science debate in oregon?

Posted on April 21, 2008 by Marie Kennedy

a new opportunity for a presidential debate on science and america’s future has been proposed, during the oregon mail-in primary. it’s important to learn what the candidates plan to do to support and promote the work of our nation’s scientists, and an open forum on the topics of science/technology, the environment, and health/medicine is an appropriate venue.

here’s a snippet of the latest invitation to such a forum, sent to the candidates by sciencedebate:

This is a serious policy discussion about the candidates’ vision for solving many of America’s most serious challenges, the majority of which revolve around issues of science and technology, and an opportunity for candidates to focus on big ideas and express their vision for how our country will remain innovative and competitive in the future.

the list of supporters for this kind of forum is impressive, and continues to grow. consider adding your name!

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DePauw Libraries: Visual Resource Center

Posted on April 13, 2008 by Marie Kennedy

depauw visual resource librarians go head to head with google image search by using artstor and win in this video:

want more? : the librarian, spring break

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typo hunt across america

Posted on April 13, 2008 by Marie Kennedy

file under, “i wish i’d thought of this.”

thanks, melissa!

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I heart Google Docs

Posted on April 11, 2008 by Marie Kennedy

Gosh, I use Google Docs a lot these days.  I’m sharing several spreadsheets with medical students and library school interns that are working on a metadata project with me, I recently worked on an outline of a presentation with a colleague, and I just yesterday added a slide to a student’s presentation file.

Google Docs totally fits my writing style.  Here’s how writing an article usually goes for me (spoiler alert!): I’ll start an article by coming up with a title and some sort of bulleted outline, and then I’m usually spent for the day.  It takes brain power to conceive an article!  But then the next day I’ll add a paragraph, or add to the outline, or put in a quote I know I want to use somewhere in the article.  Then maybe later that night, when I’m at home, I’ll pop open the document to see what I’ve got written and think about what area I want to attack next.  Definitely an iterative process, and with Google Docs I don’t have to worry if I saved the latest draft to my thumb drive, or if I’ve remembered to email myself the document before I left work.

I know that Docs doesn’t do everything, and I’ll leave my final formatting to a word processing software program so that I can insert my RefWorks citations neatly, but for most of the writing I do Google Docs is where it’s at.  Also, just this week I discovered that one can insert ‘gadgets‘ into spreadsheets, which look very nice.

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The new chapter’s here!

Posted on April 8, 2008 by Marie Kennedy

I received my author’s copy of the book with my chapter in it but have waited to celebrate its publication with you until I had made it available via my institution’s repository. Let the celebrations begin! http://hdl.handle.net/10011/439

Kennedy, Marie R. (2008). “The Impact of Locally Developed Electronic Resource Management Systems.” In Electronic Resource Management in Libraries: Research and Practice, Holly Yu and Scott Breivold, eds.

for a quick visual glance of the chapter, see this tag cloud.

This is how I felt when I received my copy of the book:

I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now. – Navin Johnson (The Jerk)

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a simple example of why we need yet more standardization within Project COUNTER

Posted on April 4, 2008 by Marie Kennedy

i eagerly read the draft release 3 of project counter yesterday, hoping that there would be a mention of title standardization, but alas. the things that release 3 will do are fantastic: counting archive usage as a separate stat, database reports counting federated searches differently than single user searches, and removing stats generated by spiders are the big changes to the standard. maybe in release 4 we can deal with title standardization?

at my university our library subscribes to some e-journals and the main campus library subscribes to others. when it comes time to look at usage statistics i really only want to look at the titles i subscribe to, but publishers and aggregators supply all of our titles in one giant report. this means that i need to run a program of my titles against the vendor reports of usage for the campus as a whole to pull out statistics only for my titles. this can be simply done if there is one field in each report that can be matched. as the program runs, if the field from each report doesn’t match the information drops out. here’s a simple example of why this is a problem:

HighWire reports usage statistics for the e-journal titled Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America as “PNAS.” If I try to join my title list and HighWire’s list using the ‘title’ field as the matching field, the statistics for the Proceedings drop out because the two titles are different, i.e. there is no match. the Proceedings happens to be our third highest used e-journal, but if I had used an automated system to match titles the statistics for that journal wouldn’t have been reflected at all.

since titles aren’t a good matching field, i considered e-issn. of course not all e-journals have e-issns, so matching on this field is out. print issns present the same problem, as many e-journals are now only being published online and don’t have a print counterpart. so what field can be matched? there isn’t one at the moment. it makes the most sense to me to standardize the title data.

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