joy at moll projects dot com
There's a research technique that my reference textbook called "citation indexing." When you find an article that is right on target, find out what later articles cited that article (that is, put it in the footnotes). How do you do that? There may be other ways, but the way I have always done it is to use the ISI Web of Science database, which is a huge database of nothing but citations and has a way to search for articles that cite the article I found. I get access to Web of Science through my Mizzou account.
I'm using a similar technique now to update the Document Formats section of i-DLR. I want to find out if there are newer things since this section was last reviewed. It seemed worthwhile to try something like citation indexing. Fortunately, I can do that with Google.
Here are two methods:
So, for example, I found five new possibilities just by seeing what has linked to that first resource on the Document Formats page, the Library of Congress' specifications for digitization projects.
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The last session I went to at the Technology Expo was about OpenURL. I heard about this once before in the Introduction to Information Technology class, but it makes more sense now that I've experienced doing research with an OpenURL resolver (at Wash U) and without (through my Mizzou account). This session was presented by Melissa Belvadi, Systems and Services Librarian, at Maryville University.
Here's the problem that OpenURL solves:
When I do a search in a database at Mizzou, I might get a citation to an article I would like to read. But the article is not available full text in the database I've just searched, only the citation. Does Mizzou have the article full text in another database? To find out, I have to first search a database of the journals that Mizzou has to see if they have that journal with the appropriate dates and what database has full text of it. Then I have to search the new database to find the article that I already found in the first database.
With OpenURL, a "resolver" program does all the work for me. I find a citation in one database, it figures out if the university has the article available full text and, if it does, links me directly to that article in the target database.
Of course, for all that to work, the databases have to "play nice" with the OpenURL resolver. Here's how they do it: The starting database with the citation allows the university to have a custom link to their OpenURL resolver. When a user clicks on that link, the database links to the resolver and imbeds in the link all the citation information for the article that the user found. The target database, with the article, must accept a predictable URL that the OpenURL resolver can build as a link directly to the article, something like "www.database.com/search/issn=12345/date=2005-03-29/page=12."
There are commercial OpenURL resolvers and open source OpenURL resolvers. Melissa wrote her own resolver for Maryville. If you are interested in more, she put her slides and other material on the web:PowerPoint slides, handout, and test page
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The second session that I went to during the Technology Expo was about PubMed presented by Barbara Jones from the medical library at Mizzou, J. Otto Lottes Health Sciences Library.
PubMed is a free database produced at the National Library of Medicine. It includes the MedLine citation index of medical journal articles, in-process citations that are not yet in MedLine, older material with no subject headings, and publisher-supplied citations.
Here are some tips:
Not new, but rapidly becoming an Easter library classic, the Millikin University Peep research project.
Happy Easter!
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Dorothea's arranging a dinner for bloggers at ACRL in Minneapolis next month.
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"What's Up with WorldCat?" (the first session I attended at the Technology Expo) was presented by Tracy Rochow Byerly of Missouri Library Network Corporation, our state's OCLC service provider that also administers database group purchases and provides training. I've met Tracy before at an SLA function.
WorldCat, for the non-librarians among my readers, is what you get if you imagine your library's on-line catalog put together with nearly every other library's on-line catalog. Libraries pay extra to get access to this huge database of library collections, but check--your library card may be all it takes to get you in.
If you don't have access to that, pay attention to your searches of books, in particular, in Yahoo! and Google or Google Scholar. You may be getting links into the new Open WorldCat. Click on those links and you can get to information about which local libraries have that item.
Here's something that will surely only be of interest to librarians, but it's enthralling! You can Watch WorldCat grow. As items are added to the catalog, you can see the title, author, etc, and which library contributed the record. A lot of them, of course, will be new books, but I get a kick out of seeing things like a Chinese book from 1833 that Harvard just cataloged.
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Yesterday I went to the Technology Expo sponsored by the St. Louis Regional Library Network. I attended three workshops and the keynote speech at lunch, so I’ll probably blog about what I learned over the next several days. This is what Spring Break is for, right? Take a break from library classes so that I can go to library classes?
The keynote speaker was Stephanie Tolson, Dean of the Learning Resource Center at St. Charles Community College. She spoke about how librarians can be a catalyst for change in the arena of technology. She had three Ps to follow:
I liked this quote she gave from Peter Drucker, “the best way to predict the future is to create it.”
And I liked the advice to become someone who writes grants requests—an institution is always going to value employees who bring in money. This might be a good pursuit for me in the next few months—become familiar with grant-making organizations that might fund projects I would enjoy doing. I don’t know much about it, but a friend of mine, who has received a grant, gave a presentation on it for our Special Libraries class and I still have those notes filed away somewhere.
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My article on trivia nights was published today in the SLA newsletter for our local chapter. At the chapter website click on the SLATE newsletter in the left menu. My article begins on page 14 of the pdf file.
I have used my blog before to explore issues that I plan to use in a paper. But this is the first time that a blog entry unexpectedly grew into a piece of writing. The seed for this article was planted in a December 16 post. If I hadn't written that post, I'm not sure I would have recognized this writing opportunity when it came along.
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Yesterday, I went to a workshop at the Lewis and Clark Library System building (Edwardsville) about using the EPA website. I took my former practicum supervisor, Barb, and we met my former cataloging teacher, Lynn, for lunch because she works in that building. The two of them know each other from working at St. Louis Public Library some years ago--neither of them work there now. The library profession is a very small world....
Anyway, after a delightful lunch, I learned about EPA's website.
Here are three useful, and not particularly intuitive, tips:
And here's one cool feature:
Some of the tools under Where You Live get to nifty mapping applications, although it takes a bit of fiddling (just like some of the census maps I learned about in Government Publications last fall) to get the things to work. Try the Window to my Environment section and be sure to mess around with the check boxes on the left and redraw the map to see the features.
Several librarians have been blogging from the Computers in Libraries conference, but I'm not going to link to all of them right now since I'm using a dial-up modem. Instead, I'll focus on Andrea's reports at LibraryTechtonics since she did a couple of reports just for me! (But the rest of you can read them, too.)
I loved "my" reports on wikis and LISNews blog. I learned that the secrets to good wikis are planning and participation (I would have guessed the second, but not the first since they seem so ad hoc) and that the "hotbed beats" at LISNews are the stories about saving our children from the various evils of the world--one of my professors says that many problems in LibraryLand get more difficult when you start to ask questions about children.
I was pleased to see that Bruce James, the Public Printer, made a good impression on Andrea. I suspect he sometimes sees librarians as obstructionists since he's constantly hearing suspicion from them at the Federal Deposity library meetings. I was glad to see that he is talking about "library buy-in," although I don't imagine this audience asked the tough question--so, why did GPO announce at ALA Midwinter in January that they were going to quit distributing print publications almost immediately when pretty much no one has "faith that the digital archive is really good enough"--in fact, it's not even really there yet, although they have some really exciting plans. (I should be linking to GOVDOC-L archives and GPO documents for this info, but, like I said, I'm on dial-up). It's cool that GPO has a blog, but not so cool that it has one entry and it's from January.
Thanks, Andrea!
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Just adding my congratulations to Michael Stephens of Tame the Web and Aaron Schmidt of walking paper for being selected to be on this year's Library Journal's list of Movers and Shakers. They were also excellent presenters at the Online Social Networks Conference I "went" to virtually a few weeks ago and are both presenting and blogging this week from the Computers in Libraries conference in Washington D.C. Links via Library Stuff.
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I'm not going to finish the book Knowing Me, Knowing God by Malcolm Goldsmith because I think I got what I wanted from it in the first fifty pages. I can't put it on my Read 30 books in 2005 list, but I can still write about it here.
My Meyers-Briggs personality type is INFJ but I tested INFP on the exercise in this book, which is meant to give a kind of spiritual personality type. This result both explains some things and provides some helpful guidance to me. My understanding of the J/P thing is that Judgers like to come to conclusions and can be a bit uncomfortable with the process of getting to the decision point, especially if it goes on longer than expected. Perceivers, on the other hand, like to gather data and to experiment and become uncomfortable when it's time to reach a conclusion or make a decision.
In much of my life, I'm certainly a J. There's nothing I like better than making a plan, preferably one that requires lots of decisions. I'm only momentarily disappointed when a plan falls through, because it usually means I get to make a new plan! But for spiritual things I happily live with ambiguity and I love to experiment. So now I know why there are some parts of my life that don't map well to the descriptions I've read of INFJs.
Even better, I've discovered a new way to approach uncertainty. As an INFJ, it can drive me nuts. See, for example, my stress over the job search. But if I can transform the whole thing in my mind to a spiritual quest, it becomes a metaphysical adventure and the uncertainty is part of the fun. Instead of obsessing over the job market, I can trust that benevolent powers in the universe will make sure I get the job that I'm meant to have. Instead of endlessly rewriting my resume, I can use job ads to help me define for myself the kind of librarian that I want to be. Instead of fretting about choices that I may have to make, I can begin to think of ways to make the job a creative expression of my self, no matter where I end up working.
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Here's an interesting development in the world of government document librarians: a cooperative virtual reference service (link via MODOC-L, from Geoff Swindells the government documents coordinator at Mizzou). I'm looking forward to using it next time I get stumped!
Also, there's a new blog about government information issues, Free Government Information by the authors of the paper
Government Information in the Digital Age: The Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program. This paper was mentioned recently in LIS News, on librarian.net, and in the March 4 issue of Neat New Stuff.
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The Consumers Union (the group that brings us Consumer Reports) has created a funny animated satire about prescription drugs in the U.S. Link via my husband (thanks, hon!).
The talk I went to the other night about The Tipping Point has made me more aware of marketing. A funny animation on the Internet seems brilliant--the Consumers Union even makes it easy to email the link to your friends. I predict it won't take long at all for this message to reach a huge audience.
This morning, I saw one of the series of Century 21 commercials where they talk about how their real estate agents research the community so that you don't have to. Effective advertising. But, although there's some implication that their agents have privileged information, all the facts they claim their real estate agents can provide could also be found @ your library with the help of your friendly neighborhood librarian. Where are our television commercials? Of course, TV is expensive. But funny animations don't have to be....
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Considering how much time I spent exploring steganography today for my Digital Libraries class, it's a shame so little of it will be useful for the project that I'm working on, a new section of i-DLR about security and Digital Libraries. Steganography is the art of hiding messages in plain sight. For a really primitive example, check out the first letter of each paragraph in this blog entry. In the computer age, the more interesting techniques of steganography hide messages in pictures. It turns out, you can change quite a few pixels in a picture without seriously degrading the image.
One use for this technique is to create digital watermarks for copyright protection. For example, if someone made t-shirts from my Relax--15 mph picture, I might want to sue them for copyright infringement. But how would I prove that this was my picture and they didn't just take another picture of the same thing? If I had encoded my name in ASCII in the bits of the image, I would be able to make a pretty good case when the same code turned up in their image.
Don't think, however, that steganography is always used for good. Early in 2001 (before September 11), a USA Today article posited that terrorists might be using steganography, and the related technique of encryption, to communicate on the Internet. This was my interest. How do I be sure, as a budding Digital Librarian, that the images in my Digital Library aren't harboring terrorist messages?
Except, how likely is that? Why would criminals target my Digital Library that, presumably, has some active management when they could use abandoned personal web pages with pictures of pets that haven't been updated in two years or more? And, it turns out, a more recent ComputerWorld article refutes that steganography has ever been used by terrorists--the payback is just too small for the effort.
Regardless of its usefulness to my Digital Libraries project, I find steganography fascinating. But then, my pick for one of the coolest jobs ever is codebreaker at Bletchley Park during World War II.
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I went to a presentation this evening, a meeting of our local Special Libraries Association chapter, about the book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I've seen this mentioned in a variety of places recently, so it was helpful to hear a summary (by Bridget MacMillan and Priscilla Stultz of Lexis Nexis) in under an hour. Now, I don't need to read the book!
Actually, I do want to read the book--say, about two months after I get my first professional position. The book is about how to get your message to become a social epidemic. I don't have a message I'm trying to get out at the moment (except, maybe, read my blog). But I will. I think that the ideas in The Tipping Point could be effectively utilized on a college campus to market the library and its services.
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The last few days, for me, have been about what Michael Stephens calls "unplugging." I checked email and the discussion boards of my classes a few times, but I ignored Bloglines and didn't surf. I had projects to do--our first statistics quiz for Research Methods is due today. But I worked on them in a more relaxed manner than I would have at home. This was our first weekend of the year at our cabin in Innsbrook and I took to heart the new speed limit signs.
It's fairly easy to get myself to stay off-line at the cabin since we use a dial-up modem. It's also a reminder of what the World Wide Web is like for all the people who don't have high-speed Internet--it loses much of its magic.
Our alarm clock this morning was an aggressive male cardinal attacking his own reflection on the window glass. When that failed to do the trick, he stood on the deck rail to out-sing his rival. Then it was back to the physical attack. "Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Ree-cher-cher-cher-cher-cher. Ree-cher-cher-cher-cher-cher."
This weekend, I watched a deer graze on leaf buds, the sun set over Aspen Lake, and the stars of Orion come out as the sky darkened--all of this from the hot tub deck at the fitness center. I took long walks and long soaks and had long restful nights. I saw a turkey vulture, a flock of turkeys, a pileated woodpecker, and a pair of very excited titmouses (-mice?). I heard yipping coyotes and a killdeer. No frogs, yet, but Rick said he heard spring peepers on the Katy Trail so I'm sure it's only a matter of time before they show up in our valley.
Just what I needed--if the weather cooperates, I'll do it all again next week!
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I just finished my first writing project in the wiki-like tool, Note Studio. (I explored this last month.) Note Studio suited my writing style quite well. One of the best ways for me to avoid writer's block on more formal writing tasks is to pretend that I'm writing something that comes more naturally like email or a blog entry. So, I didn't miss (much) the fancy tools that I have in Word while I was writing the draft. And it was really nice to use the back button to get to my list of sources which linked directly to the material.
Collecting the source material was also easy with Note Studio. I simply cut and pasted email messages, articles, and other bits and pieces onto their own pages in Note Studio. My thoughts went on another page so I had little opportunity to confuse source material with my own.
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You may recall that I was ambivalent about going to the ALA Annual Conference this year. That all changed when a friend of mine, who got her MLS in December and moved to North Carolina, invited me to be her room mate. Now, I'm really excited!
Getting to wear a Blog Person T-shirt to the Scholarship Bash, doesn't hurt my enthusiasm, either (link via Caveat Lector). Although, I still want a button for the days when I'm more formally dressed. This could work.
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