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Christina's LIS Rant

This is my blog on library and information science. I'm into Sci/Tech libraries, special libraries, personal information management, sci/tech scholarly comms.... My name is Christina Pikas and I'm a librarian in a physics, astronomy, math, computer science, and engineering library. I'm also a doctoral student at Maryland. Any opinions expressed here are strictly my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer or CLIS. You may reach me via e-mail at cpikas {at} gmail {dot} com.


A Structural Exploration of the Science Blogosphere: Director's CutYesterday
Due to popular demand (well 3 requests :) ), this is a commentary and additional information for my conference paper and presentation:
Pikas, C. K. (2008). Detecting Communities in Science Blogs. Paper presented at eScience '08. IEEE Fourth International Conference on eScience, 2008. Indianapolis. 95-102. doi:10.1109/eScience.2008.30 (available in IEEE Xplore to institutional subscribers or e-mail me if you don't have access that way).

The presentation is embedded in another blog post, and is available online at SlideShare. The video of me talking about it is (will be?) available on the conference site, but I haven't gotten it to load.

Context:
I'm interested in scholarly communication in science, engineering, and math. Specifically, informal scholarly communication and how information and communication technologies, in particular social computing technologies, can/do/might impact informal scholarly communication in science/math/engineering. I'm also interested in knowledge production and public communication of science, two sub-areas of STS (this acronym has several translations - the most common probably science and technology studies).

As a blogger, and







Comps readings this weekJanuary 4
Finished Yin
Yin, R. K. (2003). Case study research: Design and methods (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
This is one of those books that's a mandatory read if you take certain methods classes in education or business. So if you have a member of your committee who was trained in either of those areas :)
I have to say that I'm not impressed. There were some useful nuggets here and things I can use, but I found it pretty superficial after reading Patton, Wolcott, Rubin & Rubin, the Sage Handbook, Miles & Huberman, Maxwell, Cresswell, etc. It just seems like a lot of handwaving (Wolcott is, too, but at least you come out of that feeling like you've gotten a pep talk!). At least it was short - oh and if/when/as I get back on the horse for fixing up and resubmitting my journal article, I'm going to cite this for how I actually used NVivo (as a case study database). Maybe I should move Wolcott up in my readings to get that pep talk going so I can get motivated to rewrite...

also read:
Zimmerman, A. S. (2008). New knowledge from old data - the role of standards in the sharing and reuse of ecological data. Science Technology & Human Values, 33(5), 631-652.
Excellent. I wish I read this prior to attending the HCIL Workshop. She was interested in how ecologists reuse data collected by other scientists for other pu






Comps readings this weekDecember 27 2008
not terribly productive this week due to the holidays (and lots of cookies - both baked and eaten - and cupcakes, a pie... and shopping!)

Finished the Borgman book (see review).

Soergel, D. (2002). A framework for digital library research: Broadening the vision. D-Lib Magazine, 8(12)DOI:10.1045/december2002-soergel
- great short piece, to the point. Written in 2002, why don't more DL people read and follow his stuff? (this means you, AIAA!)
- guiding principles: support research, scholarship, education and practice; go beyond the horseless carriage: "Some see DLs primarily as a means for accessing information, but in order to reach their full potential, DLs must go beyond that and support new ways of intellectual work"
- Themes
1) a DL is content + tools (providing access to the content alone is not sufficient)
2) DLs should have both individual and community spaces (yes!): "support users who work with materials and create their own individual or community information spaces through a process of selection, annotation, contribution, and collabora








Review: Scholarship in the Digital AgeDecember 27 2008
Borgman, C. L. (2007). Scholarship in the digital age: Information, infrastructure, and the internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.


This book is one of the many I'm reading for my comprehensive exams. Borgman does an excellent job distilling numerous research streams and large bodies of work into a well-written book. I highly recommend this book for librarians, computer scientists, domain scientists (and researchers in the humanities or social sciences), and anyone else who is interested in (or works to support) the present and future of scholarly work.

There were some overarching th




Comps readings this weekDecember 21 2008
White, H.D. & McCain, K.W. (1989) Bibliometrics. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 24, 119-186.
Good, but like all ARIST articles, long. Not sure as valuable as some of the other things in this area.

MacKenzie, D. A., & Wajcman, J. (1999). Introductory essay: The social shaping of technology. In D. A. MacKenzie, & J. Wajcman (Eds.), The social shaping of technology (2nd ed., pp. 3-27). Philadelphia: Open University Press.
- in my initial set of readings I emphasized science, but it does really make sense to also look at technology (so sss became sts). This essay first looks at technological determinism - technologies change then they have a one-way impact on society - as a theory of society and then as a theory of technology. The authors are arguing for some middle ground. Technology is important and can shape society, but technology can also be political and can be shaped by society. It can require certain social patterns or be "more compatible with some social relations than others" (p5). They go on to discuss the relationship of science to technology and more about economic and other ways society shapes technology. I should probably re-read this to make sure I've got the whole thing.

Winner, L. (1999). Do artifacts have politics? In D. A. MacKenzie, & J. Wajcman (Eds.), The social shaping of technology (2nd ed., pp. 28-40). Philadelphia: Open University Press.
- this is the standard article on thi