the Undergraduate Science Librarian

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Embedded librarianship

Originally uploaded by Claudio Branch

The SLA session on this topic presented some information by 2007 SLA Research Grant recipients David Shumaker and Mary Talley on what an embedded librarian was, and was constitutes best practices among those who have successfully implemented the idea.

Presentation slides are available on David’s Blog, “The Embedded Librarian“.

I think this is what we are trying to do at my library – right now, we’re working on the “integrated library instruction” part, but I think we end up doing more than just instruction.

After identifying programs that were highly successful and those that weren’t successful, the researchers were able to identify common characteristics of successful programs.

Successful programs promoted themselves – by word of mouth, by print advertising and other methods
Successful programs evaluated themselves – have their numbers (documents delivered, workshop attendance, classes taught) increased? Are they getting a good return on their investment?
Successful programs offer a variety of services including in depth research, co-teaching with faculty, data analysis, ILL document delivery.
And importantly, successful programs have strong management support – librarians have the freedom to set up these special services, user have the support of their management, and everyone has a strong commitment to continuing education

The program at my library has some of these characteristics: co-teaching, assessment, word of mouth advertising, and strong support of management. We need to work on other aspects such as other types of advertising, and brining together multiple services.

It is great to see some real analysis of what practices can make a program successful.

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What a difference a baby makes

On a normal conference morning, my alarm would wake me up, I would shower and get dressed, have a quick breakfast and head to the convention center. Today was not a normal conference morning.

With my baby in tow, I was awakened by her hungry fussing an hour before I would otherwise have awoken. I fed the baby, changed her, used my breast pump, and played for a little while before my mom woke up. After getting about we ate breakfast while trying to get the baby to nap at the same time. Then I left the baby with my mother and headed to the conference.

My presence at this conference is only possible because my mother has graciously agreed to come to DC with me and babysit while I’m at the conference. Hopefully next year, when I’m not nursing, it will be easier for the baby to stay at home with her Dad.

My mother’s presence is necessary because this conference does not provide a child care center. This surprises me, especially since other professional conferences (including those in male dominated fields) often provide on site care (for a fee).

The one thing missing from this conference is those chance conversations at dinners and receptions and other informal gatherings – when I’m not in a session, I am heading back to the hotel to feed my little one and take care of her.

As a result, I get to hear about evening receptions and tours via twitter, instead of attending myself.

I am grateful that my mom is retired and excited to help me out for the week: I wouldn’t be here without her.

I wish this conference (and others) would offer more support for mothers with young children. They are often at a point in their career when they could use all the benefits a national conference has to offer but cannot take advantage due to the challenges of conferencing-with-baby.

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SLA 2009 Biomedical and Life Sciences Division Contributed Papers Breakfast

As this is my first time at the Special Library Association conference, I didn’t really know what to expect. This early morning session set a wonderful tone with some great talks that makes me very excited to be here!

Presentation slides and descriptions can be found on the DBIO website.

The first talk was by librarians from Cornell and the University at Florida about creating an online space to encourage research collaboration by allowing researchers to easily find collaborators. This talk couldn’t have come at a better time. Right now, at my institution, we are looking for ways to encourage collaborative research. In our first meeting about the subject, we discussed the fact that our current website makes it very difficult to find out what anyone else is doing. Could the Cornell model be possible at our institution?

The Cornell system creates researcher profiles, and is searchable. Faculty, alumni, prospective students can easily search or browse the site to see what research is being done at Cornell.

One of the main strengths of the system described, Vivo, is that much of the data is automatically harvested: you don’t need to rely on faculty to edit their own profiles (although that is possible). The system harvests data from HR, publications, grants and other sources to automatically populate researcher profiles. Their software is also open source.

The second talk of the breakfast meeting focused on a survey about the use of ebooks by faculty and graduate students. While graduate students were more likely to use eBooks than faculty, the message was simple: make them easy to use and discoverable (get them into the catalog).

The final talk was all about instruction, and paralleled (in some ways) what I’ve been doing in chemistry and what we are hoping to develop in biology. I got some good ideas for practice assignments and strategies for teaching about the different types of literature.

communication, culture

No more print textbooks

No more print textbooks?

Originally uploaded by Amin Tabrizi

Because Arnold Schwarzenegger says so.

This isn’t exactly a new prediction, but two recent news stories seem to confirm the downfall of the print textbook. First, the NY Times reports on a high school that ditched their algebra textbook in favor of a curriculum designed by the teachers. Then, the big news from California that Gov. Schwarzenegger has declared print textbooks to be old fashioned, and educators should start looking on the web for material to meet their needs. (My favorite headline about Gov. Schwarzenegger’s comments: Arnold Schwarzenegger says hasta la vista to textbooks.)

While California is hoping that the state will save money by not purchasing books for K-12 students, I hope that this trend extends into higher education. Wouldn’t it be great if students didn’t have to shell out $200 for their organic chemistry or introductory biology textbook? Instead, they could rely on free material on the web that their professor picked out?

Update: There is a new article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about one university’s experience with eBook textbooks.

projects, undergraduate

Assessing Information Literacy Skills

Searching

Originally uploaded by mia!

This year, the librarians at my library worked together to assess the library instruction portion of our freshman writing course.

All freshman take this writing and critical thinking class, and faculty are required to bring their students in for one 1-hour session on library skills. Most faculty fulfill this requirement.

Last summer, we spent some time revising the goals and objectives for this one 50 minute session. Based on the ACRL information literacy standards, our goals are rather modest: it is difficult to learn very much in 50 minutes. After revising our goals and objectives, we developed a brief test to assess this objectives.

We were able to test some of our incoming freshman during the first few weeks of their college career. We also have the results of the test from students at the end of their first semester, and for other students at the end of their first year.

The results are in, and I have spent some time analyzing them. After sharing the results with the librarians, we will meet again to decide if we need to revise our original goals and objectives. To me, this is the most important part of the assessment process. Good assessment requires you to go back and look at your original goals. Have you met your goals? If so, do they need to change? If not, what can you do to acheive those goals. Simply collecting data without re-examining the original goals is a waste of everyones time.

So have the students met our goals? Well, mostly.

Most students continue to think that our OPAC contains journal articles
They can’t seem to tell the difference between a book review and an article, but at least the book reviews they find are on-topic, and more students can successfully find something at the end of the year than at the beginning
Students can easily interpret records in our OPAC, but aren’t as good at evaluating a results list, although this improves with time
Worryingly (since I’m the library webmaster), students can’t seem to find our resources by subject lists at the beginning of the year or at the end.

chemistry, communication, culture, vendors, workshop

Chemistry Librarians

chemistry

Originally uploaded by Brian Hathcock

Today I attended a small workshop held at the University of Toronto for chemistry librarians. It is an exciting group to be a member of (or at least a partial member, since I work with all the sciences). There were presentations from fellow librarians, a chemistry faculty member, and several vendors. It was a long day (rush hour traffic in Toronto is crazy!), but well worth it.

The vendor presentations were interesting, but reminded me that vendors really need to learn to edit their presentations. I know that your latest product is the best thing ever, but if you are allotted a half-hour time slot, please make sure that you only take a half-hour!

This was a great learning experience for me. I am not a chemist, and listening to my librarian colleagues discuss resources and the ways they assist faculty and students helps me understand how chemists work. I am slowly catching on, but I have a lot to learn.

As a relatively new librarian, it is vital for me to learn as much as I can about the literature of the disciplines I am responsible for, but it is also important to learn about the culture of those disciplines. This is something that takes time, and I am just at the beginning.

I was able to share with my colleagues some of the work we have been doing in information literacy instruction in chemistry, and get some wonderful feedback from librarians and chemistry faculty regarding the future of our program.

communication, workshop

Scholarly Communication 101

Today I attended one of the ACRL Scholarly Communication 101 workshops, held at the Uniersity at Buffalo. It was an excellent workshop and met my expectations perfectly.

I have presented information about new forms of scholarly communication in the past, including Nature Network and ScienceBlogs.com, but I was missing some basic information, and this workshop filled in the gaps nicely.

Some interesting factoids about scholarly publishing

STM publications make up 84% of the $19.1 billion industry
91% of the dollars spent on journals go to the for-profit publishers
Papers in the for-profit publications only account for 38% of citations

The business model of publishing scientific papers isn’t really working, and right now everyone is trying to figure out what to do about it. Publishers are clinging to traditional business practices (getting content from scholars for free, charging libraries a lot of money for access). Library budgets are shrinking, and we can’t afford to purchase access to everything.

One possible solution: open access models of publication.

I am a big advocate of open access, and this workshop explored some of the advantages of the model.

One example that struck home with me was the story of a faculty member approaching the library and asking that his publications be archived in their institutional repository. The library had to tell him that unfortunately, this wasn’t possible: the faculty member hadn’t retained the right to his publications. Typical author agreements normally assign copyright to the publisher. The publisher occasionally grants certain rights back to the author, but not always.

Open access publication would allow a researcher to do what he or she wants with the results of their research.

The educational mission of universities encourages us to encourage open access publication. Open access allows more readers to learn from the research conducted by scholars.

Libraries and librarians should do everything they can to encourage their faculty to publish in open access journals, or at least retain the copyright to their work. Some libraries are assisting authors in paying author fees in open access publications. Other libraries are publishing open access journals. Some libraries are supporting consortia that encourage open access publication. At the least, librarians can help inform their faculty about opportunities for open access publication, and educate them about the benefits to themselves, their colleagues, and their students.

chemistry, communication

Searching for Spectra

Spectrum

Originally uploaded by MikeParker

A recent conversation with a chemistry faculty member has led me on a search for chemical spectra data resources.

I started with a pretty blank slate. I knew that SciFinder, from Chemical Abstracts services contained a large amount of spectra, but this faculty member was looking for more.

So where do I start? Where does anyone start a search for information? With Google, or course!

A basic search for spectral information revealed the SpecInfo for the Internet database from Wiley. This would meet the needs of my faculty member. Great! The only problem: the pricetag. As a small college, we can’t afford such a specialized database. Back to the drawing board.

Luckily for me, there are a lot of chemistry librarians at large research universities who have collected online subject guides related to spectral data. Two that I found useful are from the University of Texas and George Washington University.

These subject guides point to free resources from NIST, as well as available print resources. Hopefully this will work for the faculty member!

communication, projects

Collection Development for Beginners

That would be me – a collection development beginner.

This year I have taken on some collection development responsibilities in astronomy & physics, biology, chemistry, computer science, geology and math. It’s a little daunting.

As a public undergraduate institution, we can’t buy everything, so it is important to choose wisely.

The prospect of building a good collection in areas I am not familiar with is a little scary. Luckily for me, the faculty make most of the selections at my institution, giving me a bit of flexibility and time to learn.

I am currently developing some strategies to help me with this new responsibility.

I am talking to faculty. What kinds of projects are they asking students to do? What kinds of materials do they find acceptable for assignments? What kind of undergraduate research are they doing?
I am working with our collection development librarian to analyze what we already have in our collection. Apparently, we have about 100 books on FORTRAN, most from the early to mid 1980’s. We only have about 10 on PHP.
I am seeking the advice of experts. I am seeking out book reviews in science and technology journals, and looking for high quality books that meet the needs of our curriculum. This works best when publishers provide an RSS feed of articles that allows me to filter out the book reviews. Using Yahoo! Pipes, I can create a single RSS feed for book reviews from scientific journals. This is very much a work in progress.

I am hopeful that these strategies will allow me to build a collection that will be useful to our students and faculty, with up-to-date authoritative books on subjects our users care about.

We’ll see.

Uncategorized

A time for changes

Each summer my library undergoes a lot of change. In past years we created new classrooms or redesigned old ones. We have added electrical outlets to our main study areas through a variety of creative methods (see photo at left). This summer we are expanding the Cafe, rearranging office space, and rearranging (and weeding) our reference collection.

Electricians are busy running power and data cables to new computer stations, campus telephone technicians are trying to restore phone service to our staff as quickly as possible, and lots of panelling is being taken down and reassembled.

This yearly change is vital to our library. We are never standing still. We are constantly evaluating the needs of our students and trying to accommodate those needs within our 50 year old library building.

Rearranging and weeding the reference collection is one of the librarians biggest tasks. We are opening up our reference area by removing some tall shelving, and we need to pair down the collection. Overall, our print reference collection is getting much less use than it used to, and the students can put this area to better use. Some reference materials are being reshelved in our circulating collection. Other reference materials are being removed from the collection entirely (I’m pretty sure a guide to graduate fellowships from 1988 won’t be very useful to our undergraduates anymore).

The renovated space will be more useful to our students, more aesthetically pleasing, and represents our response to our users needs.