i prefer old fashioned pencils. i like the feel of the wood and the weight of the pencil, which is lost with the mechanical versions. for general office use i prefer the 2b grade, which is a plain old, standard pencil. there’s a nice image on wikipedia that demonstrates the grading and classification of pencils: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil.
so. i like a regular old pencil, but it has to have a SHARP point. i get grumpy when they’re dull; what’s more depressing than pulling a pencil out of the pencil holder to discover the sharp is worn down to a nub? well, lots of things are more depressing, actually, but i’ve got this sharp point problem licked. here’s how:
sharpen a bunch of pencils
insert into cup on desk with the pointy tips facing up
after using one, return to cup with now dull tip facing down
when there are no more pencils with pointy tips facing up, it’s time to sharpen all of them
this way i am guaranteed to always choose a pencil with a sharp point. woohoo!
Here’s a video of a monkey reading the abstract of the paper I’ll be presenting at the upcoming Library Assessment conference. The title of the paper is “Cycling Through: Paths Libraries Take to Marketing Electronic Resources.”
this question bubbles up in my mind weekly as i peruse tables of contents of info sci/lib sci journals. these kind of “how we did it good at my library” articles describe a problem identified at one library, recount what was done to resolve the problem, and then summarize. there is often no mention of how what was done to resolve the problem may relate to a wider body of literature and often doesn’t offer how their resolution may be implemented at other libraries. when i see this kind of publication in a peer-reviewed journal, mixed in with research articles, i’m stumped.
“peer review” to me means that a small group of topic experts reads a manuscript, situates it within the literature of the topic they know, and then decides whether it is an original enough contribution to add to the field of knowledge (i know the process is more complex. i’m abbreviating for the sake of this discussion). if the manuscript doesn’t acknowledge the literature or doesn’t suggest applicability to the library at large, what hook can the reviewer hang his decision to publish/not publish on?
is the field of library science just publishing these to get a full issue of a journal out or is there a legitimate reason to treat a case study like a research article that i’m missing?
a double-blind peer review process for manuscripts means that neither the author or reviewer are revealed to each other. most of the journals to which i’ve submitted manuscripts have this kind of review. there’s good support for this double-blind peer review, especially related to gender equality in publishing. the concept is positive and it’s something i’m in favor of. the practical problem for the effectiveness of this in librarianship, however, is that the anonymity aspect doesn’t work. the area i research and write about, electronic resources, has a small circle of experts. we all read each others publications. this becomes a problem at the point of a manuscript review because i can assume that a good editor will also know these experts and send my manuscripts to them for comment. in the last two reviews i’ve easily been able to determine the identity of the reviewers. in fact, i wasn’t even trying to figure out who the reviewers were, but based on their comments it was obvious. it was probably also obvious to the reviewers who i am as a writer.
how does this affect the final version of our manuscripts? what do you think?
i would have lost my mind by now if it weren’t for atlas.ti. i’m working with a corpus of 24 scholarly articles published in information/library science journals, picking out examples of marketing techniques used to promote electronic resources at the authors’ institutions. in addition to keeping a list of the actual techniques i’m interested in recounting the authors’ words in my summary, to help keep the techniques in context with the institutions. i started this in excel and it soon got out of control, all that copying and pasting into cells, and the inevitable scrolling. with atlas.ti i’m able to put the text of the 24 articles into the program, highlight the text i want to capture, and give that highlighted text a code that i’ve created. in this way, for example, i’m able to highlight text related to an author’s description of emails that he sends to faculty to market an electronic resource, and then give that text a code of “email.”
when i’m done coding all the texts i can export the codes along with the highlighted text, giving me a list of all the ways “email” has been used to market electronic resources. this will permit me to understand the breadth of how this particular technique is used across the variety of institutions in the articles. doing this in excel would have taken a long time, considering the number of marketing techniques i’m bumping into in the literature.
Marie Kennedy is the Serials & Electronic Resources Librarian at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA. This blog is about organization, librarianship, and sometimes monkeys and/or bananas.
