science – Page 2 – the Undergraduate Science Librarian

Things I need to learn

Multidendritic sensory neurons from Flickr user Balapagos — Multidendritic sensory neurons illustrating Green Fluorescent Protein from Flickr user Balapagos

Sometimes I feel as though I need to know about everything. When I teach an information literacy session, I feel ill-prepared if I don’t know about the topic of the class. As a result, I have learned a little bit about a lot of things over the past couple of years:

Green fluorescent protein
Markovnikov reactions
Epigenetics
siRNA and miRNA
North American trees
Synoptic climatology
The evolution of snake fangs
Trematode parasites

The nature of my job requires me to learn a little bit about all of these topics so that I can help students find the relevant literature.

Unfortunately, I’m only human, and I still get lost in many things that are outside of my geology background.

Fortunately, I know enough about the literature and scholarly communication of these subjects to help students with what I need to help them with. I can lead them into the world of scholarly communication in its various forms that they are just discovering. At the same time their professors are leading them into the world of their disciplines.

When the partnership between faculty and librarians works well, it can be incredibly powerful. Students can learn to explore the record of the scientific enterprise while learning enough about the discipline to understand what they find.

undergraduate

Helping undergraduate students understand the context of the research articles they find

Students can almost always find something about their research topic. However, they don’t always understand the nature of what they find in a couple of important ways:

They may not understand the nature of the item they find – website, article, news item, review, conference proceedings, blog post etc.
They aren’t yet knowledgeable enough in their field to understand the context in which a particular item stands.

I try to help students with the first item in a lot of the classes I teach. Prior to any discussion about which databases or citation styles the students will want to use, we go back to the beginning and talk about the difference between various types of articles that they may find:

How to tell apart a review article and a primary research article (it isn’t hard, but many of them have never thought about the difference before)
What a news article looks like and how it can help lead you to peer reviewed articles
How to identify an article abstract when you find it through Google

But up until now, I haven’t spent a lot of time helping students figure out the context of the articles they provide.

Even upper level undergraduates are still novice scientists, and they don’t yet have a sense of what is happening in a particular field. They aren’t yet sure which researchers are the established authorities in the field. Students don’t quite have the background to know how a field has progressed over the last 5 or 10 years.

Helping students understand the context of their research topics is largely the job of the department faculty – teaching them the subject knowledge to understand where things fit.

However, there are tools and tips and tricks that librarians can teach these students to help them understand the context for their subject matter.

First, we can introduce them to appropriate reference materials that may provide some background. Wikipedia isn’t a good source for their research paper, but it may help them understand terms and disciplines they aren’t yet familiar with. Specialty encyclopedias that often get dusty on the shelves can be brought into the classroom to help students understand how their topic fits in with everything else.

Second, we can help them utilize the built in tools in many of our databases to analyze the search results they find, to see when research on their topic was being done, who was doing it, and how well individual articles were received by other scientists. Many databases have tools that allow users to retrieve the keywords used by papers from a particular results set – what are the most common terms that arise? Citation databases like Scopus or Web of Knowledge help students see whether later researchers found a particular paper to be useful. Users can often examine the publication years from their results set – was this a hot topic 10 years ago? Is it popular now?

Teaching students about these resources and advanced analysis features can help them bridge the gap from novice to expert scientist, helping them out until they have the knowledge to say “Didn’t someone publish a study contradicting this idea just a few years ago?”

communication, culture, undergraduate

Are recent developments in scholarly communication relevant to undergraduates?

SCIENCE!
Originally uploaded by
viscousplatypus

On a weekly basis, a new article or editorial comes out discussing the shifting paradigm of how scientists communicate with one another. According to many, the journal article – the mainstay of scientific communication – is about to undergo a major metamorphosis as blogs and new journal concepts affect how science is done. A recent report from the Science Online London 2009 conference exemplifies this.

I am very excited about these changes, and I spend some of my time checking out real-time science blogs like Useful Chemistry, participating on online science networks like Nature Network, and exploring what PLOS ONE has to offer.

But how relevant are all of these new changes to the average undergraduate? Do they need to know about them? If they don’t need to know now, will they in the near future?

Most of the writing assignments I’m seeing are still asking students to find traditional scholarly articles as the only sources for their papers. Most of the faculty at my small undergraduate institution are still very traditional with regard to scholarly communication. A (very) few faculty still have to be convinced that an online journal is acceptable, and I wrote an email a few months ago explaining that PLOS Medicine is a highly regarded journal.

Until a consensus develops around what is scholarly and what isn’t in the online world, how are undergraduate students (who still need help telling apart a review article and a piece of original research) supposed to navigate these on-going changes?

In the short term, I don’t think that undergraduates need to know a lot about these developments, beyond their own personal interest in science blogs or online science news. For the time being, a science student can successfully navigate his or her undergraduate education without an awareness of the scientific blogosphere or the concept of open science.

As much as I would love to share my excitement of all of these fascinating changes, I don’t think students need to know about them. At the moment, I teach students about the basic differences between review articles, primary research articles and news articles.

In the future I will probably talk about blogs and social networks and how to access primary data sets – I’m looking forward to it.

Uncategorized

Finding Geologic Maps Online

New (or New to Me) from the USGS

Try finding a geologic map of a specific location, and you may run into some trouble. Not because these maps don’t exist, or because they aren’t online (many of them are), they are just very tricky to find.

The recently updated Geologic Map of North America (2005)

Traditionally, users needed to be able to search for a term that describes the geographical area covered. Sometimes this is straightforward: “New York State” or “North America”. But sometimes it can get confusing: if you would like geologic information about Chautauqua County in New York State, would the New Your State map give you enough detail? What about a geologic map of Western New York, or the Appalachian low-lands, or the Lake Erie Plain? There are many, many ways to describe a geographical area in words, often making it difficult to find what you want.

The National Geologic Map Database Data Portal from the USGS attempts to take the guesswork out of this, by allowing users to use a map of the United States to identify the area they need information on, and connect them to a relevant geologic map (either online or in print).

It is still a bit quirky (it is still labeled a prototype) but it is a huge step in the right direction for ease of use.

The National Geologic Map Database Catalog can also be searched in a more traditional manner, allowing users to locate print and online maps.

Additional resources for geologic maps.

About.com has a fairly good page linking to images of state geologic maps. Some of the links don’t work anymore, but those that do images could give users a good overview of state geology.
Texas A&M University Library has digitized the Geologic Atlas of the United States, a series of maps and information published by the USGS between 1894 and 1945. These maps sets offer great detail, in an easy to use online interface, although they are older.
The OneGeology Portal is a world-wide project hoping to provide easy online access to geologic map information from around the globe. It is a partnership of national geologic surveys. Additional information about the project can be found here.

Of course, all of this assumes that you are simply looking for an image of a map. If you are looking for GIS geologic data, that is a whole different story!

chemistry, projects

Why we need to ‘deselect’ items from our collections

Weeding a library collection is never a popular topic on college campuses. Libraries are sometimes quite open about their weeding policies, and sometimes they just hope no one notices.

Faculty sometimes protest and libraries sometimes have to defend their decisions.

Just the other day, I came across a perfect example of why we need to weed our collections: In the reference collection our library had a copy of a spiral bound users guide to Beilstein, the source of a wide variety of organic chemistry information. From 1966.

First, the guide is to the print version of Beilstein, which doesn’t exist anymore (as far as I can tell). Second, we don’t have access to the electronic version of Beilstein.

While this guide might be useful to historians of chemical information services one day, as an undergraduate institution with a constant need for more space in the library, we simply cannot justify hanging onto it.

Uncategorized

SLA All Sciences Poster Session

The All-Sciences Poster Session at the SLA 2009 conference was amazing. Although not all of the posters represented cutting edge work, I came away with several ideas to improve instruction, assessment and research collaboration at my institution.

Titles, authors and some abstracts for the session can be found here and here.

The first poster to get me thinking was from Brian Winterman and Jacquelyn Petzold at Indiana University, “Desperately Seeking Science: Guiding Lower-Level Biology Undergraduates from the Textbook to the Bench through Focused Information Literacy Education.” They described a library instruction program for freshman biology students that had them looking at information resources starting with their textbooks, moving through online resources, encyclopedias, and and ending up at the peer reviewed literature. This was done over the course of the semester and was deeply enmeshed in the course content. Since one of my summer projects involves developing some instruction content for freshman biology, this was great timing.

Another useful poster discussed the results of a faculty survey trying to discover what collaboration tools researchers were using. (“Optimizing Intellectual Workflow: Which Collaborative Platform Works for You?” By Jay Bhatt, Dana Denick, Peggy Dominy, and Tim Siftar; Drexel University Libraries). To summarize: they aren’t using any. I can’t recall all the details, but most survey respondants weren’t using any of the new collaboration tools (2collab, Connotea, even Google Docs). Many respondants indicated that they were still emailing documents as their only form of version control. Since we are looking at ways to encourage collaborative research, I wondered if perhaps the library might be able to support faculty collaboration by introducing them to some of these tools. In order for these tools to work, they need to fit in with the normal workflow of researchers. A workshop might be able to introduce faculty to some of these tools, in order to see if any would work for them.

One of the wonderful things about poster sessions is the ability to really talk with the authors and ask detailed questions in an informal setting. One of the bad things about poster sessions is when 12 other people want to talk with the same author you do.

Uncategorized

Embedded librarianship

“The garden of knowledge”

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.

Uncategorized

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.

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.