i used this as my introduction slide to talk about a research project i did about marketing electronic resources recently. it was nice and quiet in the lecture hall until people got to the last entry…
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?
about a month ago i mentioned that we were in the midst of preparing our journal lists to send to the academic departments on campus. thanks to comments from @gohomekiki , the lists we made this year are much improved. we swapped journal lists and got good feedback from each other on how to improve our respective excel files. i’ll paste a screen shot here of what the newest version of our list looks like (prices removed). for the screen shot i chose a title list from a teeny tiny fund so it would all fit on one screen. we’ve colored the cells where we ask for feedback with that turquoise color, to make it easier for the department liaison to follow. ooh, and do you see how nice our header is? we totally stole that from @gohomekiki. i’m all for improving the lists for next year, so if you’ve got feedback then please leave a comment. if you want feedback on the way you format your own lists, send me a sample via email.
…because it was too hilarious not to try.
there are two more images linked from the daily what site that i haven’t tried yet. somehow this crudely drawn image was just the right amount of satisfying.
(thanx, the daily what!)
i casually mentioned on twitter yesterday that i was finding multiple unsigned copies of a license agreement in a single folder and got a surprise: i’m not the only one. i heard from friends on facebook that their license agreement folders are also a mess. it’s funny to me to think of libraries having anything out of order since the e-resources librarians i’ve met tend to be very neat people. i think we’ve uncovered a dirty little secret about libraries. i’m sure that what’s happened is that the people who used to be in charge of the licenses had an idea about what was important to save in those folders and as time moved on stuff was just added to the folder, weeding out nothing.
i inherited a whole file cabinet of these kinds of folders in my new job. i’m enjoying looking through them, weeding out multiple copies, fax cover sheets, and email printouts that note passwords long expired. i’m putting the leftover material in order to be scanned and eventually linked in our erms, a little procedure i cooked up many years ago. my organizational scheme is to put the current license on top, followed by any older licenses, title lists, then any correspondence that notes the administrative username/password or key contact information. all of this will be scanned into one pdf, and then i’ll create bookmarks in the pdf to point to the license start date, termination information, interlibrary loan rights and restrictions, number of simultaneous users, etc.
once in pdf form these licenses become much more meaningful as living documents because it’s easy to scan a new license and append it to the old pdf, or delete a sheet that no longer applies. also, a pdf is much easier to share with librarians that need to read them than coming to our office to request a folder.
