Fun Science Books from #scio13

Way back in February, ScienceOnline motivated me to read some great science books. Thanks to the publishers, I won / received copies of David Quammen's Spillover and Barbara Natterson-Horowitz / Kathryn Bowers' Zoobiquity. Both were terrific. I reviewed them on Goodreads & would like to share the reviews here too.

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

by David Quammen

it was TERRIFIC - great investigation, great writing, scary topic. Quammen's writing is amazing. I'm not really a non-fiction girl, but this was interesting, science-y, and moved along quickly. Like a Michael Crichton novel, only real and better written.

Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing

by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz

This was a great, relatively easy read. It covers how similar diseases occur in both humans and animals. Each chapter reads like a good, long magazine article about a topic - like STDs, adolescence, cancer, obesity, and more. I won my copy at ScienceOnline 2013 and had the great fortune to befriend co-author Kathryn Bowers, who signed my copy. There's some good neuroscience in here too!

Think Like a Cat: How to Raise a Well-Adjusted Cat--Not a Sour Puss

by Pam Johnson-Bennett

I'm skimming through this - I got the first edition on Interlibrary Loan & liked it so much that I bought it. :-) I consider myself a kitty whisperer, but I'm learning some fun new things in this book. The tips about how to play with your cat (and how often: 1-2x per day, for 10-15 minutes each) are useful. Finally learned what the whiskers on the forepaws are for: "to sense any movement of prey trapped under the cat's front paws." The book gives good tips on how to desensitize cats to the scary experience of going to the vet. Most of these involve food. :-) While my kittehs aren't scared of the vet, reading this section made me appreciate my vet more, because they do some of the non-food tips to make my cats feel more comfortable while in the examining room. The book is full of good information for new & old-timey cat owners!

Favorite Books read in 2012

Goodreads has been a good way to keep track of books I've read, which was my goal. It's made listing my favorite fiction reads of 2012 very easy! The list is online, and I can even  embed it in this post.

Stephanie's favorite novels read in 2012

American Dervish

by Ayad Akhtar

This was a fascinating book. Interesting insight into the life of Muslims in 1970s Milwaukee, and a horrible betrayal by the narrator. None of the characters was especially positive, but the book was compelling. One tic that bothered me:...

The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

The Newlyweds

by Nell Freudenberger

Delightful story about a Bangladeshi woman who marries an American man and moves to Rochester. The early story is good, but has been done before. However, the second half - when she returns to "Desh" - is fresh and interesting.

The Cranes Dance

by Meg Howrey

This was a great book for anyone who likes reading about ballet, NYC, or mental illness. The two I know best were handled authentically, and the third was entertaining. It started out a bit lite-n-snarky, but I'd read a good review of ...

The Snow Child

by Eowyn Ivey

This was quite a lovely story -- the "Child" herself was lovely, as were the other characters. Alaska in 1920, too, was a character in the story -- and a very interesting character at that.

Let the Great World Spin

by Colum McCann

This was a lovely novel, though it started out as a series of disconnected short stories. I wasn't sure I'd stick with it - but I'm glad I did. The stories deepened and got very interconnected. I remember when the Twin Towers were being ...

The Night Bookmobile

by Audrey Niffenegger

I loved this book -- all librarians & good readers should read it. I borrowed my copy from the library (most of my reads are library books), but this is one I will purchase, as I could imagine wanting to revisit this one again.

When it Happens to You

by Molly Ringwald

The Wife

by Meg Wolitzer

Clearly I could have added more annotations, but at least I have a good list of books read & loved in 2012!

Mining User Data: E-Books & E-Journals

I've been meaning to blog about the recent Wall Street Journal article "Your E-Book Is Reading You" and now there's a companion post to write: "Mendeley Injects Some Pace into Academia with Fast, Big Data" (reporting by GigaOM).

Both talk about mining user data generated from use of a product. Alexandra Alter reported in the June 29, 2012 print edition of the Wall Street Journal (online July 19, 2012) that e-book vendors (specifically Nook and Kindle) have data "revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them." The data "focuses on groups of readers, not individuals," and leads Amazon to identify popular passages of books (by looking at the most underlined sentences in books downloaded to their Kindle device). This is moderately interesting: the most underlined is a passage from the Hunger Games trilogy, followed by the first sentence of Pride & Prejudice (see for yourself on Project Gutenburg).

E-book vendors are starting to share data with publishers, "to help them create books that better hold people's attention." (according to Alter's interview with Jim Hilt, Barnes & Noble's vice president of e-books). ACK! Writers may start to use metrics to determine the outcome of their novels, or to shape their nonfiction. As a fiction reader, I would much rather that my authors construct the entire novel from their imagination instead of relying on a reader, or worse, the lowest common denominator of readers, to help guide the novel's conclusion. That's why I read fiction: because I want to inhabit the writer's world. Not the writer's world heavily influenced by my fellow readers' opinions.

Further, as a librarian, I'm very wary of the assertion that the data "focuses on groups of readers, not individuals." That may be true today, but will it be ever thus? Can I opt out of having an e-book reader report back what I am reading? Apparently not. I still read my fiction the old-fashioned way, so no one knows what I read. In fact, since most of my fiction is borrowed from the library, the only one who tracks what I read is me (via Goodreads). Most libraries actively do not keep data on what books patrons read, because we believe so strongly in a reader's right to privacy.  Alter quotes security expert Bruce Schneier, who "worries that readers may steer clear of digital books on sensitive subjects such as health, sexuality and security—including his own works—out of fear that their reading is being tracked."

I'm definitely not a fan of e-book vendors tracking my reading habits on a Nook, Kindle, or any other device.

And yet, I cheer at the prospect of "reference manager and PDF organizer" Mendeley offering me data on journals faculty are reading or not reading. TheNextWeb reports that "Users can gain insight into how academic research is consumed, discussed and annotated with social metrics in granular detail" through Mendeley Institutional Edition ("powered by Swets").  Dutch library subscriptions agent Swets says this would offer "real-time visibility into the usage of your library content," but it is not clear how this data would be shared, or at what level.  For instance, would we see only a list of the most and least popular journals? The most and least popular journal articles? Would we see this by discipline? By university? By university and discipline? The more granular the data goes, of course, the greater the chance for veering into user privacy issues noted above.

• Then again, if I as a librarian who pays a lot of money for academic journals could see which articles or which journals are most and least popular with journalism faculty, or neuro-marketing researchers, I could make better financial decisions about journal subscriptions.
• Then again, if I ceased to purchase journals because they were not popular, I might enhance a journal's demise by not making it available ... which veers towards the idea that the way e-books are consumed might influence the way fiction is written.
• Then again, this seems to offer a viable alternative to the slow-moving and proprietary journal assessment tool offered by ISI's Journal Impact Factor.

I'm definitely conflicted on Mendeley's International Edition, but I look forward to hearing more. I'm not conflicted about e-book vendors keeping statistics on what I read, so I'll continue to use the library for my fiction fix.

For More Information

• Alter, Alexandra. July 13, 2012. "Your E-Book Is Reading You." Wall Street Journal. 
• Johnson, Bobbie. August 6, 2012. "Mendeley Injects Some Pace Into Academia with Fast, Big Data." GigaOM.
• Knowles, Jamillah. August 6, 2012. "Mendeley's Analytics Dashboard Speeds Up Academic Impact." The Next Web.
• Swets. nd. "Organize, collaborate and discover research | Mendeley IE."

A Librarian's View of ScienceOnline

I've submitted a photograph to #scio12 science-art show.  I wanted to convey something about science, which is tough since what I most like to photograph is flowers and cats. Ok, I could have argued that they were science photos, but I thought it was a stretch.

I thought more about it and decided to take photos of some of the books I've acquired (for myself or for my library) as a result of ScienceOnline past & current.  Here, therefore, is my view of ScienceOnline:

The books are, from top to bottom:

• Graedon, J., & Graedon, T. (2011). The people's pharmacy quick & handy home remedies. Washington, DC: National Geographic.
• Zimmer, C. (2011). A planet of viruses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Skloot, R. (2010). The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown Publishers.
• Dunn, R. R. (2011). The wild life of our bodies: Predators, parasites, and partners that shape who we are today. New York: Harper.
• McKenna, M. (2010). Superbug: The fatal menace of MRSA. New York: Free Press.
• Linden, T. (2011). The New York times reader: Health and medicine. Washington, D.C: CQ Press.
• Tucker, H. (2011). Blood work: A tale of medicine and murder in the scientific revolution. New York: W.W. Norton.
• Mooney, C., & Kirshenbaum, S. (2009). Unscientific America: How scientific illiteracy threatens our future. New York: Basic Books.
• Specter, M. (2009). Denialism: How irrational thinking hinders scientific progress, harms the planet, and threatens our lives. New York: Penguin Press.
• Meredith, D. (2010). Explaining research: How to reach key audiences to advance your work. New York, N.Y: Oxford University Press.

You can check out (literally and figuratively) these books on my WorldCat list of ScienceOnline Books.

Delightful Cognitive Science Fiction

I just finished the best novel of 2009 ... and while it's early in the year, I am confident this will still be towards the top of the list at the end of the year.

Stephanie Kallos' Sing Them Home is delightful, and also relevant to cognitive science, language, and library science. Here's how:

• Cognitive Science. One of the characters, Larken, is an art history professor who sees people in color. She does this throughout the novel, and I was reminded of synesthetes each time. Here's an example:

"Sometimes Daddy was yellow - not Mommy Yellow (the color of egg yolks in the mixing bowl, prescrambled and paled by lacings of milk, the color of Hope [the mother] when they were reading together at bedtime), but his own special Daddy Yellow: intense, glossy: the pudding-y filling inside lemon bars served at church de bachs; dandelion flowers after a downpour." (p. 93-94)

• Language. The novel takes place in the fictional town of Emlyn Springs, in southeast Nebraska near Lincoln with strong ties to Wales. Many of the characters speak or sing Welsh, and there are many Welsh rituals. Kallos' loving portrayal of the language and rituals, is touching and might be appreciated by those who enjoy language.
  

• Library Science. One small but terrific scene takes place at a library in nearby Beatrice, NE; it nicely illustrates principles of good reference librarianship that I try to instill in my students. Viney, the not-quite stepmother, goes to the library to send an email to a Welsh acquaintance, and she asks for help. Emphasis is mine, with [comments] explaining just why this is such great reference service.
  

" 'I'd be happy to help you,' the librarian says, coming out from behind the information desk. 'Follow me.' This librarian is no pinched, spinsterish matron wearing a cardigan and spectacles. She's a big girl, twentysomething, and she walks like a man. ...

" 'I'm here to write an email letter. Can I do that?'
" 'You bet.' The girl lays her hand on a silver, dinner-roll-sized object on the desk and expertly starts sliding it around. ...
" 'This is called a "mouse,"' Addison remarks. 'Sadly it's the only named part of a computer that has any poetry.' "

Addison the librarian goes on to show Viney how to select a username in gmail and says "'While you work on that, I'll go help those folks at the counter. As soon as you've got something we’ll get you started, okay?' " [librarian gives patron information, lets her work, and goes to help other patrons, promising to return]

Viney thinks and tries several names until she finds one that works. "Addison is back. 'How you comin' along?' she asks." [returning as promised, still helpful.] They figure out a good username for Viney (Addison's is "Sad bison at gee mail dot com;" Viney ultimately selects nutriyogavine) and Addison explains how to write the "email letter:"

" 'Now,' Addison continues, 'We’ll get the cursor moved down to where you need to start writing ... Now you just start typing the way you would on a regular typewriter.' Addison's fingers move with incredible speed." She shows Viney how to send the message when she's ready, and then says " 'You'll do great. I'll be right over there if you have any questions." [Addison is so patient with Viney, and she ends the encounter with good closure, inviting Viney to ask for more help if she needs it.] (pages 290-292)

If I were writing this up for a reference observation paper (which is an assignment I ask my students to complete), I would demonstrate the many ways that Addison meets the ALA /RUSA Guidelines for Behavioral Performance of Reference and Information Service Providers. And does a great job of helping a patron we care about in the novel ... as I know many public librarians do in the Real World.

Kudos to Stephanie Kallos for portraying good library assistance. The novel is good in a lot of other ways as well, but for the purposes of this blog, I recommend it for the cognitive and information science tidbits strewn here and there.

For More Information

• Kallos, Stephanie. Sing Them Home. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009.
  
• Valby, Karen. Sing Them Home (review). Entertainment Weekly, Jan. 16, 2009.
  

Short Takes

Here are a few of my recent favorite things, for your Thanksgiving (U.S.) browsing pleasure:

Bora posts a great article on New and Exciting in PLoS ONE: an article entitled Whole Body Mechanics of Stealthy Walking in Cats and he asks for LOLCat submissions to illustrate the articles. I'd like to see that too!

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I just bought the library a terrific book called Head First Statistics (O'Reilly, 2008), which I like for several reasons:

1. It explains a bunch of statistics in a lot of different ways; and, quoting O'Reilly:  "brings this typically dry subject to life, teaching statistics through engaging, interactive, and thought-provoking material, full of puzzles, stories, quizzes, visual aids, and real-world examples."
2. It's a great example of how books can be designed to effectively -- and professionally -- teach complex concepts.  (O'Reilly says the book "satisfies the requirements for passing the College Board's Advanced Placement (AP) Statistics Exam" so it's clearly no slouch!). I'd might even call it a 2.0 book?!
3. I got some good ideas of how to present study tips to my LIS students from page xxxiii entitled "Here's what YOU can do to bend your brain into submission," using tips like "Slow down" ... "Talk about it. Out loud" ... "Do the exercises. Write your own notes."  Interactivity improves learning.

Check out the book ... either to learn statistics, or to get ideas on how to make reading tough concepts manageable.

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Heard some interesting (but not uplifting) brain science stories on the News Hour:

• Misdiagnosing Dementia (Nov. 12 2008):  "About 5 million Americans suffer from dementia -- about half of those from suspected Alzheimer's disease -- according to official estimates. Now, researchers are looking for new treatments in a field that hasn't seen a major advance since the 1960s."  
• Military, VA Confront Rising Suicide Rates Among Troops (Nov. 10 2008)  "The Army says that suicides among active duty personnel have doubled in recent years, and multiple deployments might contribute to that increase."
  

Read the transcript, download the audio, or watch the video on the News Hour site.  (Note to the News Hour: nice way to keep your content vibrant in this multimedia age!)

Pre-1923 Psychology Books Online

You may remember that I recently wrote about UConn's project to digitize books published prior to 1923 ... focusing on 200 or so psychology published before 1923.  I've heard from lots of UConn faculty voting for various titles (thanks!) and I'm keeping an annotated list of print candidates for digitization in Google Docs; browsing the list, you can see which titles are popular.

I was also excited to find that many of these titles have already been digitized!  Since they already exist online, we will add them to Homer, our online catalog so that they'll be available to all.  In the meantime, if you want to take a peek inside some psychology classics, take a look below:

• Principles of psychology / by Herbert Spencer., c1896
  
• General introduction to psychoanalysis, by Prof. Sigmund Freud, LL. D. Authorized translation, with a preface by G. Stanley Hall ..., c1922
• Introduction to psychology, by Wilhelm Wundt...Tr. from the 2d German ed. by Rudolf Pintner..., c1924
• Elements of psychology / by Edward L. Thorndike., 1907
• Mental and moral heredity in royalty; a statistical study in history and psychology, by Frederick Adams Woods ... with one hundred and four portraits., 1906
• Stanford revision and extension of the Binet-Simon scale for measuring intelligence, by Lewis M. Terman, Grace Lyman, George Ordahl ... [and others], 1917
• Library of mesmerism and psychology., 1871
• Narratives of the witchcraft cases, 1648-1706, ed. by George Lincoln Burr., 1914
• Analysis of mind, by Bertrand Russell, F.R.S., 1921
• Emotions, by Carl Georg Lange (1834-1900) and William James (1842-1910), 1922
• Habit, by William James., 1914
• Inquiries into human faculty and its development / by Francis Galton., 1907
• Outlines of phrenology; by G. Spurzheim., 1834
• Psychology of suggestion; a research into the subconscious nature of man and society, by Boris Sidis with an introduction by William James., 1898
• Psychopathology of everyday life, by Sigmund Freud., 1914
• Psychology, by William James., 1892 (pub date in archive.org is wrong: 1802)

Most of these are available through the Internet archive, but others are available through Google Books or other electronic book sites.  All are free for anyone to use!

Please let me know if you don't like the quality of the digitized book already available online; I've been told that we will digitize titles that are already online if folks would prefer a better quality scan.  And let me know if you have any questions!

Note: no books will be harmed during digitization.

Digitizing Books @ UConn

UConn is participating in an exciting project whereby we are digitizing pre-1923 / out-of-copyright books as part of the Boston Library Consortium / Open Content Alliance project, with a goal of scanning approximately 1500 UConn books a year. The digitized books will be listed & linked in Homer, the Libraries' catalog, and will be online through archive.org. Note that many pre-1923 psychology titles are already there, including these works by or about William James and psychology.

This relates to psychology because I get to select 50 titles to be digitized from over 200 identified psychology titles -- and I'd love input from the UConn psychology department. You can see the list of digitization candidates in Google Docs. If there's a title or two (or more!) that you'd like to see digitized, please let me know.  Note:  some of the titles we'd like to digitize are already available online -- if that is the case, they will be directly added to Homer.  My deadline is Dec. 1, so I'd like to receive comments by Nov. 20.

For More Information

• About the Internet Archive
• Zack, Suzanne. University Libraries to play major role in consortium’s mass digitization project.  UConn Advance, Oct. 1, 2007.

*new* Psychology & Communication Sciences Books

Thanks to WorldCat and Google Reader, I've created some nifty lists that highlight new books I've purchased in communication sciences (either communication or communication disorders) and psychology.  As new books come into the library, I add them to a list at WorldCat, which then goes through Google Reader, and ultimately onto my subject pages for my three disciplines.

• Communication
• Communication Disorders
• Psychology

Note that those pages are also home to lists of recent publications by UConn faculty in those departments; both pages change frequently, so check them out often!

You can see some of the recent book purchases here:

Please let me know if you'd like me to consider purchasing a book for your subject!

Favorite Children's Books

Two very interesting "sets of information" lately on my favorite children's books. (I say "sets of information" because one is a podcast of a lecture, and the other is an article / interview / podcast ... so what is the proper name for these bits of information? but I digress)

First, I read the article in last week's New Yorker about children's libraries, Anne Carroll Moore, arguably the mother of all children's librarians, and E.B. White's Stuart Little. Jill Lepore describes the "Department of Work with Children" at the New York Public Library and provides background on Anne Carroll Moore, the NYPL's first children's librarian, including details of how Moore championed good books for children. Lepore describes how Moore pestered White to write a book for children, but then recoiled from Stuart Little. Stuart himself prevailed, of course, and the rest of the article follows Stuart's progress. The New Yorker also includes a blog post by Lepore who "writes about how she got to the bottom of the Stuart Little battle" and a podcast discussion between Lepore and Roger Angell about the article.

Then I downloaded a podcast of Anita Silvey talking about some of the 100 best children's books to students and school librarians at Simmons Graduate School of Library & Information Science. I had the great fortune of taking Modern Book Publishing with Anita while I was at Simmons, and she is terrific storyteller. In this lecture Anita gives, in her words, "30 short book talks," which turns out to be 1-2 minutes about some delightful books for children and young adults. I was enthralled for virtually all of the talk, and I learned many interesting tidbits about some of my favorite children's books like ...

• One series of books was written by a mother and daughter, although only the mother was credited as the author.
• One picture book was rejected over 20 times, and one of my all-time favorite YA books was also rejected over 20 times.
• One picture book was written during WWII and could be used today to comfort children who are concerned about family members fighting in Iraq.
• One series of books was written by two German Jews and was smuggled out of France shortly before the Nazis invaded Paris.
  

Listen to the podcast to find out about these books and more! (or read Anita's books 100 Best Books for Children and 500 Great Books for Teens) Anita is full of fascinating tidbits, like "it doesn't matter how you get a great book" and arguments why publishers and librarians view controversy differently and "great artists do whatever needs to be done" to get a great book.

If you like (or liked) children's books, or if you have children who read, I highly recommend both the New Yorker article and the Anita Silvey lecture.

For More Information

• Lepore, Jill. The Lion and the Mouse: The Battle that Reshaped Children’s Literature. The New Yorker, July 21, 2008.
  
• --- The Book Bench: Jill Lepore writes about how she got to the bottom of the “Stuart Little” battle. (blog post)
• --- and Roger Angell discuss “Stuart Little” and children’s literature (podcast)
  
• Silvey, Anita. The Stories Behind the Classics April 26, 2008, Student School Library Conference @ Simmons College GSLIS.
• --- 100 Best Books for Children, Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2004 and 500 Great Books for Teens, Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Science Books in Braille

Very cool story on ScienceFriday last week about some astronomy books written by NASA folks that are available in Braille! Ira Flatow interviewed Doris Daou, one of the authors of the latest of several books in the NASA Braille Book of Astronomy series. Touch the Invisible Sky " ... feature(s) [tactile diagrams with] raised outlines and textures superimposed on the images themselves to indicate how the objects appear differently according to wavelength viewed in – for example, radio, infrared, visible, ultra-violet, or x-ray. The text clearly and concisely explains what each image shows, and even describes how the different types of telescopes capture the images."

Other titles in the series include Touch the Universe and Touch the Sun (links to NASA press releases about the books).

According to ScienceFriday, "The book will be available to the public through a wide variety of sources, including the National Federation of the Blind, Library of Congress repositories, schools for the blind, libraries, museums, science centers and Ozone Publishing."

For More Information

• Grice, Noreen, Simon Steel, and Doris Daou. Touch the Invisible Sky: Exploring the Cosmos in Braille. Ozone Publishers, 2008. (link to publisher's site; title doesn't seem to be in any libraries yet).
  
• Grice, Noreen. Touch the Sun : a NASA Braille Book of Astronomy. Washington, DC : Joseph Henry Press, ©2005. (link to WorldCat; book in several New England libraries)
  
• Grice, Noreen. Touch the Universe : a NASA Braille Book of Astronomy. Washington, DC : Joseph Henry Press, ©2002. (link to WorldCat; book in several New England libraries)
• Grice, Noreen. "The Touch of Astronomy" Mercury. Summer 2007, Vol. 36 Issue 3, p18-23. (online through the Astronomical Society of the Pacific). Subtitle: "Most people take for granted the visual gratification that astronomy provides, but it is possible to turn astronomy into a tactile experience for the visually impaired."
• ScienceFriday. Touching the Invisible Sky, January 18, 2008.
  

If You Search, Read This Book

I'm preparing for another semester of teaching Digital Information Services & Providers, or as I like to call it, "Advanced Reference." At the start of the semester, we review some favorite resources from reference like Academic Search Premier and LexisNexis, and we study new sources like Web of Science and Dialog. We also talk about free search engines like Ask, Exalead, and Yahoo!

There's a great new book that explains these and other search engines, and also covers directory sites like Yahoo!'s directory and the Open Directory. Ran Hock's book The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook : A Guide for the Serious Searcher. (2nd ed. CyberAge Books, 2007) clearly explains these topics and more.

Hock starts out with a chapter on "Basics for the Serious Searcher," which provides a brief chronology of the Internet, explains general Web directories and search engines, and offers sensible strategies for formulating a search. Hock talks about older content as well, describing the Wayback Machine, a treasure trove of archived Internet material. This chapter also provides 4 pages on evaluating what you find on the Web and briefly discusses copyright.

Hock's next chapter describes basic directories like Yahoo!'s directory and the Open Directory in more detail than in the first chapter, and he describes one of my favorite directories, the Librarians' Internet Index, which includes tens of thousands of Web sites carefully chosen and annotated by librarians. Chapter 3 describes more directories, broken into categories like law, education, and the US government; Hock describes a few subject-specific directories in each category.

Chapters 4 and 5 cover the basics and specifics of search engines, and both are full of interesting tidbits for Web searchers. It includes a link to Search Engine Shortcuts, a handy page that Hock maintains showing how to do specific searches in Ask,Google, and Yahoo!. These include currency conversion, airport information / delays, and UPC code lookups.

Later chapters cover newsgroups; finding images, audio, and video; as well as blogs, podcasts, and creating your own Web sites. The book concludes with a handy 9-page glossary, which defines Boolean concepts, podcasts, relevance & recall, and technical terms like Ajax, FTP, and HTML.

The topics in the book are useful, but what's best about it is Hock's clear and descriptive language. He knows this material like a librarian, but he talks about it like a normal person. Finally, Hock maintains a page with all the links mentioned in each chapter. If you can't read the book, you might want to glance through these links, focusing on the topics that most interest you. (And if you have the opportunity to see him speak at a conference, take it; he's a great and generous speaker)

Everyone is pretty good at Web searching -- but we could all use a boost from time to time. Ran Hock's book is filled with great boosting techniques and will be required for my class. I encourage you to buy it or check it out @ your library.

Blogged with Flock

Fiction / Science / Philosophy

I like when more than one of my interests combine, as they did in a 1983 book I recently read by Rebecca Goldstein.

In The Mind-body Problem, Goldstein's heroine is a philosopher / graduate student at Princeton married to a math genuius. She jokingly tells her future husband that she is interested in the "body" of the mind-body problem, and then defends her joke (because he doesn't get it):

" 'Well, if there's a philosophy of mind, why shouldn't there be a philosophy of body? After all, the main question in philosophy is the mind-body problem. Why assume only the mind makes the relationship between them problematic? Why assume only mind needs analysis?' " Kind of a joke, but the story is set in 1976, and in 2007 ... it's closer to truth than it was 30 years ago (see Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee's "The Body has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better" (2007) ... about which more soon).

Anyway, the book is a nice blend of philosophy of mind and mid-list women's fiction.

I discovered it by reading Goldstein's recent essay in New Scientist entitled "Science in Fiction" in which she describes her own struggle between reading fiction and "good for you" stuff as a child:

"Every time I visited the library I allowed myself to take out one work of fiction. To balance it, I had to take out a book that was good for me, something I could learn from. I forbade myself from reading the storybook before completing the good-for-me book." Goldstein eventually became a philosopher of science and a novelist.

She's writing a new novel about science and religion.

For More Information
* Goldstein, Rebecca. The Mind-body Problem. New York : Random House, ©1983.
* --- List of works in WorldCat.
* --- “Science in Fiction.“ New Scientist, 8/25/2007, Vol. 195 Issue 2618, p43. Available in EBSCO, LexisNexis and more.

LIS Books

Over on facebook, some librarians are having a discussion of favorite LIS books. I can't think of a dedicated LIS book that I like, but here are two that have shaped my view of design and users:

* Krug, Steve. Don't Make Me Think! : A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. 2d ed. Indianapolis, Ind.: Que, 2006.
Explains in very clear language how to design for users in a way that they will understand. Emphasizes the value of simplicity. My favorite graphic is in the chapter "Street Signs and Breadcrumbs", in which he shows a street sign in Los Angeles and another in Boston. The LA street sign spans the entire street and is easy to read while you're driving around, possibly lost. The Boston street sign, when it exists (speaking as an infrequent Boston driver), is tiny and very difficult to read. Essential, and easy, reading for any web designer.


* Norman, Donald A. The Psychology of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books, 1988.
Norman's classic is not specifically written for web site design, but it can easily be applied to web design, and Norman's engaging style makes for another easy read. I think about this book EVERY TIME I open a door that is not clearly marked. Essentially, he says "if I have to think when I open a door, the door is badly designed." (I'm looking at you, entrance to Hampshire College Library Center). I also think of this book when I try to turn off my iHome radio in the morning; Norman talks about how difficult it is to design something complex and keep it simple. Highly recommended.

Funability in Danbury

The Loose Cannon Librarian has done a very cool thing: she's mashed the Danbury Library catalog with the social networking tools of Library Thing for Libraries (read more about it on the Library Thing blog).

If you look for a book & want to find "more like this" (more Irish fiction, say, like Maeve Binchy's recent Whitethorn Woods), you could, of course, click on the Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) Highway bypasses -- Ireland -- Fiction. But really, how many books are there with that subject heading in the catalog? (answer: in Danbury's catalog, 3 -- all different editions of the same book; in WorldCat, the answer is 1 - they've managed to put al three editions onto one record. But I digress).

So while the LCSH works sometimes, it's not useful for Reader's Advisory, or helping patrons find more books they want to read on a given topic.

What does help is social networking tools like tagging. Which LibraryThing does nicely. Until now, though, Library Thing has been primarily for personal use -- you can see the books (mostly fiction) I’ve cataloged there, but Library Thing has some great potential beyond just the personal. And true to their name, they're expanding to ... libraries!

Check out the Danbury catalog record for Whitethorn Woods: you can see those standoffish subject headings and also some neat tags leading you to related books. If you look at "Similar Books," you'll see a few others by Maeve Binchy, plus some you might not have considered. One cool thing is that it only shows similar books that are in the Danbury catalog -- so you don't get recommendations of books you can't borrow from Danbury.

See also (heh) the record for Anchee Min's terrific Empress Orchid, with the LCSH Tzu-hsi, Empress dowager of China, 1835-1908 -- Fiction. All right, so the subject tells you what the book's about, but ... what else would you read if you liked Empress Orchid? Library Thing readers suggest some similar books available in Danbury, such as Lisa See's also terrific Snow flower and the secret fan, and Gail Tsukiyama's Night of many dreams, which a f2f friend recommended to me.

Check it out & ask for it @ your library!

Read more about it
* from the Danbury Library's perspective at Loose Cannon Librarian
* from Library Thing at Library Thing for Libraries

Evolution for Everyone!

Have you heard about David Sloan Wilson's new book Evolution for everyone : how Darwin's theory can change the way we think about our lives ?

I saw him speak at Hampshire back in February, and he was great. Natalie Angier reviewed the book in the April 8 issue of the New York Times, and of it, she says:

"Rather than catalog its successes, denounce its detractors or in any way present evolutionary theory as the province of expert tacticians like himself, Wilson invites readers inside and shows them how Darwinism is done, and at lesson’s end urges us to go ahead, feel free to try it at home. The result is a sprightly, absorbing and charmingly earnest book that manages a minor miracle, the near-complete emulsifying of science and the 'real world...' "

Of related interest is his 2005 article Evolution for Everyone: How to Increase Acceptance of, Interest in, and Knowledge about Evolution in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology (13.5).

"This essay reports a success story, showing how both walls of resistance can be surmounted by a single college course, and even more, by a university-wide program. It is based on a campus-wide evolutionary studies program called EvoS, initiated at Binghamton University in 2002, which currently includes over 50 faculty members representing 15 departments. Enthusiasm at all levels, from freshmen students to senior administrators, makes EvoS a potential model for evolution education that can be duplicated; the basic ingredients are present at most other institutions, from small colleges to major universities."

Worthwhile both for ideas about how to start a new program on campus, but also for the science, as Wilson explains a bit about what he teaches in the EvoS program.

Favorite Reference Sources?

This is an informal poll, for the LIS crowd.

If you were stranded on a desert isle, and you were lucky enough to continue doing reference for your current constituents, what 5 reference sources would you want to have on hand? You're lucky enough to have both high-speed Internet access as well as a safe, climate-controlled space for up to 5 reference works. :-)

Mine?

- Statistical Abstract of the United States.
- The Statesman’s Year Book.
- Dorling Kindersley Ultimate Visual Dictionary.
- MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (and its cousins, Turabian & the APA Style guide) not for favoriteness, necessarily, but definitely for usefulness.

And I reserve one player to be named later.

Library Journal's Best Sci-Tech Books, 2006

Interesting list of the Best Sci-Tech books of 2006 in the March 1, 2007 issue of Library Journal:

Science's Big Picture // Best Sci-Tech Books 2006
By Gregg Sapp — March 1, 2007
"From our prehistoric past to the promise and perils of our future, the top science titles of 2006 offer plenty to ponder."

The list includes some titles of interest to armchair cognitive scientists, such as (links to WorldCat; reviews on the LJ site):

• Mithen, Steven. The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body. Harvard Univ.


• Firlik, Katrina. Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside. Random.


• Kandel, Eric R. In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. Norton.


• Dennett, Daniel C. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Viking.

New on Libraries 4 Friends

More Reading Ideas in which I tell Friend about Literature Resource Center and Books in Print's *awesome* Fiction Connection readers advisory tool. Friend is a big library user -- for taking out books 'n stuff.

He asked me if there was a web resource like allmusic does for music?

"Of course there is!" I replied.

After I emailed him my thoughts on finding authors to read in a certain genre, he wrote back and said that he'd seen that page but never imagined the riches that lay beneath.

Come on library people, what are we going to do about that?!

Oxford DNB Podcasts!

Wow, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) is offering podcasts podcasts of some of its entries. You can get them in iTunes, or browse their past (podcast) biographees online. They include Maurice Gibb, of the Bee Gees; Alan May, physicist and spy; Barry Sheene, racing motorcyclist; and Denis Thatcher, prime ministerial consort (ha!). There are new podcasts daily.

Great way to move an awesome print resource into the digital age. Browse some entries in the old-fashioned print format.