lots of different topics.

Critical Thinking Disposition and Library Anxiety: Affective Domains on the Space of Information Seeking and Use in Academic Libraries - Hey, I love empirical data and studies as much as the next engineer turned librarian, but SKIP TO THE CONCLUSION.

1) Does anyone read my blog?

2) Do you know of any universities that have tenure track librarians and also a library school with tenured faculty? How similar are they and how do they interact? Those I have talked to so far (including myself) only have experience where the librarians are quasi-tenure with a separate/dis-similar system. How would Penn State accommodate Library and Information Science faculty professors?

This is a microblog post that will only explain what I mean by the title "the information age is a cyberpunk dystopia". In reading lots of science fiction including the genre of cyberpunk, perhaps even playing the RPG Shadowrun, I recognized a theme that data (information) is an expensive commodity. The struggle in "the net" isn't how fast your connection is, but what you can get access to because of who you are or if you can "hack into" it. The enemy is the "corp" who has secrets that need to be unlocked for the good of mankind. You can probably see the scholarly publishing world in here, though our researchers aren't confined to plateaus in the desert at gunpoint. But things are looking up for those with government funded research and the other publishing models look to be catching on, so perhaps we're due for utopia instead.

I attended one talk during the 2008 IST Graduate Symposium this year and it was the opening keynote from Google's Dr. Peter Norvig, director of research. I was hoping to hear more about the new Google Research project that would support eScience and large data sets. Instead I got a talk that appealed to the Computer Scientist in my (ah, 211). He covered what was in the description of the keynote, the amazing ability of simple algorithms to identify images and natural language text... just because of BILLIONS of data points. Test their ability to draw semantic links between ideas from words with Google Sets.

Some gems of insight:
"Don't make algorithms that work well, make algorithms that work well with large enough data"
We can model the entire world by "using the world as it's own model"
We don't need to define rules because "the rules are in the data"

I have happy to say that between my wife and I, who both registered for the conference and exhibits at ALA Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia, we came back with only 1 more bag then we left with (despite returning with over 50 books) and only about 5-6 items of swag. I carried my mug, from Internet Librarian, almost the whole time and was able to waste very few beverage cups and recycle some of those. I actually mentioned it to some people, causing smiles and a couple "I forgot mine at home."

I didn't realize that I would have to say "No, thank you" as often as I did to exhibitor bags and swag. But in the end, I feel much better about my impact on the environment. I hope that I can find avenues to effect change on the profession for the positive. The idea, from SLA members, to bring old conference bags and lanyards to the conference can be done REAL SOON. And if anyone complains about losing corporate sponsorship revenue, just have the company sponsor the concept (and put up one poster or something).