Emerging Practices in Science and Technology Librarianship

Amy Besnoy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317985587
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Business

This book investigates the emerging practices of science and technology librarians specific to maintaining collections, providing access to resources, and ensuring that informed decisions are made regarding limited financial resources. Issues discussed include librarians becoming embedded in curriculum design and delivery, the continuum of librarian involvement, science literacy and the intersection with lifelong learning, integration of information literacy into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) curriculum, development of course-related instruction programs. In addition, chapters include the differentiation between locating and accessing content and the economics of access, data driven collection and retention decisions, social networking and the scientific community, the trend to merge IT with libraries, institutional repositories, and managing productivity.

Each chapter considers the change that is occurring in and around the profession and together these chapters present a notable set of reflections on the changes that are necessary for science and technology librarians to thrive in the shifting information landscape. This book is recommended for scholars and professional librarians.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Library Administration.

Introduction

AMY L. BESNOY

University of San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA

If there were one word to summarize this journal issue, it would be change. As technology changes around us, we must adapt to the changes while maintaining collections, providing access to resources, and ensuring that in this difficult economic time we make prudent decisions about our limited financial resources. Further, we are called to expand the vision of what librarians and libraries do to stay current and relevant. The library, after all, is a growing organism (Ranganathan, 1963) and with growth comes change and adaptability.

I had the good fortune—and perhaps foresight—to attend the Association of Research Libraries Fall Forum: Reinventing Science Librarianship in Washington, DC, in October 2008. There, I met a remarkably impressive group of people, and the topic for this journal issue began to develop. Over time, this issue has taken shape with an array of scholars from North America who are thoughtful and engaging. It has been an honor to work with them as these special issues has evolved and changed. The patterns of this issue are intriguing to me as a large number of the submissions are specific to pedagogy, and there is much variation and range within this area—how we as librarians integrate our lessons into curriculum and in the classroom by partnering with teaching faculty and embedding ourselves in curriculum design and delivery. Cecelia Brown and June Abbas address the complexities of institutional repositories in a remarkably accessible manner. Kay Cunningham clearly illuminates that just staying current is going to cost money amidst the rapidly changing information landscape. The scientific community and Web 2.0 social networking technologies are surveyed by Sue O’Dell and discussed as part of what she refers to as the ongoing discovery process. Maliaca Oxnam highlights a successful collaboration across typically disparate entities through a collaborative partnership of engineering and government document librarians to achieve digital access and preservation of federal government technical reports. Through a survey examining students’ attitudes toward science literacy and lifelong learning as addressed in the Association of College Research Libraries (ACRL)’s Science and Technology’s Information Literacy standards, Irina Holden concludes that to achieve responsible citizenship, science literacy must intersect with lifelong learning.

Collection and retention decisions are driven largely by data, especially in difficult financial times, and the data to make collection decisions must be accompanied by narrative to assist in its interpretation, Locke Morrisey imparts. In the subsequent issue, Norma Kobzina discusses a unique relationship with the teaching faculty of an interdisciplinary course in which librarians and library staff worked closely with faculty and graduate student instructors to collaboratively develop course-related instruction programs. By linking her university’s learning objectives with the ACRL Science and Technology’s Information Literacy standards, Jeanine Marie Scaramozzino sets forth a comprehensive and integrated program for bringing information literacy into the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) curriculum.

An exploration of evolving digital services is handled well by Carol Hunter, Sherry Lake, Carla Lee, and Andrew Sallans. Their case study addresses the intrinsic interdisciplinary nature of the library and the trend to merge IT with libraries and the unique cultures within each organization. Scott Warren and Kim Duckett bring students into the economic conversation of the high price of science materials and differentiate between locating and accessing content. Peggy Pritchard suggests a continuum of librarian involvement ranging from supplemental to embedded, which is dependent on the support of the departmental teaching faculty. Managing productivity is addressed by Catherine K. Craven, Victoria Goode, Claire Twose, Dongming Zhang, and Nancy Roderer in their interesting discussion of the database management system their institution implemented to quantitatively assess service.

Throughout Parts 1 and 2 of these special issues, the reader will encounter a variety of terms for librarian—informationists, information specialists, subject specialists—and for libraries—knowledge centers, Learning Commons, research centers. Regardless of the names, the work and resources are changing. Access across platforms and disciplines are becoming increasingly more complex and we are called to consider revising our teaching, collection and retention processes, access points, assessment tools, productivity expectations, and, in some ways, our identities as science and technology librarians.

REFERENCE

Ranganathan, S. R. (1963). The five laws of library science, 2nd ed. Bombay: Asia Publishing.

Institutional Digital Repositories for Science and Technology: A View from the Laboratory

CECELIA BROWN and JUNE M. ABBAS

University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA

ABSTRACT. Institutions across the United States are actively creating institutional repositories (IRs) and an array of field-specific online collections, especially in the biological sciences. The 20 earth and biological scientists interviewed for this article embrace online resources for use in their research, teaching, and creative activities and, although previously unaware of the functions of an IR, unanimously support the development of one at the University of Oklahoma. The ability to share scholarly information across campus and to securely archive data are seen as valuable attributes of an IR. Despite their endorsement, participants have little interest in spending time and effort in creating an IR beyond voluntarily submitting their published works.

INTRODUCTION

Institutions worldwide have created a host of openly accessible online repositories populated with locally produced scientific works, including preprints, postprints, data sets, technical reports, photographs, animations, videos, and teaching materials. These institutional repositories (IR) are considered effective tools for showcasing an organization’s scientific research by making it publicly available. Additionally, by providing a centralized mechanism for scientists to organize and store their research-related information, IRs ensure preservation of an institution’s intellectual capital. Because science libraries organize, store, and provide access to information for use in scientific research, science librarians are ideally positioned to spearhead the development of their institution’s IR. However, use of openly accessible IRs may be challenging for scientists who are accustomed to traditional journal-based scientific communication, as IRs raise questions about data ownership and intellectual property rights. Plus, the development and maintenance of an IR requires an investment of valuable and often scarce resources. However, for an IR to be successful and enduring, it must be used by and considered beneficial to the intended audience. To understand scientists’ perceptions of IRs, faculty members studying a range of problems related to earth and biological sciences were asked about the benefits, drawbacks, and uses of IRs for scientific communication. The impressions about IRs of 20 scientists in the fields of astronomy, geography, geology, meteorology, microbiology, and zoology were gathered during a series of in-depth interviews at the University of Oklahoma, Norman Campus, and are presented in this article. Additionally, to assist science librarians in understanding the current state of geoscience and biology repositories at institutions in the United States, the findings of a survey of repositories at the schools ranked among the top geoscience and biology graduate programs by U.S. News & World Report (2009) are given. Knowledge of the value of IRs to scientists researching a wide array of problems, in combination with an understanding of the currently available science-oriented IRs, will assist science librarians in deciding whether the creation of a science oriented IR is a worthwhile endeavor for their institution to undertake.

WHY CREATE AN IR FOR SCIENCE INFORMATION?

Science is a social enterprise that depends on researchers sharing their methods and data so that others can reproduce—and hence verify—one another’s claims. This long tradition of scientists disseminating their research results contributes to the advancement of scientific knowledge and understanding. Physicists, particularly those studying high-energy physics, have been openly sharing their research for over four decades, first using paper preprints, and now electronically as eprints. An eprint is the precursor to an article that may eventually be published in a peer-reviewed journal. Paul Ginsparg launched the pioneering online preprint repository, arXiv.org, in 1991 to facilitate and enhance the sharing of research findings within the high-energy physics community. Enumeration of the citations made to the works in the physics section of arXiv.org indicates that eprints have become an established and vital component of communication among physicists even though the works have not been vetted through the peer review process (Ginsparg, 1996; Youngen, 1998; Brown, 1999). It is the absence of peer-review that causes scientists in other disciplines to be less inclined to adopt an eprint model for sharing results (Butler, 1999; Glaze, 1999; Koenig, 2000; Marshall, 1999a, 1999b; Wilkinson, 1998). Direct tallying of the citations to the eprints in Elsevier’s Chemistry Preprint Server (CPS) illustrates that chemists have not accepted eprints to the same extent as have physicists (Brown, 2003). Although authors depositing their work in the CPS find the eprints posted to be of high quality and enjoy the platform provided for the discussion of current chemical research, they express concern over not only the lack of peer review but also about the permanence of eprint storage (Brown, 2003). This skepticism, combined with the refusal of editors of the top chemistry journals to subsequently publish papers previously posted on the server essentially caused the CPS to fail after a brief online presence from 2000 to 2004. Although the eprint may not be the preferred way to communicate research results in most scientific fields, the push to disseminate publications online after they have passed through the peer-review gauntlet is gaining support by funding agencies and several scientific journal publishers. The U.S. National Institute of Health’s (NIH) public access policy, signed by President George W. Bush in 2007, requires all NIH-funded researchers to submit an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts to the National Library of Medicine’s openly accessible repository, PubMed Central (Suber, 2008; Trager, 2008). Additionally, the prestigious multidisciplinary journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, gives authors the opportunity to have their submission immediately available online upon acceptance. However, this option comes for a price of $1,000 per article (National Academy of Sciences, 2008).

Open accessibility not only gives scientists the ability to reproduce another laboratory’s research results but also increases a work’s visibility. Citation analysis of openly accessible journals in several fields indicates an “early view” citation advantage that allows scientists to read and cite an article earlier than if the work only appeared in a print journal. Several studies of openly accessible journals in a wide variety of fields, including agriculture, biology, computer science, engineering, mathematics, medicine, and physics, indicate that articles appearing online are cited at higher rates than articles that are not electronically available (Fosmire & Yu, 2000; Lawrence, 2001; Antelman, 2004; Brody et al., 2004; McVeigh, 2004; Moed, 2007; Sotudeh & Horri, 2007). However, this initial citation advantage of open accessibility appears to be diminishing, perhaps because of the increasing ease of distributing and accessing articles beyond publishers’ Web sites, eprint servers, and other easily trackable open-access modes (Davis, 2008). As scientists disseminate and access information using a range of electronic modes such as laboratory Web sites, digital repositories, listserves, and blogs, it becomes difficult to attribute citation influences to just one means of open distribution. This effect points to the potential impact institutions can have if their scientists are provided a quick, efficient, and measurable digital means of disseminating scholarly output. As more and more scientific information becomes available, online institutional support will be essential for ensuring that researchers maintain a visible, easily accessible, and quantifiable online presence.

In addition to making peer-reviewed journal articles electronically available, several scientific disciplines are taking advantage of the ability to store terabytes of information cheaply and effectively for long periods of time. This ability allows collaborating scientists around the world to share information without time and geographical constraints and h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Index