Recently in Reflections Category

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?"