Actually, PubMed has never been very good…

March 30th, 2008 Stewart

I Am Not Yelling. Not Out Loud. - Lab Life - Anna Kushnir’s blog on Nature Network

As the blogger above will testify, PubMed is not at all attuned to how modern searchers search. On the other hand, it really has never been a particularly good search engine, so I don’t know why this is striking so many librarians as a harsh criticism. PubMed isn’t bad for government work, but it has many problems as we all know.

This isn’t an information literacy issue either, I’m sorry to say. Researchers and clinicians shouldn’t have to “learn to search” to be able to run basic searches, and instead they should call the librarian when things get rough. The analogy I like to use is for car owners: Everyone should be able to pump their own gas, some might even change their own oil, but sometimes you need to hire a pro to come in and fix the transmission.

Unfortunately, many of the competing products, including my old standby Ovid, are also just terrible for running simple MEDLINE searches. Partly this is due to legacy problems with MEDLINE, partly it’s due to limitations with the MeSH and the indexing, and partly it’s due to PubMed being coded in the mid-1990s and remaining largely unchanged this whole time. Researchers used to complain about PubMed’s imprecision; clinicians complained about getting too many hits. And now, we’re going to have a new generation of searchers used to very simple, effective techniques that work fine in Google and elsewhere not getting what they need either…

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Truth, Justice and the American Copyright…

March 28th, 2008 Stewart

The Siegel Superman decision - Uncivil Society

I’m going to be very curious to see how this ultimately turns out, but this is clearly a significant victory for the Siegels. (Another court battle over SuperBOY has already wreaked havoc in the DC Universe.) It could also make  an interesting touchstone for discussion of copyright issues in an information literacy class.

I’m just eager for the day when Superman, Batman and other heroes developed in the early 1930s finally revert to public domain, to become truly classic heroes like Robin Hood and King Arthur. Decisions like the ones were seeing above give me some reason to hope we might see this transition happen within my lifetime.

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Listening to: Annie Lennox - Dark Road
via FoxyTunes

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Cost of doing business

March 27th, 2008 Stewart

StickerShock2 from Cornell

I used to point to the first StickerShock exhibit in my old E-Journals workshop as an example of how libraries are trying to make their constituencies aware of the appallingly high subscription costs we face collectively. Particularly astonishing to me are titles like Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering or International Journal of Solids and Structures, where the cost per use is so high that interlibrary loans might actually be more cost effective, if less convenient.

Recently my co-editor Chris Hollister and I placed the first volume of Communications in Information Literacy on Lulu.com as a print-on-demand edition. For our open access title, if we were to sell 10 copies of the print edition, we would raise enough money to pay for our web hosting costs for a full year. Granted, the cost of running our small e-journal is considerably less than the cost of producing a journal for, say, Elsevier, but then we’re not trying to make $9 billion in profits each year either.

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RSS workshop slides

March 27th, 2008 Stewart

Okay, I’m having a lot of trouble posting these with this template for some reason. The slides are from a recent RSS workshop I gave, in preparation for a whole series of Web 2.0/3.0 workshops I hope to teach this fall:

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It all begins with Gygax

March 4th, 2008 Stewart

Dungeons & Dragons Co - Creator Dies at 69 - New York Times

Unusual for me to post anything personal on this blog, but I felt the situation warranted it. Gary Gygax died today, and that’s actually kind of a big deal for me.

You see, like a lot of librarians, I’m a nerd. I was born a nerd; I’ll die a nerd. Although today’s nerds have a certain degree of cache (librarian-chic being just one example of this), I’m an old school nerd.

What D&D did was to help nerds find each other. When I transferred to my small town junior high school in 1982, from an even smaller rural school, I didn’t know anyone and making friends was really hard. One day, though, I happened into the library at just the right time, and saw a small band of my fellow dorks gathered around a copy of the Monster Manual rolling a few dice and laughing with each other. I had found my people. The same thing happened my first month in college and I’m happy to report that I’m still good friends with most of the role-players I met then. I even have a standing invite to their monthly game, and I’m hoping to take them up on it soon.

What Gygax created was Gaming 0.0, a social network for the socially outcast, and one that didn’t need monitors, joysticks, headsets or soundcards to join — just your imagination, a pencil and a sheet of paper. (D20s you could borrow from your friends.)

I know public libraries have had a great deal of success recently with LAN parties and Saturday MMORPG sessions. May I suggest, in honor of Mr. Gygax and his legacy, a return to our roots? If you’re in the position to set it up, get a D&D session going at your local library this month, and hold your vorpal swords high in tribute to the man who started it all, and gave a lot of kids some great memories and great friendships.

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Listening to: Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark - So In Love
via FoxyTunes

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