Rowland Institute Library Blog

Rowland Institute at Harvard
Library News & Notes
January 22, 2010

This is the final issue of Library News & Notes. I am grateful to have served as librarian in the Rowland Institute these past twelve years. The science keeps getting better and better. Thank you.

Quotes of the week

There is no way unless you’re dead, and even then there is still a question, that you’re not going to offend somebody. There’s always someone that’s going to get offended over something that somebody does. -Frank Zappa

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes you got to spill the news … – Sonic Youth “Winner’s Blues”

Internet Sites of the Week

Books/eBooks

E-books bibliography
(Source: Anna Akerberg)

E-readers: the compatibility conundrum

How Copyright has Banished Millions of Books to History’s Scrapheap
(Source: Eric Rumsey)

The Writing on the Wall for Independents

Computers and Internet

Dewey Music: A Tool to Browse and Search the Millions of Tracks in the Internet Archive Music Library

Doing Real Time Search? Watch Your Word Order

Five for Friday (Five4Five) #1: A Casual Roundup of the Best Online Research Tools
(Source: Roy Kenagy)

How is the Internet changing the way you think?
(Source: bibliothekarin)

Logan airport planning free wi-fi rollout
See also: Passive Aggressive Wi-Fi Hotspots
(Source: A Cup of Jo)

PDFmyURL Generates PDFs from Any Web Address
(Source: Beyond the Black Stump)

ShowMeWhat’sWrong
for remote PC troubleshooting
(Source: Internet Legal Research Weekly)

Thoughts on To-Do Lists & Personal Information Management (PIM)

Tweaking an old router to extend a wireless network

5 Google Wave Search Tips for Research, Trends & Tracking
(Source: Pandia Search Engine News)

Libraries

Bite-Size Marketing
(Source: The ‘M’ Word – Marketing Libraries)

Bridging the Silos: Creating sustainable research infrastructure with implications for digital scholarship
(Source: Bill Mayer)

The Condition of U.S. Libraries: Trends, 1999-2009
(Source: beSpacific)

Cornell Library Proposes New Model to Keep arXiv Going

Discovering Primary Source Material
(Source: markemoran)

Finding American Treasures With The New Archivist
(Source: ResourceShelf)

The Full Spectrum Librarian
(Source: SonjaandLibrary)

Harvard Library Twitter feed
(Source: Gloria Korsman)

Library Efforts to Index, Preserve and Catalog Blogs, Websites, Email Archives, Cyber Resources (summary)

Library IPhone apps – a short list

Library Related Conferences

Most Interesting Libraries of the World
(Source: bibliothekarin)

Science Online 2010: Scientists and librarians

Stop Freaking Out and Head to the Library!
Or, to quote @oodja, “1999 called. It wants its business model back.”

Why Libraries Exist
(Source: Christina Pikas)

yes, and…
(Source: sharon370)
See also: think in other categories

Scholarly Communication

LaTex Search Tool (beta)
Springer lit search w/LaTex strings
(Source: Robin Dasler)

Open and Evolving Scholarship

Very quick note on things that are used but not cited

Web of Conferences

Science and Technology

The Back-Channel of Science
(Source: John Dupuis)

Blogs you should be reading
women in sci-tech

Gathering clouds and a sequencing storm

How Soon Was Now?
Polaroid

Nano-Scale Robot Arm Moves Atoms With 100% Accuracy

Powering the national labs as engines of discovery

The Promise and Peril of Big Data
(Source: The Scout Report)

Science and Engineering Indicators 2010
(Source: Docuticker)

Small rise for US postdocs

A tale of two qubits: how quantum computers work

Time Crunch for Female Scientists: They Do More Housework Than Men

Tying Light in Knots

When science asks, what if
(Source: Science in the News)

Social Networks

Gary’s Social Media Count
(Source: Joseph Esposito)

How to Stop Boring Your Readers To Sleep
(Source: kbloemendaal)

7 Lessons for Better Networking with Social Media
(Sources: Library Web and Ellyssa Kroski)

That’s Life

Eight Tips for Maintaining Friendships

It Is Who You Know and Who Knows You

The Slow Issue
(Source: sustainable)

We’re taking Xavier home with us

The 27th New England Complex Fluids Workshop takes place tomorrow.  Rowland’s Zvonimir Dogic is one of the speakers. 

A profile of Harvard University Librarian Sidney Verba discusses the
scope of the university’s collaboration with Google, and also some gray
areas around copyright. 

Twenty-five people will receive MacArthur grants this year, including
scientists, artists, and people working for the public
good.   (Source: Chronicle of Higher Education)

A wiki lists “things you can do with RSS,” including getting weather
reports, tracking other’s bookmarks through deli.ci.ous, tracing
packages and so forth.   (Source: Internet Legal Research
Weekly)

BusinessWeek has what looks to be a lively collaborative blog on technology news.  (Source: Scripting News)

musings by Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Watch) on how RSS feeds might
be made easier to find and use… (Source; the Virtual Chase)

My presentation from the session Blogs and k-logs for information
dissemination and knowledge management at the ASIS&T Annual Meeting
is now available in .pdf.  Keep an eye out, however, for the
excellent presentations by Jessica Baumgart on feeds and Christina
Pikas on blogs for personal knowledge management, which should appear
shortly.  Christina and Jessica contributed a great deal of
material to a blog for the panel as we were preparing for the session
over the last few months.  Thanks to Kris Liberman for organizing us.

Update (11/19/04): Jessica’s presentation is now online, while Christina posted an outline of her slides. 

A group of us are presenting at an SLA workshop later this month. 
The topic is Blogging and Feeds.  I’m talking about this blog and
my experiences with it.  Jessica Baumgart, of j’s scratchpad,
has done an enormous amount of work to promote weblogs, especially in
libraries, particularly through her own blog.  Shimon Rura and
Josh Ain are presenting on the weblog content management system they
call Frassle.  It’s a massive
piece of work, their slogan is “never be bored again.” You can assign
multiple categories to a post or item or bookmark, for example. 
Evidently they have more than 350 users.  I saw a demo of the
system earlier this year and am interested in how it has evolved. 
Haven’t been to Mt. Holyoke, but I have spent some time in the Pioneer
Valley and expect gorgeous sights this time of year.

The 2004 MacArthur fellows were announced recently.  Each
recipient gets a “no strings attached” $500,000 grant over five
years.  Many are in academia, including scientists, a folklorist,
fiction writers, poets, a high school debate coach, a ragtime pianist,
a community health advocate and others.  See the press release.  (Source; Harvard in the News)