Scholarly Communication in the Sciences, The Soap Opera

This article was part of last week’s reading for my ST info sources class. After reading several academic articles examining what constitutes the communication process in the sciences (largely informal but uses formal publication to establish priority) and why this supports an open scientific community, this New Yorker piece “Manifold Destiny” by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber pretty much summed it up from the human, real world perspective. It’s a fun read.

Can you say taking 5 classes?

I haven’t updated this blog in donkey’s years, but here’s a quick rundown of what’s been going on, in no particular order.

1) I went to a beautiful poetry reading by Steve Kronen, who also happens to be a public librarian. V. encouraging for dual MLIS/MFA seekers such as myself, and his poems are wonderful. I highly recommend his book Splendor.

2) My library is getting Central Search to replace MetaLib as our federated database search, and from the demo today it looks promising. Also, I finally got to meet our library’s head systems librarian. Too bad I was wearing a t-shirt and jeans, my comfort uniform that I put on in preparation for my three hour Melville exam.

3) This semester I’m taking Information Sources and Services for Science and Technology, and surprisingly liking it a lot. My partner and I are going to prepare a presentation on Physics resources for our final project, getting back to my once upon a time scientific roots.

4) I’ve discovered Alexander Press’s online classical music listening library, which my library subscribes to, so no more lonely silent mornings in collection development. I have music to keep me company now, on demand.

5) Collection development: that’s my internship post this semester, and I’m enjoying it so far despite the manual labor aspect. I like the communicative process between library and faculty and I feel special reading the titles of new books first.

Whew! Back to homework.