Interview with Google Scholar co-creator, Anurag Acharya

In my instruction sessions with students, I often do a quick poll of how many people use Google Scholar to find articles - the percentage has gone up substantially in recent years, and it makes me wonder about the money we spend on buying access to bibliographic index databases. But that's a discussion for another day.

These days, every faculty member and grad student I have asked in individual consultation sessions uses Google Scholar.

I'd say most librarians have conflicted feelings about Google Scholar, and this interview doesn't do anything to change that. We still don't know where Google Scholar is looking - or where it is not looking. But it's interesting to hear from a person who is instrumental in developing something which in ten years has transformed how scholarly research is discovered.

See also a linked article:

How to tame the flood of literature - Recommendation services claim to help researchers keep up with the most important papers without becoming overwhelmed.

Changes at the Sciences & Engineering Library (@SEL) - Fall 2010 - elevators, shelves, and names - oh my!

We've been busy this summer.

Because the campus Facilities Planning is upgrading the electrical system in our building, we lost a little space on every floor, and about half the Library's basement. We installed motorized compact shelving in the remaining basement space to maximize the storage capacity there; that propelled our decision to rearrange our collections to take the best advantage of this change. In short:

• All circulating books - 3rd floor
• All bound journals - 1st floor & Basement

Here's our current floor directory
 
Unfortunately, due to bureaucratic issues, we are not allowed to use the basement yet. Thus, the journals shelved there are unavailable to us until the Amherst Fire Department signs off on the room. Articles from those journals can be requested through Interlibrary Loan.

Also, the long-awaited elevator replacement project has begun.  The north elevator in the Lederle Low Rise was replaced over the summer. They are now working (intermittently) on the one in SEL. Until they are done, we must use the elevator at the north end outside the Library to move books from floor to floor (for reshelving, e.g.).  If you need to get from floor to floor in the Library, and have limited mobility, please let us know and we can assist.

Finally, we have amended the name of the Library, dropping "Integrated" because it doesn't mean anything now, and because it caused confusion for our patrons, who have been known to go by mistake to the new Integrated Sciences Building instead of Lederle to reach us.  This required a lot of website editing, and I'm not convinced we found them all, so if you find "Integrated Sciences and Engineering Library" on our website, please let us know! I also changed the name of the blog - since we are now acronym-ized as SEL, we are blogging as @SEL.  Hope you like the change.

Science Blogs

As you all know, the blogosphere is burgeoning - people have things to say, and the Web makes it possible for folks to find an audience easily. The thing to do is find the right name!

I was reading a blog I found through the environmentalresearchweb newswire written by a woman named Liz Kalaugher doing Arctic research onboard the icebreaker/research vessel Amundsen, and started wondering if someone was collecting all the science blogs.

So I Googled "science blogs" - and found someone has taken that name. Seed Media Group has a site called "Science Blogs" - a group of about 70+ bloggers that this company has selected. So no, I haven't found a collection of all science blogs yet, but there's some pretty interesting stuff on this site - not just people propounding their own point of view, but discussion from readers. In my opinion, that's where the real action is.

For instance, I sampled a blog called Drug Monkey which is written by DrugMonkey, an NIH-funded biomedical researcher, and PhysioProf, an NIH-funded basic science faculty member at a private medical school. PhysioProf was ranting about (1) the way up-and-coming scientists - grad students, post-docs - are not exposed to the possibilities of 'alternative' career paths other than 'academic science' (in the private sector); and (2) don't expect him to change the system - he's only one person. This piece was posted yesterday, and there are 40 responses from thoughtful (mostly) people as of this writing. Forty responses tells me the blog has a lot of people who follow it, not only reading but writing in. It's a little community.

If anyone finds a big list of science blogs from different sources, please let me know - I'd like to start collecting them, if not reading them!

Another blog

I really enjoy Olivia Judson's blog posts for the New York Times. She's an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College in London, and she's witty, imaginative and seems really smart. Today's post discusses the bacteria discovered in rocks deep below the seafloor, and the possibility that they may contribute to weathering of the crust. She has blogged about ichnofossils, rain-seeding bacteria, and what the world would be like if all genetic mutation stopped. She is given to flights of fancy, like this one on dinosaur mating habits:

"Which brings me to my tyrannical fantasy. I want to take a journey 68 million years back in time to see a Tyrannosaurus rex couple mating. What was it like? Did they trumpet and bellow and stamp their feet? Did they thrash their enormous tails? Did he bite her neck in rapture and exude a musky scent? Somehow, I imagine that when two T. rex got it on, the earth shook for miles around."

Or this one on things that live among pineapple leaves:

"The other day, I went to the supermarket to buy a pineapple. I didn’t select the one that smelled the ripest, but the one with the most impressive leaves: tall, bushy and uncrushed by the journey from Costa Rica. When I got it home, I put it in the kitchen sink, turned on the tap, and watched how the water gathered and formed pools in the spaces between the leaves. And I began to imagine that I was not a human in an apartment in London, but a small frog in a tropical forest, climbing up the leaves of a plant like a pineapple, looking for a pool where I could deposit the tadpole I’m carrying on my back."

Her curiosity as an evolutionary biologist leads her to think about a range of environments, from clouds to the "deep subsurface biosphere." As a geologist, I find lots to think about in her articles. Take a look at a couple yourself. They make for provocative reading, but they're somehow relaxing.