Events I Will Be Leading

I thought some of you might be interested in this Continuing Ed class I'm co-teaching with Terry Plum in November about open access journals: "Open Access and Free Scholarly Resources: What Are They and How Can You Find Them?"

Terry will answer these questions & more: What is Open Access? What does it mean for libraries, with respect to journals, databases, and other scholarly resources? What do publishers think of this model, and who pays for it? We will provide a brief overview of the Open Access movement and discuss future possibilities. We will also address related issues such as the Google Book Project, the Open Content Alliance, and journal embargoes.

I will talk about how we can find these Open Access journals. These are usually free, so it's a nice way of adding content for your users at no cost. Terry and I will review harvesting standards and protocols such as OpenURL. I will demonstrate some academic resources such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) as well as some free scholarly search engines such as the science search engine Scirus and Google Scholar. Finally, we will discuss how you can promote use of these resources to your patrons.

Date: Nov. 4, from 10-1:30.

Location: GSLIS West Office, across from the campus of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass. Easy access for western Mass. & Connecticut residents, and lots of free parking.

Cost: $160 -- current GSLIS students & faculty can register for half price!

See Simmons Continuing Ed Workshops @ Mount Holyoke for more info or see our Facebook event.

Condoms @ Your Library

Yes, it’s true! This is my favorite example (so far) of libraries thinking outside the box to promote their services.

The October 2007 issue of American Libraries writes about the Penn State Altoona Eiche Library’s recent participation in a recent student health fair. Library staff sponsored a booth where they gave away free condoms with “Eiche Library: Facts You Need Between the Covers” stickers on the packages. Hee! They made glossy bookmarks with the call numbers of sex-related library materials, had a display of sex-related books & reference materials, and had a sex quiz modeled on their library’s existing trivia quizzes.

Terrific idea!

For More Info.
* Imler, Bonnie and Michelle Tomaszewski. “The Powers of Attraction.“ American Libraries, Oct2007, Vol. 38 Issue 9, p60-61. Free online if you’re an ALA member.

Oliver Sacks Now

["... Now" is a short post of cog sci topics in the news]

Oliver Sacks is plugging his new book, Musicophilia : Tales of Music and the Brain (New York : Knopf, 2007), and you can follow along:

* He had an article in the Sept. 24 issue of The New Yorker A Neurologist’s Notebook: The Abyss (subtitle: music & amnesia).

* He was briefly interviewed in the October issue of Wired, with expanded coverage online: Oliver Sacks on Earworms, Stevie Wonder and the View From Mescaline Mountain.

* And while this isn’t recent, Jaime Diskin blogs about an interview in which Oliver Sacks talks about musicophilia. Diskin says: "In January, 2006, everyone's favourite Brain doctor, Oliver Sacks spoke with the New Yorker staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar in a series hosted by the Columbia University Arts Initiative. One of the subjects he talked about was the brain's reaction to music and in particular, the strange phenomenon of musicphilia." (and check out the rest of Jaime Diskin’s blog as there is some cool multimedia / neuroscience stuff).

edited to add
* On Nov. 1, Oliver Sacks was interviewed on WHYY's Radio Times: "In his new book, Musicophilia, neurologist OLIVER SACKS examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people." Listen to the show via RealAudio or download in iTunes (usually available only for a limited time)

Seniors & Medical Information

Read an interesting article yesterday from JASIS&T which covered usability for seniors in two domains: first, the article talks about how seniors get information about drugs, and then it talks about how they look for information about drugs within two specific web sites.

Given, Ruecker, et al write about an study they did on Inclusive Interface Design for Seniors: Image-browsing for a Health Information Context in the Sept. 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. While seniors are prescribed drugs by their doctors, they rarely call their physicians for drug-related information, even though "seniors are particularly prone to negative drug interactions, hospitalizations, addictions, etc. as a result of improperly identifying their medications" (many recent articles support this).

Instead, seniors are more likely to get drug & drug interaction information from their pharmacist, followed by contacting "personal contacts" (friends and family, "especially those working in the health care field." Note that libraries don't show up on this list of trusted information sources.

Seniors like using the Internet for find health / drug information, but they are aware of the potential accuracy / bias problems that exist on the Web, including the "difficulties sorting out drug 'ads' from truly informational Web sites."

The authors tested a couple of interfaces with a group of 12 seniors to see how different sites met their needs with respect to identifying specific pills. A major problem that seniors have using the Web is physiological: difficulty reading small font, trouble distinguishing colors and even small shapes -- which is especially important when trying to find "their" medication on a Web site. And as frequently happens when doing usability testing, the participants often didn't see the "affordances" on the page, such as a "zoom" feature, while others didn't see the "sort" button.

The study itself was an interesting insight into how older folks use Web sites, especially one that is geared to them, and to addressing one of their serious information needs.

I read it thinking ,"how can libraries market their services to seniors?" Here are a couple of ideas: provide local pharmacists with information about the public library -- hours / phone number / contact information, maybe a handout with selected health resources available through the library -- telling the seniors, via a trusted resource -- how we in the library can help them. Perhaps we could put this in emergency rooms also? I don't know what the protocols are, but ... that's where seniors are, and when they need health information. And aren't we good at providing information to people, when they need it?


For More Information
Given, Lisa, Stan Ruecker et al. Inclusive Interface Design for Seniors: Image-browsing for a Health Information Context Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Volume 58, Issue 11 (September 2007), pp: 1610 - 1617. Link to abstract; full-text available only with subscription, or check out Interlibrary Loan.

Event I *Will* Attend

Next Generation Library Catalogs

Wednesday, November 7, 2007
1:00 - 4:00pm
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Campus Center Auditorium

As a library’s key database and the one system with which most users interact, the online library catalog has been evolving for over 30 years. Software upgrades, enhanced functions and performance improvements have brought us a long way. In the past two years, however, catalogs have begun to undergo a change that is more dramatic. Driven by evolving user expectations and the explosion of web 2.0 technologies, library databases are on the verge of a paradigm shift that warrants consideration as a whole new generation of discovery and delivery tool.

Come and hear more about this “next generation” of library catalogs from some folks on the front lines:

David Lindahl is Director of Digital Library Initiatives for the River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester. He has extensive experience in library-related digital research and design projects and is currently co-principal investigator for the eXtensible Catalog Project.

Jennifer Ward is the Head of Web Services for the University of Washington Libraries and manages the Libraries' usability program. She is part of the University’s WorldCat Local implementation team.

Anne M. Prestamo is Associate Dean for Collection & Technology Services at Oklahoma State University Library. Dr. Prestamo's main area of interest is with technology for the delivery of library resources and she has been involved with Oklahoma State’s implementation of AquaBrowser.

This free program is sponsored by the Five College (MA) Library Directors (with support from Simmons College GSLIS West)
Advance registration required

For More Info
* Further program information and some interesting reading are available
* Oklahoma State University's AquaBrowser catalog
* University of Washington's WorldCat Local

Events I Wish I Could Attend

Coupla interesting events at UConn / Hampshire that I wish I could attend. Darn work, always getting in the way. Anyway, they're fun to think about, and maybe you can attend one or the other...

From the University of Connecticut, comes this announcement of their Cognitive Science fall colloquium schedule:
C.L. (Larry) Hardin, Syracuse University (Philosophy) Friday Oct 12, 4 pm BOUS 160 (the Alivin Liberman Room)
Title: TBA
Larry Hardin is the author of the groundbreaking book Color for Philosophers (librarian alert: subject heading = Color (Philosophy) heh heh) and numerous articles on color, perception, and the mind-body problem.
His talk will focus on color and is co-sponsored by the UConn Philosophy Department.

And from Hampshire College's Culture Brain & Development program,
Thursday, October 18 at 5:30 p.m. at Hampshire College, Amherst, MA
"Autism: What does it mean to be a spectrum disorder?"
Public Lecture by Roberto Tuchman, M.D.
Location: Franklin Patterson Hall Main Lecture Hall, Hampshire College

ABSTRACT
The labels of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) or Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD) are commonly used to describe individuals who have varying deficits in verbal and nonverbal communication, social skills and a restricted repertoire of interests or repetitive behaviors. These labels are now used interchangeably with autism. The criteria for determining who is and is not affected by autism are based on arbitrary clinical behaviors. The characteristic clinical feature that set autism apart from other disorders of brain development associated with communication and behavioral problems are impairments in reciprocal social interaction. Is there more autism or are we just recognizing it more? How do we define social deficits? What are the causes of autism and what factors biologically and culturally impact the social phenotype? How do early deficits in social communication lead to the clinical phenotype of autism, and what are the cellular and neural mechanisms that define the social constructs that determine social cognition? These questions will be discussed from the perspective of child neurology. The focus of the discussion will be on the changing criteria of autism over time and how this has affected the concept of the "normal" social phenotype. Examples of etiologies of autism will be discussed. The early social constructs that determine an individual's distinctive social phenotype will be demonstrated. Our present understanding of the neuronal networks responsible for social behavior will be reviewed and discussed in terms of intervention strategies for social communication disorders.

About the speaker:
Roberto Tuchman, M.D., FAAN, FAAP, is the director of Autism and Related Disorder Programs at Miami Children's Hospital Dan Marino Center (note football connection) and director of Developmental and Behavioral Neurology at Miami Children's Hospital. Dr. Tuchman is an Associate Professor of Neurology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. See some of his publications in PubMed. He is a graduate of Hampshire College (73).Yay Hampshire grads!

CogSci to PsycINFO?!

It's not often that my cognitive science interests and my library science interests overlap, but here's one of those times. This note came into my email & I thought it might interest others:

APA Invites You to Participate in a Cognitive Science Survey

Dear Colleagues,

As a result of some requests from librarians, APA is seriously considering the development of a cognitive science add-on to PsycINFO. This enhanced version of PsycINFO would feature a new coverage list of journals not currently covered in the database, as well as new index terms. Searching across the entire database would be seamless.

We'd like to hear your thoughts about this idea. Please go complete a brief survey online (note: it really was brief!) - and enter our raffle for a chance to win a $350 Amazon gift certificate.

Please let me know if you have questions.

Cordially,

Susan B. Hillson
Manager, Customer Relations

PsycINFO/American Psychological Association 750 First Street, NE Washington DC 20002-4242 shillson@apa.org

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.

Q&A NJ at the VMAs

Awesome video spotted by Stephen Francoeur & posted on his Digital Reference blog.

Apparently Q&A NJ, New Jersey's virtual reference service, purchased air time for a commercial on the MTV Video Music Awards, Sunday, September 9, 2007.



Awesome! That's *definitely* thinking outside the box. Yay, Q&A NJ!!

Two of My Favorite Things ...

Football & libraries are RIGHT HERE in the Sept. 7 copy of Entertainment Weekly:


Gosh, that makes me smile.

If I were to quibble ... it would be petty.

Go ALA! Go football! Go “thinking outside the box marketing”!

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