jdupuis | June 12, 2009Thanks to Mark Spicer for bringing this item to my attention. Note that the site I'm linking to sells printer cartridges, but still has some cool content.
The 7 Most Impressive Libraries From Throughout History. Drop by the article, it's well worth reading. It also has links to each of the libraries.
The Great Library & Mouseion: The First Universal Library (Alexandria, Egypt)
The Celsus Library: One of Antiquity's Finest Libraries (Ephesus, Turkey)
The University of Sankore: An Ancient Seat of Muslim Learning (Sankore, Timbuktu)
The Bodleian: One of The Oldest Surviving European…
jdupuis | June 12, 2009My brain is completely overloaded at the moment after the two absolutely fabulous conferences I've attended in the past week. I'm going to do individual posts about each conference, but I thought I'd give some initial impressions in this post first.
As a reminder, the conferences were BookCamp Toronto and Managing Data for Science.
First of all, BookCamp Toronto, an unconference attended mostly by people from the trade book publishing industry, the Canadian version of which is centred here in Toronto. There were quite a few authors in attendance as well as some publishing people from other…
jdupuis | June 11, 2009It's with great pleasure that I welcome Walt Crawford and his blog, Walt at Random, to the ScienceBlogs family.
I've been following Walt's writings on the library world for a long time, probably at least seven years, and his Cites &Insights ejournal is a terrific source of links and commentary. Interestingly, it was Walt that inspired me to blog. Interesting, you say, because I've actually been blogging longer than Walt. How is this possible?
Well, it's those early days of Cites & Insights that inspired me to start expressing myself on professional topics. At the time, I was…
jdupuis | June 5, 2009I expect blogging will be lighter than usual between now and next Thursday as I have two conferences coming up.
First off, tomorrow here in Toronto I'll be attended BookCamp Toronto, an unconference on "he future of books, writing, publishing, and the book business in the digital age." The program looks very interesting and as you can all imagine I'll be keeping a keen eye out for ideas relevant to the future of libraries. I'm also looking forward to meeting Peter Brantley of Archive.org for the first time.
Tuesday and Wednesday next week, I'll be at Managing Data for Science, the ICSTI…
jdupuis | June 5, 2009I've more or less promised sets of Canadian and jazz songs for this series, but lately I've been so entranced with the latest Derek Trucks Band CD, Already Free, that I thought I'd feature a Derek Trucks extended family post, all featuring laid back blues rock. Not only does Trucks release his own music, but he's also one of the guitarists for the Allman Brothers Band.
Here are five great songs showcasing Derek Trucks and his extended musical family:
Down in the Flood by The Derek Trucks Band. The first single off the new album.
Desdemona by The Allman Brothers Band. A great track…
jdupuis | June 3, 2009After last year's success, the organizers put on a another great SciBarCamp show! It was this past May 8th and 9th at the University of Toronto's Hart House.
What is SciBarCamp, you ask?
SciBarCamp is a gathering of scientists, artists, and technologists for a day of talks and discussions. The second SciBarCamp event will take place at Hart House at the University of Toronto on May 9th, 2009, with an opening reception on the evening of May 8th. The goal is to create connections between science, entrepreneurs and local businesses, and arts and culture.
I'll just do some fairly detailed…
jdupuis | June 2, 2009As you may have noticed, ScienceBlogs is making a concerted effort to engage a broad range of the Information Science community. That community includes librarians, publishing people and scholars who are interested in issues around libraries, information management, scholarly publishing, Open Access, research metrics, human-computer interaction, privacy, intellectual property and a whole host of other topics.
The first step was recruiting a couple of new bloggers from the library community -- Christina Pikas and myself -- to supplement the considerable amount of IS discussion that's already…
jdupuis | June 1, 2009Every once in a while I get an email out of the blue from a science student who's thinking of a career as a librarian and they want to know a bit about the field and it's job prospects.
I always respond very positively because I think science librarianship is a great career and that, on balance, the job prospects are pretty good.
Christina has a post up today with a little more detail:
If you are a scientist, but you want to get out of the lab, want to have a little more variety in your life, like helping people and finding information, but still want to use your science degree and be part…
jdupuis | June 1, 2009First Principles is physicist Howard Burton's story of how Research in Motion founder and CEO Mike Lazaridis basically plucked him out of obscurity to become the founding executive director for The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. And quite a story it is.
Burton had just finished his PhD and was looking for work. He sent some CVs around and one of the responses was from Lazaridis, who was looking for do something both big and important with his considerable wealth. After a brief (and rather odd) interview, Burton got the job. It was then his job to figure…
jdupuis | May 29, 2009I'd like to pick up a little where I left off in my last posting on social networking. In that post, I was highlighting a post by Wayne Bivens-Tatum on how he prefers to interact in online environments. Or more precisely, how he prefers not to get too deeply involved.
Wayne's points are well thought-out and reasonable. And a kind of challenge to those that want to build online communities -- the people they probably need to listen to the most when they are designing their communities are people like him rather than just people in the social media echo chamber.
Now, of course Wayne got a…
jdupuis | May 29, 2009Bookgasm is a great site that reviews a lot of fun reading in all kinds of genres. As the name indicates, they don't necessarily take themselves too seriously either.
About a month ago they had a post on Paper or Plastic?: The Books vs. Kindle Showdown that is absolutely hilarious. It's a 10 item smackdown on the usefulness of owning 200 paper books versus the Kindle in various life-changing moments. Often somehow involving zombies.
In any case, here's a taste:
SITUATION #2
Government experimentation has caused the dead to rise up from their cold and lonely graves and stalk the living in…
jdupuis | May 27, 2009Every year starting in November or so, I start to highlight various "year's best science books" lists I find around the web.
Typically, one of the last is the long list for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books. Since it's a juried award, they need time to actually read the darn things. Yes, I know what that's like.
In any case, here's their list:
What the nose knows: The science of scent in everyday life by Avery Gilbert
Bad science by Ben Goldacre
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of science by Richard Holmes
Living with Enza: The…
jdupuis | May 26, 2009Yes, the book. My Job in 10 Years: The Future of Academic Libraries.
To rewind a bit, the story begins this past January. I did a little off-the-cuff post on how libraries could model their web presences on commercial book-related sites like Tor.com or the Globe & Mail Books site. It ended up being surprisingly popular, even getting picked up by AL Direct.
Shortly after that, I was contacted by Christopher Rhodes of ALA Editions to see if I was interested in proposing a book for them about designing library web pages that way. (Thanks, Chris!)
Well, like any good blogger, I've always…
jdupuis | May 25, 2009For those of you new to Confessions of a Science Librarian, I've been publishing various lists of books and reports/white papers for the last little while. The reports and books explore various ideas, issues and trends that I think will be important in the development of academic libraries over the next several years and range pretty far and wide in terms of subject matter.
I've done four lists so far, mentioning a rather frightening number of different items:
Sixteen books
Twenty-nine reports
Thirty-four books and eight reports
Nine reports and sixteen books
Reports
Online Catalogs: What…
jdupuis | May 22, 2009My last Friday Fun post at the old home was a list of five hard rock songs that I really love. I enjoyed doing that list so much, I thought I'd do it again this time, but with a focus on the blues.
I'm a Criminal by Paul Reddick + The Sidemen. This song totally blew me away the first time I heard it and it will totally blow you away too.
How Blue Can You Get by BB King. BB King was the very first blues artist I got into. My father was a huge Johnny Carson fan when I was growing up and I often used to stay up with him and watch The Tonight Show. And Carson loved blues and jazz music and…
jdupuis | May 22, 2009Go on over and visit ScienceBlogs' newest librarian blogger: Christina Pikas at Christina's LIS Rant.
jdupuis | May 21, 2009Apparently, there are thousands of librarians that read ScienceBlogs. No surprisingly, the ScienceBlogs brain trust wants to know why.
In particular, they are looking to gather some information about what librarians hope to get out of reading the site. The question is: how does the content on ScienceBlogs help you in your role as a librarian?
You can send your thoughts to editorial at scienceblogs dot com or just leave it as a comment here.
I'll start.
I'm a science librarian so I have a couple of information needs in my work. First of all, I need to understand science and where it's…
jdupuis | May 21, 2009Lots of great articles in this issue! Pretty well every one is worth checking out:
Percentile-Based Journal Impact Factors: A Neglected Collection Development Metric by A. Ben Wagner, University at Buffalo
A Subject Librarian's Guide to Collaborating on e-Science Projects by Jeremy R. Garritano and Jake R. Carlson, Purdue University
What Engineering Sophomores Know and Would Like to Know About Engineering Information Sources and Access by Zorana Ercegovac, InfoEN Associates
The 2007 STS Continuing Education Survey: Continuing Education Needs of Science/Technology Librarians by Jo Ann…
jdupuis | May 19, 2009As we race headlong into a future full of opportunities for online social networking, as we try and build systems to engage students, scientists, librarians or others, we have to remember one thing.
When we build these systems, we need to build them for everyone. Not just the coolest and most technophilic. We have to build for who our audience really is, not who we wish they would be.
And sometimes we just have to recognize that not everyone will be interested in what we have to offer, even if they seem to fit our profile in other ways.
Wayne Bivens-Tatum does a very good job of…
jdupuis | May 18, 2009Here I am on ScienceBlogs, moved from the comfortable confines of my old blog, where I've been active since October 2002.
The opportunity to come here was never anything I really expected or pursued, but now that I'm here I'm really excited to start this new chapter in my blogging existence.
How did it happen, you ask? Well, it all started last week with a post I did about the "Are You a Librarian" survey that Seed was running on the site at the time. Basically, the survey was a marketing tool trying to encourage librarians to subscribe to Seed Magazine for their institutions. I was…