Ta-da!

So there I was... merrily blogging along for 5 years... when all of the sudden... the borg needs librarians (and who doesn't?).

Please allow me to introduce myself. I am a librarian in a university-affiliated research lab. Our lab does mostly physical sciences and engineering. My favorite things to research go BOOM or WHOOSH! I wrote a long post on what librarians do, but what you need to know about me, is that I do in-depth literature searching and I'm embedded in some teams. In-depth means that I might work 40 hours or so on something and the completed product is an annotated bibliography, with analysis, and maybe some visualizations of the scientometric sort.

I'm also a doctoral student at Maryland. I'm done coursework and am prepping for my comprehensive exams. I'm done most of the reading and re-reading, so I'm trying out ideas in the form of essays. You can check some of these out on my old blog and I'll plan to put some up here. The areas for my exams are: communication and information transfer, science and technology studies, computer mediated communication, information retrieval, and research methods.

A little bit of background - I got my BS in Physics from Maryland - a long time ago. I was then a commissioned officer in the US Navy and served first as the gunnery officer on USS O'BANNON (DD-987) and then as facilities manager at the Navy Historical Center.

Along the way I worked at a dot-com web-hosting company, in reference at a public library where I still sub about one Sunday a month, and as a librarian at an EPA analytical chemistry lab.

I blog about libraries, librarians, finding information, scientific information, how scientists find, select, keep, re-find, use, and share information, and about supporting scientific work. I'm actually into engineering as well, which is quite different, but also very interesting!