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Advice request: What is the best approach to exposing a publications list online. Any good tools for generating html/xml/rdfa?

December 31 - Comment - Like - Share

Kevin S. Clarke, Mr. Gunn, Duncan Hull and 14 other people liked this

Bibsonomy has a good mechanism if you have your pubs in its database (it can import bibtex and other things) and tag them appropriately. E.g. http://www.bibsonomy.org/publ... or http://www.bibsonomy.org/export... - Alec

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Incidentally this will be in the context of a wordpress install: http://cameronneylon.net/publica... in its current form will severely damage any semantic web cred I have :-) - Cameron Neylon

Bibsonomy also has an API and wordpress plugins. I think Mendeley has 'badges' as well, but I haven't used them. - Alec

Mendeley doesn't really deliver what I want at the moment but I'll check out the bibsonomy plugin What I'm really after is exposing some nice dublin core or CoINS records, or even better having something that will take something along the lines of [doi="******"] and format the lot for me. - Cameron Neylon

There is also bib2html which is close to what I want but just formats the citation http://wordpress.org/extend... - Cameron Neylon

....mmm but doesn't seem to work for some reason.... - Cameron Neylon

I have used bib2html on my site and it works fine (see http://mattleifer.info/researc...). What exactly is the problem you are having? - Matt Leifer

I agree that it would be nice to have more than just reference formatting in wordpress, e.g. ability to export in a variety of formats, but I was never able to find a plugin that does that. Drupal has an excellent bibliography module (http://drupal.org/project...) and there is also a module for exposing the data using OAI-PMH. I don't think it is worth the pain of converting a site... more... - Matt Leifer

It is also worth noting http://publicationslist.org in this context, since they do a pretty good job of exposing the individual records in a variety of formats. However, as far as I am aware they have no API for harvesting the metadata. Also, it seemed to be heavily reliant on pubmed when I tried it, which is pretty useless for a physicist and I didn't feel like entering all the metadata by hand. - Matt Leifer

Cameron, this seems like a simple thing for Mendeley to do. I know they're working on proper markup for embeddable collections. - Mr. Gunn

Matt: I'm running Wordpress 2.9 and when I run bib2html I get an error saying "function.usort requires an array" or something similar. I'm presuming that what is happening is that at line 73 in bib2html.php something is going wrong with list($preamble, $strings, $entries) = $parse->returnArrays(); then a few lines further down $entries doesn't exist when requried. I've tried a bunch of... more... - Cameron Neylon

Mr Gunn: I imagine Mendeley could. It's not a trivial problem though as you're mixing semantic information with formatting information where the user will probably want control over the latter. This is actually a really fundamental underlying problem with the semantic web - there are very few tools that make it easy for the average user to put thi structure in and then have some widget... more... - Cameron Neylon

wrt taking an identifier, running it against a service, and getting formatted stuff back... I'm wondering if your institution has an SFX server (or equivalent?) - you could then see if there's a batch mode... ugly, but it would be like doi > sfx > openurl > COINS generator .... - Christina Pikas

Well thus far I've managed to handcraft some functional rdfa for one entry (top entry at http://cameronneylon.net/publica...) - except for the minor point that it doesn't validate, I think just because my DOCTYPE headers are wrong. I'm tempted to write a crude bibtex to rdfa converter for publication lists. There are some reasonable bibtex libraries out there, but as far as I can tell... more... - Cameron Neylon

I played around with citeline some time back. Have you seen it? http://citeline.mit.edu/ - Mr. Gunn

I was looking at Exhibit which is kind of cool but I'd really like to have semantic markup if I can. - Cameron Neylon

@Cameron: there does not seem to be a solution yet; see also http://www.semanticoverflow.com/questio... - Egon Willighagen

Ah cheers - I didn't find that while searching which kind of emphasises some point or other :-) I'm thinking I might try and hack together some python to do something rough and ready that would spit out html and rdfa. There is good bibtex support for python and the rest is just generating text strings. - Cameron Neylon

Indeed... My go would be at a JabRef plugin, but I don't have time for that right now... But, I'd love to stress test your python script... If you put it in GitHub (or sorts), I might even send some patches to tune things to my needs for http://egonw.github.com - Egon Willighagen

I'll see what I can do. Top current priority is preparing for Wave demo at SciOnline'10 though - Cameron Neylon from twhirl

I use a google spreadsheet solution combined with javascript...see http://baoilleach.blogspot.com/2009.... CrossRef metadata sucks, I'm afraid, so direct conversion of DOI to HTML can't work . For some journals, only the first author is provided (by the publisher), for example. - Noel O'Boyle

Hah, neat. You could also pull bibtex from e.g. citeulike through the Simile Babel service to generate the JSON. Shame citeulike doesn't output directly in JSON actually. Presumably wouldn't be too hard to do and would save you filling out the spreadsheet...might be worth putting in a request, they have a reputation for being very responsive. - Cameron Neylon

Was going to mention CiteULike, but I was a bit unclear on what you're trying to do. Their "RSS" is actually RDF + prism + dc. Any page of CiteULike refs also uses COinS (install Zotero, click icon in URL bar to see that in action). And they do, apparently, have a JSON API call, but you need special permissions to use it for some reason - http://wiki.citeulike.org/index.... - Neil Saunders

RDFa is something you embed in (X)HTML ... so, the output is HTML ... @Cameron, did I understand your goal correctly? - Egon Willighagen

My ultimate aim is to have something that (semi-)automatically takes my list of pubs (from a service that I can update via bookmarklet), and generates html with rdfa that I can either paste directly into http://cameronneylon.net/publica... or even better updates it automatically from time to time. Current best options are: a) generate rdf via zotero and paste into an html comment (but... more... - Cameron Neylon

If you look at the separate item at the top of the pubs list you can see what I am trying to do roughly - you'll need to look at the source of course - which looks like: <div xmlns:bib="http://purl.org/net/biblio#" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc..." xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"... more... - Cameron Neylon

Can't resist ... http://friendfeed.com/egonw... - Egon Willighagen

aaargghh! What have I done?!?! ;-) - Cameron Neylon

Hubmed might also be useful, but solely focused on Pubmed, see e.g. http://www.hubmed.org/search... - Josef Scheiber

Yeh, unfortunately a good proportion of my papers aren't in PubMed. Price of being interdisciplinary really - Cameron Neylon

I linked to this discussion from the #scio10 Online Reference Managers page - maybe if there's participant interest, we can discuss this, too. - Christina Pikas

Cameron. I'm clearly missing something here although I admit, I've not not had the time to read this thread in detail. One has always assumed that after publication in a PR Journal, the end result was indexed in PubMed. <scratches head> - Graham Steel

Graham, PubMed only covers the biomedical sciences. As I understand it a journal has to have some number of NIH funded researchers on its editorial board to get into PubMed and that limits the field somewhat. Bunch of journals I publish in aren't there. Nature Physics probably being the most prominent... - Cameron Neylon

Cameron, may I recommend ResearcherID: http://www.researcherid.com/rid... - Martin Fenner

Christina, that's great..... - Graham Steel

Martin, you could...but they don't seem to want to let me in...have they added semantic markup that you can take elsewhere? - Cameron Neylon

Update: bib2html has suddenly started working...so will see if I can get that path to work properly... - Cameron Neylon

I got reply, but a XHTML+RDFa plugin for JabRef will not be ready this week... - Egon Willighagen

@Cameron so, very much looking forward to what you can come up with... - Egon Willighagen

See what I can do but also unlikely to be this week :-) - Cameron Neylon

There is also MyNCBI and NCBI collections , you can add your papers which are on PUBMED to the My Bibliography section and then export xml , rss etc - Hari

FYI: I just wrote the stylesheet transforming a pubmed/xml to an Simile/Exhibit file. See my latest post: http://plindenbaum.blogspot.com/2010... - Pierre Lindenbaum

Pierre, please tell me that there are actually forty of you chained to terminals knocking out the code at the rate you do... :-) - Cameron Neylon

@Cameron, they asked me to reply "no". - Pierre Lindenbaum

I've also come against some issues with the bib2html wordpress extension. It uses what appears to be a moribund but open php library called OSBIB. This has a quite powerful but not very human readable xml citation format which I think I will struggle to let me do what I want. It does however provide some sort of array which the top level of the wordpress plugin gets to play with and add to the citation. If I can figure out the documentation on that I think I can make it do what I want. - Cameron Neylon

not rocket science: It was just a matter of refactoring an old stylesheet for pubmed ... - Pierre Lindenbaum

@Pierre, all of them or just the ones on coffee break? - Cameron Neylon

Fred

RT @mathowie: Our fake xmas tree is so convincing some boy scouts stopped by to ask if they could mulch it.

January 1 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

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Andrew Lang

I'm so glad we didn't have to do wood cuts. http://usefulchem.blogspot.com/2009...

December 30 - Comment - Like - Share

Christina Pikas, Dan Hagon, carolh and 5 other people liked this

the next generation will note that they are glad they don't have to extract knowledge from human-only readable documents - Jean-Claude Bradley

+1 Jean-Claude. A few more "information generations" and working scientists will consider our current methods functionally equivalent to woodcuts. I hope. - Bill Hooker

Strictly speaking woodcuts were an extravagance in Newton's time since it was only used for inline figures within the text (itself composed of metal type) so each figure had to be individually, skillfully and laboriously hand-crafted. Also since it was wooden it had an extremely short lifespan compared to the rest of the text block which meant that only short print runs were possible... more... - Dan Hagon

Richard Akerman

they really should have called it "global climate chaos" or "global climate disruption". scientists can be terrible at branding.

December 16 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

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Neil Saunders

December 16 from Flickr - Comment - Like - Share

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Sir Shuping

i hate, hate, searching lexis nexis for a particular item. it's interface completely sucks

December 1 - Comment - Like - Share

Stephanie_Happy2010!, carolh, John Dupuis and 2 other people liked this

lexis user interface was created by the devil. - Marie has inbox zero!

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totally - marthalib

Actually, it was founded by a consortium of lawyers...oh, never mind. - Sarah G.

Real LexisNexis, or the Academic Universe product? - Peter Murray

lexis' interface was bass-ackwards prior to Y2K. I suspect it hasn't changed much, if at all? - mjc

whatever version it is that we have peter :) probably the academic version...is the real version any better? - Sir Shuping

I find the real version (sold to lawyers) was pretty good. (It's been six years or so since I've had access to it.) I don't like the academic version either. - Peter Murray

maybe i should check into the real version. on the academic one they "upgraded" the interface about a year ago...in reality they made it a lot worse. it reminds me of stuff from dialog...only worse. - Sir Shuping

I don't know if it will help, but I just posted two screen shots on my feed http://ff.im/cihP9 - Sarah G.

My students tend to prefer Westlaw to LexisLibrary (our academic product) - Pete

Richard Akerman

IanMulvany: google gives us our known unknowns, twitter the unknown unknowns - http://twitter.com/IanMulv...

November 30 from Twitter / Favorites from... - Comment - Like - Share

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IanMulvany: google gives us our known unknowns, twitter the unknown unknowns - Richard Akerman

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I would "like" that, but damned if I even understand it. But then, I don't currently twitter, either... - Walt Crawford

I think it translates to "your social network finds things of interest to you that you wouldn't otherwise have known about." Certainly true for me. - D0r0th34

Ah. Thanks. OK. In which case, FriendFeed certainly does that for me...as does Bloglines. - Walt Crawford

Richard Akerman

changes in the library environment via @research_inform: http://hangingtogether.org/...

November 30 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

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Nick Hamblet

The Enjoyment of Mathematics: Selections from Mathematics for the Amateur (Dover Books on Mathematical and Word Recreations) - http://www.goodreads.com/review...

November 28 from Goodreads - Comment - Like - Share

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Hilary to Hilary's feed, The Life Scientists, Science 2.0

Communicating Chemistry: http://www.nature.com/nchem... Nature Chemistry 1, 673 - 678 (2009)

November 23 - Comment - Like - Share

Jamie McQuay, Joe, Oliver Schuster and 11 other people liked this

By Theresa Velden and Carl Lagoze: "New web-based models of scholarly communication have made a significant impact in some scientific disciplines, but chemistry is not one of them. What has prevented the widespread adoption of these developments by chemists — and what are the prospects for adoption over time?" - Hilary

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With a discussion of the role of open access, data sharing, electronic lab notebooks, preprint servers, and blogs in chemistry communication. - Hilary

I think the latter part of the article by Velden and Lagoze hit the nail on the head albeit sideways. There is a lot of chemistry disciplines and the pharmaceutical and beauty industry would be especially open to espionage. There is also the issues of security with the organic chemistry field as research from that branch could be turned into catastrophic weapons of mass destruction. The... more... - Aaron Kendrick

so given that those fields are only small parts of a decentralized whole, why should they hold the rest of the discipline hostage? - D0r0th34

Aaron: is that scenario realistic? the knowledge and facilities required to make nuclear or biological weapons are considerable. simpler methods such as guns or explosives may still be a more effective and reliable means for violence - Mike Chelen

it is confusing that this article states "Hardly any established scientists maintain a blog" then cites an article http://dx.doi.org/10... which says "they contribute to the current practice and reputation of science as much as, if not more than, any popular scientific work or visual presentation" - how could blogs be so influential with supposedly no participation from established scientists? - Mike Chelen

Full whitepaper here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813... (I would have liked to see this linked to in the article). Also http://ff.im/bU7ae - Hilary

Security of biological weapons is a much more serious issue than for chemicals. Mustard gas is nasty but limited in spread, and most seriously nasty chemicals are natural in origin anyway. On top of that I think its been reasonably well established that security in e.g. cryptography is best served by an open approach. Espionage similarly is a separate issue. What we have at the moment... more... - Cameron Neylon

i definitely don't think the issue is about weapons/weaponization, an undergrad in chemistry (or a high school kid who can read on the internet) should know enough to make some serious bombs. Velden talked about her dissertation research at 4S. It was interesting how the members and PIs of the labs carefully do not reveal details of their work. They've had things scooped by other labs with more money/people so they don't talk about the details at conferences. - Christina Pikas

This talk of "dangerous science" is a red herring for a discussion on Open Science. It could leave one not familiar with the chemistry publication process with a very false impression. With very rare exceptions, all the information required to synthesize explosives and other dangerous compounds is already contained in regular research papers. If anything Open Science could make science... more... - Jean-Claude Bradley

Finally got round to reading the Nat Chem article. Can we stop talking about weapons in this thread - totally irrelevant. The article makes some excellent points, particularly in the section "Chemistry distinguished". The "focus on creation" paragraph will irritate many, but there is an element of truth there, as anyone will acknowledge who spends much time reading organic synthesis or catalysis papers. When/where is the second workshop? - Matthew Todd

Mat - if there is any follow-up meeting it will be discussed in the Google group http://groups.google.com/group... - Jean-Claude Bradley

Richard Akerman

re-reading The Sling and the Stone http://www.librarything.com/work... to see if 4th generation warfare theories hold any insights for culture change.

November 23 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Pete, AJCann, Mickey Schafer and 2 other people liked this

IT/web people = (reluctant) invaders who showed up on the shores of LibraryLand about a decade ago, speaking a different language. Citizens of LibraryLand justifiably proud of their native culture and with an almost unlimited capacity to resist the change the invaders bring. Both sides have valid concerns. You can also replace LibraryLand with GovernmentLand or AcademiaLand. (Please note: this is just a gedankenexperiment, it struck me as I was thinking about resistance to culture change.) Discuss. - Richard Akerman

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it sounds about right to me, honestly - D0r0th34

I think there's some asymmetry in the "valid concerns." My concerns, as an outsider and young turk, are very different from the concerns of (e.g.) the guy running MPOW's technical-services empire, who's been here for thirty years. There's also a difference in mindset: I'm used to being uncertain, misunderstood, starved of resources. (Not to say it's *fun*, but I'm used to it and... more... - D0r0th34

It has always struck me that many in the IT migration failed to recognise the value of *anything* in library work, or that much of what they did built on that work. - Pete

... and vice versa, believe me. ;) - D0r0th34

Oh I believe that! But I only speak IT as a... fourth language ;) After Social Science, Religious Studies and Librarianship. I should really work on it. - Pete

Except for that "/web" qualifier, I wonder about the "about a decade ago," since I've been involved in IT work in libraries since the late 1960s--and there have been similar misunderstandings all along the way. Particularly, frankly, the tendency to think --sans information--that library applications were just vanilla business applications and that librarians had nothing to offer. - Walt Crawford

You have two groups from different cultures that speak different "languages", and each has expertise and confidence in their separate domains. Where we're having trouble is our domains now overlap. This is a recipe for conflict. And like Dorothea said, it's more complicated than that because it's actually entrenched IT plus entrenched librarianship vs. new information workers. Would it help if we web visitors said "we are of peace"? :) - Richard Akerman

It'd probably help if you didn' think of yourselves as so very ontologically different ;) - Pete

I find that librarians tend to be somewhat early adopters, at least the young turks, anyways, so I think you're closer than you think. It's a sign of nascent compatibility that you're starting to talk about these things, instead of them not even being concepts. - Mr. Gunn

Greg Wilson

Special Issue of Computing in Science & Engineering - http://softwarecarpentry.wordpress.com/2009...

November 18 from Software Carpentry - Comment - Like - Share

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Jay Bhatt

Architectural overreaching - http://library.duke.edu/blogs...

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Python in Science - http://softwarecarpentry.wordpress.com/2009...

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Jill Hurst-Wahl

Allow me to join those whose heads are spinning over the SLA name change. I am not totally against a name change, but am not pleased how we've run head-long into this one. It would have been nice of the membership has concluded that a name change was needed, rather than the board and consultants doing it.

October 20 - Comment - Like - Share

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Getting the bottom of the pyramid involved is essential. This has been too top down. Will there be an option to abstain in the vote? - Jill Hurst-Wahl

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BTW I am one who agrees that saying you have an MLS isn't always needed. In fact, in my corporate life, my MLS was less important than my ability to do my job. But I don't totally shy away from the L-word. - Jill Hurst-Wahl

For those who believe in special libraries (libraries focused on special topics and services), will they spin off into another association? Will the Veranda Conference of 1909 be repeated in 2010 on a virtual veranda? - Jill Hurst-Wahl

I hope they don't spin off. I always thought that SLA's strength and what made it different is its diversity. How did this ever turn into a "we versus them" discussion? - yankeeincanada

Daniel, I don't think the Association healed after the name change vote in 2003. - Jill Hurst-Wahl

I think the "we versus them" has come from members feeling left out, as Jill noted, and confusion over the place of many members under this new model. I still worry if it's just me, but then several other academic and government librarians have expressed similar confusion, it makes me think perhaps either the research excluded/ignored that sector, or that extra care needs to be made to make them feel part of this new direction. - Kendra <3 Three Lions

Some of the split comes from the assumption that almost all members work in corporate / business based libraries. The SLAers I hang with are academics, govs and non profits for the most part. - Joe from iPod

The survey text given to the 226 people (concerning the 3 choices) was quite telling. - Joe from iPod

Yeah, that description blew my mind. - Meg v. Meg v. 1.0.0.1

You're right Jill - about a certain segment of the association. From many of the comments made over the last week, I'm left with the impression that most members now don't realize that a) there was a vote in 2003 and b) that the decision by the membership was to change the name. My point being that the board and consultants didn't decide - the members did - and it has taken this long to... more... - yankeeincanada

Oh sure, the question is whether *my* association will still exist. I am fine with a name change? Language has changed, and I am cool with that. This name (and process) is skewed against a good chunk of us, though. It's odd. If ultimately there is more dividing us than keeping us together, I have to honor that. It's just a bummer to feel so unwanted by an organization that I was actually excited about. - Meg v. Meg v. 1.0.0.1

Ok. What's going to be different? Who will be the face of SLA in five years if this passes? From what I'm reading you don't feel you will be. So, can I ask you to paint me the picture? - yankeeincanada

I would say that in 5 years, there will be fewer academic people and more corporate. It's not a house of horrors or anything. It's just disappointing to me, personally. - Meg v. Meg v. 1.0.0.1

I should maybe add that I'm in the SLA Academic/Chem/PAM divisions, and I've already ditched ALA for the most part because it's too big, broad and too public library oriented. And that I'm a (fairly) energetic new librarian who joined SLA because it seemed like there were similarly minded folks, and that it was a place where I could contribute to the profession. - Meg v. Meg v. 1.0.0.1

I'd be very happy ditching the SLA name. The "special libraries" moniker has been an albatross. I'm not sure I understand why some feel they won't be included with the proposed name? It's meant to be more inclusive rather than exclusive. I can still call myself a special librarian (although always hated that designation, to be honest). - Connie Crosby

Thanks for sharing Meg. If things continue as they are, the corporate sector is going to shrink - not grow. Corporate libraries are closing at an alarming rate - and what's worse - we don't often hear about them. Here in Toronto we've had two major research centers/corp libraries close this year - one in a bank and one in a consulting firm. And just like everyone else in SLA, they too... more... - yankeeincanada

Connie: it's not that "special librarian" suits me, and I'm fine with changing the name. It's that "strategic knowledge professional" suits me even less. Without getting into interpretations/semantics, at the very least it needs to be evident to my employer (and I'm tenure-track so this is potentially My Employer) that my professional development activities are relevant *to libraries*, especially as our travel money becomes more and more restricted. yankeeincanada: yep, totally. - Meg v. Meg v. 1.0.0.1

Thank you for clarifying, Meg. I guess it will take a bit of work at first (probably for many of us) to convey to our employers what this group is/does. You would still be able to point to the division names (which aren't changing I think) to show how they are aligned with what you are doing. Some of my past employers have also wanted to see descriptions of sessions that I would... more... - Connie Crosby

Meg, like ALA, could our division membership be the thing we mention? Like being a part of PLA (which is part of ALA), we could say that we're members in specific divisions which are part of this larger organization. Would that work? - Jill Hurst-Wahl

Daniel, like 2003, this may be that we - in general - agree that there should be a name change, and similar to 2003 can't agree on a name. (Yes, one of the names technically won, but there weren't enough people present for the vote to count.) In the vote, will there be a way for people to abstain or to say that they don't want a name change at all? (Or that they do want a name change, but not this one?) - Jill Hurst-Wahl

My impression is that even as heterogeneous as membership is, they could converge on a new name; if a less top down process were put in place. - carolh

Carol, how would a less top down process take place? I know I was part of a focus group of librarians and executives who worked on the alignment issues including the name, as were many in the association. I'm wondering what could have been done differently. - Connie Crosby

Connie, how many people from SLA were involved in the focus groups? You're the first person I've heard mention being involved in one. - Jill Hurst-Wahl

Jill, agreed. There's agreement to change the name, I believe, but no agreement on what the name should be. And that debate has raged since 1909. Voting no would equal a vote to keep the same name. Abstain by not voting. There will be no option to say you want to change the name but don't like the current proposal. - yankeeincanada

Jill, I'm not sure--it is probably on the Alignment Project wiki. Fleishman-Hillard did extensive focus groups across the U.S. and Canada. There were about 40 of us in the room, half SLA members and half executives. We did things like press indicators to show our feelings while watching people on the screen, discuss the various words used to describe librarians, discuss the role of... more... - Connie Crosby

Jill - round tables and interviews with SLA members took place in: Denver, Louisville, Seattle, Savannah, and Washington. Fleishman-Hillard has been at every SLA conference and leadership summit since 2007 talking to members (and non-members, partners, and vendors). Focus groups took place in Washington, Vancouver, Seattle, Toronto, and Los Angeles. The timeline on the SLA site, if you... more... - yankeeincanada

Thanks for the link, Daniel/yankee! - Connie Crosby

@ConnieCrosby Do not have a perfect path at my fingertips. All I know is that the huge number of email reactions on both sci-tech div and pam div lists yielded several suggestions. At least one or two had a number of folks saying "yes, to that one". It is hard work to do this. But think it could pan out. - carolh

I've seen similar discussions elsewhere. Unfortunately completely different suggestions come up. We are not going to have all of us love the name we come up with, we just need a good number of us to find it acceptable. I guarantee whatever other name people in one group come up with, other groups will object to it. I must say, I do find the number and intensity of conversations this has generated to be impressive. I've never seen librarians talk so much to one another online in my life! - Connie Crosby

Saw a tweet from Yankee (http://twitter.com/yankeei...) that he is trying to figure out the alienation amongst the academic crowd. For example, the questions given to the 226 people in the naming survey said -- "In today's global economy, success depends on having access to the right information for the best business decisions.... They are uniquely qualified to... more... - Joe

Joe: The name proposed is too corporate and there's a segment of academic librarians who feel they weren't represented in the research. That I understand - fully. I don't have an answer (yet) as to how that feeling of alienation can be changed - and that's part of what I am after. Is starting the research again an option? Yes. Feasible? Doubtful. More to the point - what I don't... more... - yankeeincanada

The value I and my employers get from an organization greatly depends on whether there are other people in it who are at least kinda like me (generally speaking, librarians). If an organization is not interested in keeping/attracting librarians (as evidenced by a name and a naming process that seem to exclude librarians, and also that this name has been promoted as being fundamental to,... more... - Meg v. Meg v. 1.0.0.1

Meg, you bring up a good point. SLA has been trying to recruit more non-librarians. While this can be very beneficial, there are some who will be looking for a more pure "library" association. I also wonder what the conferences will be like with a broader mix of people. At first, we'll have non-librarians attending something that really is a library conference. Over time, will it be more of an info industry conference? - Jill Hurst-Wahl

Thanks yankeeincanada. What I get most out of SLA are the people in PAM, Sci-Tech, Eng Div, and the other sciency groups. Those tend to be academic centric, but it is great to hang with people who work for NASA, IBM watson research center, engineering/research firms, etc. for their varied experience and perspectives. What I was trying to say is that the text of the ppt... more... - Joe

If SLA changes the name, will I drop my membership? Not right now. I've got too much invested. Long story. - Joe

How can that alienation be changed? The word librarian needs to be used as much as the phrase "information professional". I can't remember the last time I heard Janice Lachance say the "L" word to the membership. - Joe

I teach continuing ed courses, and have to take care not to say "librarian" because there are also library technicians, archivists, records managers, researchers, information managers, knowledge managers and information consultants who also take my classes. I say "information professionals" instead, to talk about us generally. I am trying to understand the need to be so exclusionary. - Connie Crosby

It seems that people are framing it either or. Joe made the point that "librarian" and "information professional" can peacefully co-exist, but they're not giving membership either option. SLA Headquarters is cutting the L out with "research". Fine. I'm OK with that. Giving us a jargon name that is even more obscure than SLA? I'm sorry, I can't get behind that. - Kendra <3 Three Lions

Garret McMahon

YouTube - The Crime of the (20th) Century by James Boyle - http://www.youtube.com/watch...

October 27 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

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Love the shout-outs to librarians. - D0r0th34

Yeah! I was considerably cheered by that. - Garret McMahon

Richard Akerman

RT @mza: Mozilla Raindrop looks pretty cool: A better Wave? http://labs.mozilla.com/raindro...

October 23 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

carolh liked this

Agree. This could be (to me at least) more useful than Wave. - carolh

John Dupuis

The Man Who Saved Geometry -- TVO.ORG | Video | Documentaries - - http://www.tvo.org/TVO...

October 22 from delicious - Comment - Like - Share

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"By the middle of the 20th century, Geometry looked dead. The excitement in math had moved to computers and chaos theory. But one man - Donald Coxeter - kept the torch burning. Inspired by Siobhan Roberts book, King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry." - John Dupuis

Stephen Francoeur

Dealing with the Pusher Man - http://blogs.princeton.edu/librari...

October 16 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Bill Hooker, carolh, Elaine Nelson and D0r0th34 liked this

Christina Pikas

hi. my name is christina and i can't figure out how to search google wave and actually find anything :(

October 12 - Comment - Like - Share

Stephanie_Happy2010!, Yann Abraham, Björn Brembs and 8 other people liked this

with:public - Richard Akerman

18 more comments

I'd help you but I graciously got an invite for my girlfriend; not for myself. Don't think she's done much with it yet either, though. She got her's a couple days ago thanks to generosity of @ksclarke - Mar₭ Liŋdŋer

http://easiertounderstandthanwave.com/ :-) - Pierre Lindenbaum

@Pierre Hilarious! - Chris Lasher

Just added you to a few waves - Cameron Neylon

thanks! - Christina Pikas

May be of use: http://friendfeed.com/the-lif... - Bill Hooker

Same as what Richard said. - carolh

tried the same search again and got a lot. not sure why it didn't work earlier. - Christina Pikas

I just got my account - please add me Cameron.to a few waves Is there any way I can get accounts for my students? I can see it would be interesting to have my cheminfo retrieval class students play around with the system - Jean-Claude Bradley

How does one find waves to add or to be added to? For example, is there a list of waves that people in this group have developed? - Rajarshi Guha

@Rajarshi and @Jean-Claude: what happens when you click here: https://wave.google.com/wave... This is the 'Research Collaborations in Wave' wave. New to this myself, so not sure how to add you directly within google wave. - Allyson Lister

it says you are not a participant in this wave - Jean-Claude Bradley

@allyson - it says that I don't have an account. But I hav a dev sandbox account. If I search for this wave in their I don't get any hits - Rajarshi Guha

Rajarshi - I have had this problem trying to find Andy with my new account - is it possible that the sandbox accounts are not included in this preview version of Wave? - Jean-Claude Bradley

Not sure - I can search for various waves and have found one on research collaborations, but not the one mentioned by Allyson. So I can use my sandbox a/c to join waves and do all the other stuff. I also did find chemspider etc but none of it seems to work for me. Right now, it looks like glorified IM to me, but maybe I just haven't gotten the hang yet - Rajarshi Guha

@JC. AFAIK, the sandbox accounts are different from those on wave.google.com... 'we' had to wait for new accounts around the 30th Sept too... - Egon Willighagen

@Rajarshi... yes, the final applications still need to take shape... the current state is in between IM and GDocs... I see that a lot of people are afraid to edit messages from others, giving the IM feeling... - Egon Willighagen

Does any one have a request left for Andrew Lang? - Jean-Claude Bradley

hi. my name is monica and I would love to receive an invitation... and promise to find out an answer for your question ;-) - Nic

Jill O'Neill

Alerting folks to the new look of the NFAIS web site (http://www.nfais.org); National Federation for Advanced Information Services. FWIW, I'm blogging under the "News" section of the site.

October 12 - Comment - Like - Share

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Andrew Perry to The Life Scientists, Science 2.0

Here's a certificate of entitlement that you can print yourself, taken from Lawrence Lessigs recent talk on the effect of copyright law on how we do science http://www.youtube.com/watch...

October 9 - Comment - Like - Share

Tom, carolh, Daniel Mietchen and 8 other people liked this

slashdot

Professor Wins $240K In Fair Use Dispute - http://yro.slashdot.org/story...

September 29 from Slashdot - Comment - Like - Share

carolh and Joe liked this

Nick Hamblet

wondering if i'll be one of the lucky 100000ish tomorrow. come on wave, come on wave...

September 29 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

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Neil Saunders

Revolutions: How to use a Google Spreadsheet as data in R - http://blog.revolution-computing.com/2009...

September 28 from delicious - Comment - Like - Share

Mr. Gunn, James Ward, Peter Miller and 11 other people liked this

Google Docs offers a solution. As long as you have a Google account, you can store your data as a Google Spreadsheet, and then create a special URL for that spreadsheet that can be used as a CSV file source by R. The process is a bit complex, but it only needs to be done once, and then your data are freely available to anyone who wants to access it via R. - Neil Saunders

3 more comments

If anyone uses R in this way with our solubility data please let us know - I would like to see an example http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc... - Jean-Claude Bradley

This is how I had done the initial analyses - Rajarshi Guha

Rajarshi - so you usually did it on live data, not after exporting? - Jean-Claude Bradley

well I basically thought of it as exporting since I did do manual processing of the downloaded data. It's just that it was all done in R - Rajarshi Guha

Andrew Spong

Missed this: There is no single future for scientific journals http://michaelnielsen.org/blog... | (michaelnielsen.org)

September 29 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Walt Crawford, Meryn Stol, carolh and 2 other people liked this

Bora Zivkovic

RT @carlzimmer Note to self: don't trust Google scholar too far. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article...

September 26 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Michael Kuhn, carolh, Fiona Bradley and 5 other people liked this

Who is the author? I see the blog/site is run by Elsevier so all my red flags are up although the article appears legit. Who is the Chief Developer of Google Scholar? - Bora Zivkovic

9 more comments

Library Journal is a legitimate publication, despite being owned by Reed Business. Peter Jacso is a VERY well-known figure in libraryland -- prolific author. His specialty is the evaluation of database and e-journal products. Sorry, Bora, 'fraid you have to take this one seriously. - D0r0th34

OK, good to know. Now, the last question again: Who is the Chief Developer of Google Scholar? I wish I could get that person to come to ScienceOnline2010 and field questions, comments and suggestions from the most Web-savvy users in the world of science. - Bora Zivkovic

Péter Jascó is library science prof at Univ. of Hawaii & has been assessing Google Scholar in this methodological way since it first came out. He's an LIS academic rock star, at least imho. http://www2.hawaii.edu/~jacso/. and, what @D0r0th34 said. :-) - Stephanie_Happy2010!

@Bora - wikipedia mentions "Alex Verstak and Anurag Acharya" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Anders Norgaard

Thanks - I'll try to track them down.... - Bora Zivkovic

See also Duncan's "Mistaken Identity: Google thinks I’m Maurice Wilkins" - http://duncan.hull.name/2009.... - Neil Saunders

How did I miss that!? Kewl! - Bora Zivkovic

Google Scholar thinks my husband and I are the same person. We are both D Salo, but the subject matter we publish on is... rather distinctly different. - D0r0th34

Anurag Acharya came to speak at Ex Libris user group 4-5 years back - he was AWESOME. I'm pretty sure he developed Google Scholar in his 20% "free" time with Google. He flew in & out just for the talk but he was quite a good speaker. He anticipated our concerns & totally won me over. (the issue was whether or not to link our OpenURL resolver with Google Scholar ... I didn't want to play... more... - Stephanie_Happy2010!

here's an interview with Anurag: http://www.google.com/librari... from 2006 - Stephanie_Happy2010!

Hilary

University of Texas releases details of contracts with Elsevier and Springer to economists researching journal pricing (after the Texas Attorney General gets involved): http://www.libraryjournal.com/article...

September 14 - Comment - Like - Share

carolh and Christina Pikas liked this

"the Texas Attorney General (AG) ordered that contracts between both Springer and Elsevier and the University of Texas (UT) system be released to economists... The ruling goes against claims made by the publishers to the AG's office, arguing that the contracts constituted trade secrets that would adversely affect the their "proprietary interests"... According to the AG, Springer and Elsevier did not present sufficient evidence that the "release of the information at issue would cause them substantial competitive harm"... [the economists] have acquired nearly 150 contracts covering agreements with more than 500 institutions among the universities and consortia. A few universities submitted redacted versions of contracts from Elsevier and Springer, though Courant told LJ that the researchers would seek unredacted versions." - Hilary

go researchers go! - D0r0th34

Fred

Hilarious spam bot mistake -- I got a "very nice" comment on a photo that was purposely all black! http://www.flickr.com/photos...

August 27 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

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Cameron Neylon

Request to FF: Before any shut down please ensure there is a a public archive made of the complete public timeline. There is gold in there for future sociologists (they just haven't realised it yet). For the rest of the research community here there is immense value tied up in here which we would like to continue to get at in the future.

August 11 - Comment - Like - Share

Anders Norgaard, Branwen Hide, Egon Willighagen and 28 other people liked this

Could I also suggest that if there are licence issues that people declare that leaving a comment here means that they are happy to have their (already public) content archived in this way? - Cameron Neylon

11 more comments

OK to hang onto my public comments, yeah. - D0r0th34

Absolutely, mine also. - Garret McMahon

Dear FF team: archive my FF content any way you like, just please do archive it and keep it public. - Bill Hooker

I think that sociologists have begun mining what's available here. I spent months lurking here and on blogs mostly from an ethnographic point of view. And yes, I am happy to be archived. - Mickey Schafer

Yes, please! - Elaine Nelson

Feel free to use my stuff - Archive away. - Chris Miller

If it's publicly posted here, it should be assumed to be archivable. While that's my opinion and applies to all my stuff here, I think it's also probably the consensus. - Mr. Gunn

Cameron, shouldn't you also post this to the Friendfeed Feedback room? You've posted it as a request to the organization, but not in a place they're as likely to be tracking. - Jill O'Neill

Jill I have, but its on a separate item. Check here http://friendfeed.com/the-lif... and here http://friendfeed.com/friendf... - Cameron Neylon

Agree with Mr. Gunn 3 posts up. - Steve Koch

Aso agree with Mr Gunn but I wouldn't want something to be scuppered because of something odd in the terms of service... - Cameron Neylon

Are people attempting to archive their individual contributions? If so, how? I've posted a lot of stuff directly here that isn't replicated elsewhere. - Hilary

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