Beyond Peer Review: Highlights from #Scio11

 

Science Online 2011 Badge

Overview:

After a whirlwind American Library Associations MidWinter and a couple vacation days with my family in California I headed across the United States to North Carolina for Science Online 2011, held in Research Triangle Park. For those of you not familiar with Science Online it bills itself as an un-conference, a place where the presenters are there to facilitate a discussion, but the audience is the real source information.

I’ve been to a few un-conferences and know that you’re probably thinking about how lots of un-conference sessions fail to deliver, but I have to say that all the un-conference discussions at #scio11 that I attended had extremely engaged presenters and audience members. ?Instead of wishing the session would just end at a certain point, sessions left you wishing that you had an extra hour or two to continue your discussion.

Un-conferences are often thought of as less professional, less rigorous, but #scio11 blows those preconceptions out of the water. Unlike a traditional conference where you may be speaking with your peers in a niche area attendees at #scio11 came from many backgrounds, just to give you a small idea of the types of people I met: industry researchers, university faculty, high school teachers & students, journal editors, journalists, programmers, and science bloggers, to see more check out the #scio11 attendee list. These attendees were not a passive audience but an active and vital force which provided insight and caused discussions to turn in exciting, if unexpected, directions.

In the interest of full disclosure, and so you don’t think I’m sugar coating things, there was one snafu during the workshops on Friday when we apparently overloaded the server because the Internet connections slowed to a crawl when a room full of people tried to load and use Prezi at the same time. As far as technical problems go I didn’t consider it that big of a deal, but I suspect with the proposed change in venue next year that it won’t be a problem in the future.

Bora's 2010

A great opening:

…by Bora & Anton (the main organizers of #scio11) followed by one of the most interesting opening speeches I’ve ever attended by Robert Krulwich. What was unique about Robert Krulwich’s speech was that instead of using slides he used audio clips to illustrate his talk and then surprised us with a video clip at the end. His talk has me seriously considering if that might not be an effective way to present in the future. Clearly a master of audio timing I’d highly recommend that you listen to Krulwich’s keynote speech!

SciO11 Video: Bora & Anton Opening (Part 1)
SciO11 Video: Bora & Anton Opening (Part 2)
SciO11 Video: Robert Krulwich Keynote (Part 1)
SciO11 Video: Robert Krulwich Keynote (Part 2)
SciO11 Video: Robert Krulwich Keynote (Part 3)

 

Biomanufacturing:

GoldenLeaf Biomanufacturing Facility

Thanks to Russ Campbell of the Burroughs Wellcome Trust without whom we would not have been able to tour the Golden LEAF Biomanufacturing Training & Education Center. I have to admit that initially I signed up for this tour because it was an area I needed to learn more about for work, however, thanks to Winnell Newman who provided the tour, Walter, Rhianna, and Russ I not only learned a lot about the biomanufacturing industry and training, but had a fun time while doing so.

Completely blown away:

Luckily I sat with Stacy Baker and some of the students from her class blog, Extreme Biology at the group dinners Friday night. Not only was I impressed with the maturity of Stacy’s students, but also with their intelligence and depth of thought. ?I honestly think Stacy’s students were the smartest people in the room and I had a great time chatting with them and finding out about their hopes and dreams for the future. Watch out, Stacy’s students are going to change the world, they’re already doing it!

Sigma Xi Wall of Nobel Prize Winners
Sigma Xi Wall of Nobel Prize Winners

Discussions:

Active participation was the key to the #Scio11 experience. I learned more about advances and issues in science, data curation, and science communication from the free-range discussion sessions and the individual conversations in the hall than I could ever have learned digging around the Internet.

If you’re a science librarian, scientist, science enthusiast, or journalist and want to know what the hot issues are, what people really want, #Scio12 will be the place to be next January. I’m really grateful to @2020Science for making me aware of the convention, it may have been the most useful information I’ve been passed all year.

Special Swag & Other Goodness:

1) The Beautiful Blue Crab DVD (Link to NCSU YouTube chanel versions)
2) Poisoner?s Handbook
3) Science of Kissing Promo Chapstick
4) Annoyatron
5) #ihuggedbora
6) Endangered Species Condoms
7) Canopy Meg <= This woman is my new science hero!

#1 Lesson Learned: Show up & participate to succeed!
Have lots of fun & make new friends & meet future collaborators at the same time! :-)

Remember it’s never too early to plan for next year so put #Scio12 on your calendar. I’m assured that the venue will be bigger next year, but I would register ASAP since #Scio11 sold out in 45 minutes!

Hope to see you there!

East Coast Adventures AKA The Road to ALA 2010

Image with fireworks in the background reading DC 2010 ALA Annual Conference and Exhibition June 24-29 2010.
ALA 2010

Greetings and salutations!

I hope that everyone reading this is doing well, and that my fellow attendees all made it home without incident.

So, what have I been up to?

June 12, 2010 I attended graduation at Drexel University and got to meet some of my fellow students, hurrah!

I also spent several days exploring Philadelphia with my husband, guided by my aunt and cousins before visiting Missy Harvey, the Computer Science Librarian for the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries in Pittsburgh. We moved on to Harrisburg to visit the National Civil War Museum, which I highly recommend seeing, and Gettysburg.? After that we moved on to New York, NY to visit my step-son and one of my oldest friends, and then turned south to Delaware. I realized from the signage that I was near the University of Delaware and gave myself an impromptu campus and library tour, they have an awesome audio/video center in their library! We spent a few days in Maryland relaxing with some friends, and then moved on to D.C. for ALA 2010.

A Few Washington, D.C. Highlights

Revisiting Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum (Twice!)

What can I say, you can’t take the science out of the girl and I always adore seeing the new takes on the NASA display and all the other changes, it really did take two visits to see all the new stuff and I still didn’t have time to see one of their IMAX presentations!

Spectrum Professional Options Fair

This event is part of the Spectrum Leadership Institute, I was there as a representative of ACRL’s Residency Interest Group. The purpose of the event is for Spectrum Scholars to learn about various career paths and professional groups, and to provide general networking for them as well. My group passed out flyers, business cards, pointed people toward other groups of interest at the institute and generally had a good time promoting Residencies, scholarship and mentoring opportunities, and librarianship.

ARL’s 10th Anniversary Celebration of the Intitative to Recruit a Diverse Workforce

As an ARL Diversity Scholar I was asked to attend this lunch celebration of the Initiative to Recruit a Diverse Workforce. I showed up early to help setup with my husband and we helped out and generally had a good time. Not only was the food excellent, but the speakers were as well. I was particularly proud of my fellow 2009-2011 Diversity Scholar Jeff Cruz’s speech. Jeff also challenged us to see which of us would become the first ARL director. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a multi-way tie in the end, good luck to us all!

Sunday – Best day! I’ll do a separate post on this next week :-)

Privacy –

Monday as I wandered in tired and without a plan and only 2 hours to spare, I had the good fortune to run into Brian Leaf who suggested I go to a session with him on privacy issues. I’m not sure what the name of the session was but I really enjoyed one of the speakers analogy for privacy issues, a black box sitting on a rotting net with a flag.

Exhibits Report

As per usual there was the usual assortment of people watching and free books. I was especially impressed by the determination of the woman who brought her daughter to sit with bags and had 8 bags of books within about 30 minutes of the exhibits opening. I myself snagged 8 which looked interesting, and even managed to snag a free copy of a book being sold Saturday by staring rather wistfully at a book as they were closing the signing and mentioning that I had the first book at which point the vendor gave it to me for free and I was the last person to have their book signed.

I was disappointed in the selection of science related vendors, even the vendors with science products were not nearly as helpful as I had met at midwinter. To that I say, science people want convention attention too! If I ask about your science products and you are a representative for your vendor telling me you don’t have any handouts and only know that name of the products makes me wonder if you really want me to buy them.

In contrast I was very pleased to speak with the people from the Oxford University Press they were very helpful, interesting, and I learned about new products which were in my area of interest. I was also very happy to meet up with Dave, Ryan, and the rest of the Mango Languages crew, if you haven’t tried their product yet see if you have access through your library and check them out! I really love how they not only have lessons for English speakers to learn foreign languages, but also English as a second language lessons. (No I am not affiliated with them, I just like their product and want it to continue succeeding so I can continue using it!)

Poster Sessions

I really enjoyed the chance to see what people were doing to improve their libraries and their services. I really enjoyed the opportunity to connect with other librarians and discover people with similar interest and specialties who I hope to collaborate with in the future. Talks and presentations are useful, but if you don’t drop by the poster sessions when you can you’re missing a fun and highly useful opportunity to connect with your peers/future colleagues/future bosses. Most interesting poster has to go to the librarians that created a virtual tour using adapted dolls, some model props, and photos to simulate a library tour for online students in a video clip. I also loved hearing about successful scavenger hunt strategies and brain storming for overnight mystery events in libraries.

All in all I had a great time, met great people, and learned a lot, if you have a chance to attend a convention I highly encourage you to go.

Attended ALA 2010 in D.C.? What were your highlights?