Science Librarian at Penn State

There is a new website (web 2.0 tool) called Liszen Trends that facilitates posting of library news (mostly via blogs) and voting less than 24 hours after I wished for a digg-like tool for library literature. So I didn't quite get my wish, since the topics sometimes discuss professional books but that is a review ON a blog.

What I want is to be able to tag and vote on both the Old Literature and the New since both are information sources for professionals and, believe it or not, the Old has good stuffs.

Academic Subject Guides: A Case Study of Use at San Jose State University Shannon M. Stately was a good read and well summarized by the abstract (link above). Though the results first seemed a death knell for Subject Guides, the Online Articles & Databases pages as well as E-Journals and Web Site Search Engines were familiar to over 50% of most students. The data was from Nursing, Journalism, and Organization & Management students, primarily undergraduate upperclassmen. Best point: Library instruction leads to greater subject guide use.

Analysis of a Decade of Library Literature Kelly Blessinger and Michele Frasier will be primarily useful when deciding what journals to browse or where to submit those pre-tenure papers, but isn't really a revelation about the subjects of contemporary library literature.

The book reviews were pretty good, I am now aware of a pretty significant book on The Economics of Attention

The Elusive User: Changing Use Patterns in Academic Libraries 1995 to 2004 Charles Martell has data that is a bit out of date and not that surprising: cost of journals WAY UP and electronic use UP (exceptions: circulation in Ivy League libraries has gone UP, reference transactions at Columbia UP). There is a great final quote in the conclusion, from another reference, "Among the most critical [frontiers for librarians to explore] are those that facilitate interaction between the virtual user and the library professional." I believe this is a great endorsement for all the Web 2.0, chat, and other related efforts of librarians.

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.

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?

Engaging Users: The Future of Academic Library Web Sites by Shu Liu is a a good summary of "current" academic library homepages highlighting Web 2.0 and RSS features. Suggestions for "MY library SPACE" (capitalization mine) may be portentous... could portals get a "second life"?

Using Circulation Systems for Special Collections: Tracking Usage, Promoting the Collection, and Addressing the Backlogs by Beth M. Whittaker - The fact that I skipped this article says more about me than anything else.

Organizational Learning in the Evaluation Procedures: A Qualitative Study by Kuan-nien Chen and Pei-chun Lin has 11 endnotes in the first 13 sentences, which starts a disturbing trend in this issue.

Librarians as Teachers: A Qualitative Inquiry Into Professional Identity BEST in issue by Scott Walter - The 78 endnotes, many of which contain several citations, in this article made my eyes start to pop out of their sockets. A twenty page article that is one quarter notes must be some kind of record (and the font on the notes pages is small!) However if you are interested in librarians as teachers, read it anyway. You will probably find a dozen other cool articles or books.
Note to the author: ACRL's Immersion program does include a focus on teacher identity

Citation Analysis of Ph.D Dissertation References as a Tool for Collection Management in an Academic Chemistry Library by Núria Vallmitjana and L. G. Sabaté is a very concise article with some most results following what you would assume, but giving numbers in the discipline of Chemistry to prove it. No good news in cost, really, except that the core journals were relatively easy to spot. What is the cost? Well, they estimate the resources used by one thesis to be 90 € = $142

My first peer reviewed (co-authored) article appeared in May and my first solo article in a major journal appears in June, here are the citations.

Meier, J.J. & Conkling, T.W. "Google Scholar's Coverage of the Engineering Literature: An Empirical Study," Journal of Academic Librarianship, May 2008

Meier, J.J. "Chat widgets on the library website: Help at the point of need," Computers in Libraries, June 2008

Research Productivity Among Librarians: Factors Leading to Publications at Penn State by Joseph Fennewald paints an encouraging environment for professional publication that does indeed exist here at Penn State. I also like the fact that the most productive type of faculty librarian (in journals and books) is MLS plus a second Masters (like me).

A Mixed-Methods Investigation of the Relationship between Critical Thinking and Library Anxiety among Undergraduate Students in their Information Search Process by Nahyun Kwon reinforces an earlier study on correlation between anxiety and success for library users. A good map (textual and visual) for library service desk interaction and advice for general interaction of library staff with users.

Measuring Students’ Information Literacy Skills through Abstracting: Case Study from a Library & Information Science Perspective by Maria Pinto, Andrés Fernández-Ramos, and Anne-Vinciane Doucet is a very long article with lots of figures and tables on abstracting, which I found out from a colleague is a totally separate "profession" in some ways to librarianship. I certainly didn't study it in library school (should I have gone to Spain?)

Better than Brief Tests: Coverage Power Tests of Collection Strength by Howard D. White