A Twitter Tizzy!

After tweeting privately for over 18 months, I have recently created two public Twitter accounts. One is for folks at my new position as director of the Park Library at UNC's School of Journalism and Mass Communication (JoMC), where I am @JoMCParkLib and the other is ... finally! ... as @CogSciLibrarian.

All this Twitter activity has gotten me thinking about how I use Twitter and why I feel the need for three separate accounts. I've also been thinking about it because of an upcoming study at UNC by Fred Stutzman and Woody Hartzog on privacy behaviors in online social networks. They are looking for people who "have started using social networking sites within the last two years, and maintain multiple profiles (e.g. a 'work profile' and a 'personal profile')." I'll use my blog for personal reflection and share my thoughts, in partial answer to "omg! three Twitter accounts" reaction and also in response to Stutzman and Hartzog's interesting call for participants.

My personal Twitter account is for me to stay in touch with my friends. I "know" most of the people I tweet with privately, either in the Real World or from connections made online. I talk about what I'm cooking for dinner, what license plate I'm going to get (NC State Parks), and other miscellaneous chatter that is reserved for friends.

My work Twitter account, @JoMCParkLib, is where I post library items of interest to students, faculty, alumni, and staff who use or might use the Park Library. I want to promote the exciting resources that the library makes available to members of the JoMC and UNC communities. Journalists and other mass communicators such as advertisers and marketers are making good use of Twitter, so I am consciously trying to communicate in a medium that is familiar to my library's audience. If Twitter isn't familiar to folks at JoMC, maybe my Twitter account will encourage them to learn more about it. The tweets are going directly to those who follow me on @JoMCParkLib, but I also have them feed into the library's home page, and I send out a weekly email to faculty & staff highlighting the week's top tweets.

The work Twitter account is also where I'll write the majority of my professional library science tweets; I did some live-tweeting from the recent Special Libraries Association (SLA) conference and will probably do the same for the upcoming Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) conference. At SLA, I was eager to show my followers how libraries are useful to journalists (there were great shout-outs to librarians by Colin Powell, Judy Woodruff, and Robyn Meredith). At AEJMC, I will also be happy to promote the role of the librarian in educating journalists & mass communicators.

I use Tweetie on my Mac to manage the two Twitter accounts, and that is going so well that I created a third Twitter account for @CogSciLibrarian.

I haven't been blogging much, in part because I was teaching and working full-time last semester, and then moved over 700 miles ... but I was still thinking about all things CogSci. There's been some talk that Twitter is supplanting blogging (it is called microblogging, after all), where shared items (or ReTweets, as they are called; RT for short) on a topic are tweeted instead of written about on a blog. Longer, more thoughtful items are written as blog posts. My new idea is to embed my @CogSciLibrarian Twitter feed into this blog and continue blogging longer items of cognitive science interest. I don't expect to post to @CogSciLibrarian as much as I do to my other two feeds, and I will not post personal material to that feed at all.

While I am dividing my Twitter accounts, I will most likely keep one blog, under the CogSciLibrarian name. I will continue to post about cognitive science and library science, with a splash of music; and I will integrate some journalism / mass communication into the mix.

For More Information

• Common Craft. Twitter in Plain English. March 5, 2008. A short video introduction to the micro-blogging service Twitter.
  
• Stutzman, Fred and Woody Hertzog. Recruiting Participants for a Research Study. Unit Structures, blog. June 26, 2009. Consider participating!
  

Extra-Curricular Librarian

I recently spoke at the Spring 2008 meeting of PVAAL, the Pioneer Valley Association of Academic Librarians. My topic was "The Adjunct Life and other LIS Extra-curricular Activities," and at the talk, I reflected on my five years teaching library students and blogging. I promised to post links to what I talked about here, as well as the PowerPoint I used.



So ... the Adjunct Life comes from the title of an article I wrote in June for Library Journal (The Adjunct Life). I summarized the article and added new bits, but if you want to know what it's like for me to teach, this is a good review.

I talked about blogging -- why I do it and how I find the time. Why? I addressed some of that in an October blog post entitled "Another Reason I Blog." Another handy side effect of my blog is that I can point people to it as a way of getting to know my professional interests. It's a more comprehensive business card / resume, which illustrates my thinking and quirks (and sometimes even my cats).

Finally, I talked about two articles I am co-writing with a graduate student at UConn. We are writing about our shared experience in the Scopus Student Ambassador program, which I blogged about back in June. What was (is, we're still writing the second article!) fun about the process was that we had different angles on the project -- Chelsea was very interested in the peer-to-peer nature of the training, while I was focused on the great partnership between the UConn libraries and Scopus. And we both get two articles out of it! (More on them when they are published ...)

So ... all of this extra-curricular activity takes a lot of time. Is it worth it? Mostly, yes. The good thing about blogging is that I can do it on my time -- so when I am feeling unintelligent, I can keep my mouth / blog shut, and when I am feeling inspired or determined to understand something better, I can blog about it. Teaching is it's own reward -- the students are great fun, inspiring, and they encourage me to keep up with LIS trends, technology, and databases, all while keeping perspective on the essentials of library theory

Thinking About Teaching, and Other Things

I've been so busy filling up my spring dance card that I haven't been blogging. Here's what I'm up to, if you want to follow along at home.

Teaching 454, Digitial Information Services & Providers for Simmons GSLIS. Still teaching Dialog. What a great class this is! See online materials (all still under construction, but essential built):

• Course Outline
• Source List
• Reading List

... all of the above created with Google Pages. Notes maintained online using Zoho planner. Sites remembered using del.icio.us tag 454.

I'm going to be blogging periodically (monthly or so) over at ACRLBlog. The topic will be about academic librarians and faculty blogs. I've been reading quite a few lately (see some of my favorites tagged with teaching at del.icio.us), and thought a lot about what Steven Bell posted on ACRLBlog last year about the carnival of the professoriate. I've got a lot of ideas for blog posts -- themes mostly, sort of a continuation of the carnival -- but I'm open to new ideas, too. Let me know your favorite faculty blogs or faculty blog topics. I'm especially interested in finding more LIS faculty (adjunct or not) who blog.

And I'm going to give a version of a terrific presentation I saw at ASIS&T on usability at the Connecticut Library Association meeting in April. Paul Marty did a "Live Usability Lab" session in which he had members of the audience actually participate in usability testing of institutional repository sites -- he showed rather than explained how valuable usability testing is. Steve Cauffman and I will do a similar presentation using iCONN's resources as a test environment.

I promise I'm still thinking about cog sci, too -- just that my head is full of LIS for the moment ...

For More Information

• Marty, Paul F. and Michael Twidale , "Usability@90mph: Presenting and Evaluating a New, High-Speed Method for Demonstrating User Testing in Front of an Audience." FirstMonday. July, 2005.
• Varnum, Ken. Notes from Live Usability Lab @ ASIS&T 2007 on his rss4lib blog (Oct. 2007):
• Introductory thoughts from the session, calling Marty's session "so simple it's genius"
  
• Notes from the session & each usability test (note: I was a volunteer for test #2)
  

Images Online

I saw two great lists of free online images, both published in November. Thought I'd blog them here so I don't forget them ...

• Find free images online - Judy O'Connell's list (check out the rest of her blog too -- great library content from "down under")
• PresentationZen's 10 links to cool, high-rez images. These are mostly science and gorgeous.

Check out both the text of the blog posts as well as the comments.

My three favorite sites for images for PowerPoint presentations are ...

• Google images
• Flickr (there are some great shots here which nicely illustrate various points about reference that I like to make; see all images tagged library)
• stock.xchng "free stock photography." What I like about these is that you can enter a term like "change" and find relevant results. Ain't tagging grand?!
  

Library & Information Science Blog Posts

So I got an iPod Touch a few weeks ago, and it's swell. I love having the Internet anywhere in the house or at work, and this makes it much easier to keep up with blogs. Yay! Google Reader has a terrific mobile interface, which makes the blog posts easy to read. Say what you will about Google taking over the world, but they sure know what works for people. I wish libraries were more like Google in that respect. But I digress.

Anyway, I've had more time to browse / read blogs, both cognitive science and library science. Yay! I've seen things I want to blog. I star the items I want to blog and go back to them later, investigate, and write a blog post. I've also seen items I want to share with my LIS students. But that's not what this blog is for, and I can't take on another blog.

Google to the rescue! I can also "share" items:




Nifty! And because Google owns Blogger / Blogspot, I can easily embed the recently starred posts on the right navigation bar of this blog. If you have a Google Reader account, you can subscribe to my shared items and easily see the new posts.

Science Blogging: Translating 'Scientese' into English

Great session today on science blogging: Opening Science to All: Implications of Blogs and Wikis for Social and Scholarly Scientific Communication

Bora Zivkovic talked about the types of science blogging, which include ...

• Translating science into English;
• Combating pseudoscience (so that refutations of “pseudoscience“ show up in Google searches);
• Affecting policy - see The Scientific Activist;
• Fusing science & art; the history, philosophy, ethics of science (including, I would add, Hampshire College science & religion professor Salman Hameed‘s Science & Religion News);
• Blogging from the "field" - see Bonobo Handshake;
  Popular & serious science magazine blogs (Scientific American, Nature) ... and my favorite for last:
• Jokes - see interspecies communication via yoga !!

Jean-Claude Bradley, organic chemistry professor at Drexel, talked about "Open Notebook Science," which he compares to traditional "closed" lab notebooks and published articles where scientific data is not shared; instead Open Notebook Science is "full transparency" where all data, notes, etc. - everything that's been done -- is recorded. His Useful Chem Blog serves as integrative tool pulling together several of his blogs, including one for molecules and another for experiments. Bradley has been able to use his blog & wiki data to collaborate with other scientists to evaluate / contribute to various aspects of research, and he uses his wiki to work with his organic chemistry students.

Janet Stemwedel, professor in the department of philosophy at San Jose State University spoke about the "Social & Scientific Implications of Science Blogging." Stemwedel begins by arguing that scientific communication is essential to scientific practice - to gain resources, share information with the public, and as part of science education. Information has been shared through traditional channels such as peer-reviewed literature and conference presentations. These channels usually prevent communication between scientists and their lay audience. Some other limitations of traditional communication include biases among the small number of folks who are reading / commenting on the literature, as well as the delay between when the science was written and reported to when it is published. However, good science communication is useful both combat / screen out biases, and to cover research in many disciplines (cognitive science, anyone?)

Blogs have several promising features, like shorter time-frames between communication; and those with different disciplinary and geographic foci can participate, and there is a record of the "conversation" -- and blogging conference meetings can help make them less ephemeral (!). For current and prospective students of science, blogs can also be a window into the process of "scientific knowledge building" and what life is like as a practicing scientist (See Jane Compute is my favorite example).

Stemwedel concludes with some interesting questions and statements: do blogs help or hurt the scientists' professional reputation? Can blogs shift the culture? Increased communication between scientists and non-scientists could be a good thing.

The panelists were asked what they think are important research questions for the future of science blogging ...

• How do scientists learn what it means to be a good scientist?
• How does science actually get done (see examples via the Useful Chem blog / wiki)
• What is the life of the scientific article after publication? (post-publication peer-review)
  

For More Information

• List of useful science blogs at ScienceBlogs.com,
  
• Watch Jean-Claude Bradley's 13 minute screencast describing "the big picture and history of UsefulChem," and see his presentation at the Science Blogging Conference (@ Slideshare, from Jan 2007, but many slides similar to today's talk).
  
• Janet Stemwedel's blog: Adventures in Ethics in Science.
• eta: See Bora's links & photos from the session
• eta: Christina Pikas wrote a full summary of the presentation on her blog, Christina's LIS Rant.

Another Reason I Blog

This blog was originally intended to provide a spot to put articles, links, etc. I found that would interest "my" faculty & staff at Hampshire College's School of Cognitive Science. I became more and more interested in the interdisciplinary topic of cognitive science as time went on, especially psychology, but also computer science, education, and animal science. And philosophy. Well, ok, just about all aspects of cog sci interest me. As part of my own education, I would browsed through journals in the field so I'd know what "my" faculty were thinking about. As part of my job, I purchased books in the various fields, and I used the blog to highlight new books & databases. The focus of the blog was intended to be exclusively cognitive science.

Then I left Hampshire, and that was very sad because the faculty there is great fun. I have kept up my interest in cognitive science and I have taken to listening to podcasts during my 2.5 hours in the car each day. The combination of the two has led to many blog posts, as I try to synthesize what I've learned and share it with the world. Posting about what I've heard helps me remember what I've learned within the cognitive science realm.

On the other hand, I am a working librarian and a teacher of library science at Simmons Simmons Graduate School of Library & Information Science (at their Mount Holyoke College campus). There is some overlap between cognitive science and information science (think usability) and everyone likes to or needs to search, so some posts appeal to both the cogsci audience and the LIS audience. Also, I suspect that many of my regular readers are educators of one kind or another, so the periodic posts about teaching appeal to the cog sci audience.

Some topics, however, are weighted heavily to LIS and probably appeal more to my LIS colleagues, friends, and even former students. My occasional rants about marketing are a good example, as are the rarer posts about reference, or anything labeled "library science."

Why the mix of topics and audiences? I want to naturally, personally, show scientists & psychologists what we librarians do and how we think. It's partly my nature to be inclusive, but it's partly a mechanism through which I can demonstrate the "marketing" of library science without being dreadfully obvious about it. I read somewhere -- and I can't go back to the source, because I read this a few weeks, months, years ago (you all know how memory works, right?!) -- that it's a good idea for academic librarians to publish in the non-library literature to highlight what they do in a venue where their faculty colleagues congregate. I definitely can't get published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences or Trends in Cognitive Sciences, which some of you might read, but ... I can publish here and reach a few faculty / graduate students in cognitive science and psychology and philosophy.

It's a big Internet, but the nice thing is we can get to know each other in ways we can't quite in real life. So ... that's another reason I blog.

Welcome to readers of these science-y blogs ...
* BPS Research Digest (from the British Psychological Society)
* the Brain Science Podcast
* Channel N
* Combat Philosopher

and all you Googlers!

Blog- or Print Publishing?

Which is better in library-land (or scientific-land), blogging or print publishing?

I seem to remember that Jim Rettig, vice-president/president-elect of ALA, wondered in a campaign statement if librarians were blogging or writing in the print library literature? [note to self: the fact that YOU can't find this statement by Rettig should serve to keep you humble when you try to help patrons who don't remember where / when they read something. but we digress]

Stephen Abram said, when I slobbered over how much I love his Stephen's Lighthouse blog at ALA, (and I paraphrase): "It doesn't matter where you write, just get your ideas out there."

In an interview with Ken Auletta at the The New Yorker Conference The Web: 2012 in May, the Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington said that in the future, there would be blogs like the Huffington Post and New Yorker style writing and not much in between. That is, short bits of (accurate) information online and longer, more analytical, background-y pieces in print.

All of which I agree with -- even tho' some bits contradict other bits.

What I wonder is ... does it matter that librarians are writing more on blogs than in print? That by the time our ideas are in print, they are almost old news? Who is the audience for print library literature, anyway? Is it those of us in the biblioblogosphere? Is it those of us who want more detail than our old eyes can read online? Is it those of us who don't read library blogs but need (arguably) to keep up with what the young'uns (and I mean young-at-heart, creative, if you will, rather than age-young) are thinking and doing?

Why would I write something thoughtful on my blog rather than try to get an essay published? Hmmm. First of all ... timing. I can write here and 30-40 people a day will hit my blog -- a mix of librarians & non-librarians. Quickly. Immediately.

Another reason: I control the writing. Good & bad -- I've had some good editors who have helped me shape my writing and make it substantially better. I've also seen published articles in that could have used a good deal more editorial intervention.

Which reminds me of what Chris Anderson said in an IT Conversation with Moira Gunn: in between writing his Wired article on the Long Tail and his book of the same name, he blogged. Wrote up his ideas, got feedback from readers, revised his thinking and writing, got more ideas from readers, retweaked his own writing, and ... his book was better for it. According to him, anyway.

Of course, if you're going up for any kind of peer-review promotion, you need to publish in peer-reviewed journals. At least, that's the old way.

What's the new way? I don't know... only that I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I'd like to hear from you on this, either on the blog or by email. Even better if we can get a conversation going on the topic from librarians, future librarians, and other kinds of folks, academics, interested parties, etc.

Blog on!

Tips of all Kinds

From Guy Kawasaki's most excellent blog:

1. The Nine Biggest Myths of the Workplace by Penelope Trunk. Trunk, author of Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success, debunks some career myths. Find out why such aphorisms as "You’ll be happier if you have a job you like", "Job hopping will hurt me" and "Do good work, and you'll do fine" are not true.

2. Ten Questions With Penelope Trunk: Career Guidance for This Century, in which Trunk answers questions like "How much money does it take to be happy?" and "What's the ideal length of a resume in a world where every resume is electronic and not viewed printed out on paper?" (it's shorter than you think)

3. Make a List and Check It Twice: A Real-World Guide for Speakers and Presenters: some great tips for people who make a living giving speeches, but the tips are also useful for those of us who give talks here-n-there. (Direct link to Compulsive Obsession with Details will Save Your Neck When Giving Presentations from the blog Escape from Cubicle Nation)

4. Questions with Anastasia Goodstein, author of Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online. Some good tips here for YA librarians ... plus a link to a KQED interview with Goodstein.

Read More
If you don't read Guy's blog, you should.

Science Blogs

Science Librarian pal Naka Ishii receommended a cog sci blog I hadn't known about, which leads me to post this short list of science blogs new to me, and maybe to you.

Naka points me to Mind Matters, a cognitive science blog by Scientific American. Here's what they say: "Sciam.com's 'seminar blog' on the sciences of mind and brain. Each week, top researchers in neuroscience, psychology and psychiatry explain and discuss the research driving their fields."

It looks really good, but I will have to print the articles out & read them offline. Apparently my brain can't process science online! The brain charts are great -- clear and easy to understand.

The New York Times has a relatively new blog called TierneyLab. They say: "John Tierney always wanted to be a scientist but went into journalism because its peer-review process was a great deal easier to sneak through. ... [H]e's using TierneyLab to check out new research and rethink conventional wisdom about science and society." He's covered topics like Saturn's hexagon and peregrine falcons. Not exclusively cog sci, like Mind Matters, but it does cover some interesting things. Also lists a nice blogroll of science blogs.

Finally, my science reporter heroine, Sharon Begley, is now writing for Newsweek rather than the Wall Street Journal, and she's blogging there, too. Called Lab Notes, the blog inclusive science, which is to say, not exclusively cognitive science, but that doesn’t make it bad. Since starting the blog last month, she's written about insomnia, hormones, and cancer therapy. Keep an eye on her column in Newsweek -- the April 9 issue has a good review about "messy reptilian brains" which I'll recap shortly.