For those who are trying to understand us science types here’s a few items that may help.

What do we think?

We might err, but science is self-correcting
Author: Lord John Krebs Principal of Jesus College, Oxford

This piece explains why scientists question everything, and why there are not always clear-cut answers to scientific questions.  Lord Krebs expresses the feelings of many scientists on the need for governments not to reject scientific advice just because it is inconvenient without explanation, and in return the need for scientists to be scrupulously honest in their claims.

What do we care about?

You may have heard the term citizen scientists in the context of citizens with little formal scientific training who contribute to major scientific discoveries.  This is a great definition for citizen scientists, but, I’d like you to consider something a secondary definition.

I’d like to promote the idea of the citizen scientist as “people who intertwine their work and their citizenship, doing science differently, working with different people, drawing new connections and helping to redefine what it means to be a scientist.”

To that end I recommend reading:

citizen scientists reconstructing science with civil society (PDF)
Author: Jack Stilgoe Published by: Demos
Contents: Acknowledgments– Preface – 1 Towards collective experimentation –2 Science and civil society – 3 The value of science and scientific values – 4 Doing things differently – 5 Political scientists – 6 Rediscovering scientific diversity – Notes – References.
CC: Some rights reserved

How do we preserve our history?

Science is a field in which almost everything ever written stays relevant, for a given value of relevance.  Many of the greatest scientific minds are currently alive, and the British Library is in the process of creating a new archive, Oral History of British Science, dedicated to collecting and preserving 200 in-depth interviews with British scientists.  Each interview will be 10-15 hours in length, plus supplementary recordings and seminars.  There are four themes that will be explored by group “witness seminar”: The Factory of Life, Cosmologies, Made in Britain, and A Changing Planet.  Many people do not realize how driven scientific interest is by individual lives and world events.  Small things, an observation, a question, or an anomaly, often lead to the most dramatic results.  I’ve very excited about this project and look forward to seeing history through the lens of Britain’s Scientists.

What do we enjoy?

One of my favorite sites, and proof for those who still doubt that scientists are passionate, energetic, and fun people is the Symphony of Science website.  The videos are created using clips from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, owned by Druyan-Sagan Associates, Inc.  “The Symphony of Science is a musical project headed by John Boswell designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form.”

Featured scientists in The Symphony of Science:

David Attenborough Jacob Bronowski Richard Dawkins Richard Feynman Jane Goodall Brian Greene Stephen Hawking Michio Kaku

Laurence Krauss PZ Meyers Bill Nye Carolyn Porco Carl Sagan Michael Shermer Jill Tarter Neil deGrasse Tyson

5 music videos available are accessible through the home page of the Symphony of Science website.

My favorite quote is “Science is the poetry of reality”.

I’ll leave you with a tip for those who need to quickly create a professional poster; check out PosterSession.com, overnight shipping is available.  Thanks to Stephen Bell for mentioning this service in a recent blog post.  (In science, a poster presentation counts as a significant professional publication.)

A large part of literacy instruction is explaining the resources available, one of the ongoing debates in the scientific community, and the library community, about how scientists should and will be communicating and sharing information in the future.


Literacy Instruction Readings, Reference, Tips, & Tutorials:

Office for Literacy and Outreach Services Toolkits (ALA)

http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/olos/toolkits.cfm

10 Tips for Teaching Technology to Teachers by Liz B. Davis

http://edtechpower.blogspot.com/2009/09/10-tips-for-teaching-technology-to.html

Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large Vol. 9 No. 12

http://citesandinsights.info/v9i12a.htm

Developing Research & Communication Skills Guidelines for Information Literacy in the Curriculum – Middle States Commission on Higher Education

http://www.msche.org/publications/Developing-Skills080111151714.pdf

ILI-L, the Information Literacy Instruction Discussion List (hosted by ALA)

http://lists.ala.org/wws/info/ili-l

IL Resources & Tools by Lisa Metzer

http://www.mindomo.com/view.htm?m=b93aa8ef223445ff8919191fbc3ed23c

Information literacy in the disciplines (ACRL wiki)

http://wikis.ala.org/acrl/index.php?title=Information_literacy_in_the_disciplines

LION: Library Information Literacy Online Network – Downloadable & Embeddable Guides

http://liontv.blip.tv/

Project Information Literacy

http://projectinfolit.org/

Turning Topics Into Searches by Iris

http://pegasuslibrarian.com/2009/11/turning-topics-into-searches.html

UCLA Library Research Guides – Teach Information Literacy & Critical Thinking!

http://guides.library.ucla.edu/teachingtips


Advice:

The Top Ten Things a new Sci/Tech Librarian Should Know: Developing Core Competencies (STS Issues in Sci/Tech Library Management Discussion Group ALA Annual Meeting, Toronto June 22, 2003) Victoria S. Mitchell


Looking Toward the Future:

Citizen Scientists Reconnecting Science with Civil Society (pdf)by Jack Stilgoe ~ If you only look at one link I have listed I highly encourage you to read the first part of this pamphlet, starting on page 13 of the pdf file.

Libraries and e-science by Lorcan Dempsey

Training to Climb an Everest of Digital Data by Ashlee Vance

What Should Social Software for Science Look Like? By Cameron Neylon

Science Readings and Resources:

Annual Reviews – Subscription Based Resource

http://www.annualreviews.org

Bibliography of Scientific and Industrial Reports Prepared for the web by Robert L. Bolin

http://www.unl.edu/Bolin_resources/bsir-xml/

BioMed Central The Open Access Publisher – Free Access, registration required.  This site hosts journals on a variety of topics, mainly medical, including journals on ecology, plant biology and zoology.

BIRN Biomedical Informatics Research Network

http://www.birncommunity.org/

BookBoon.com – Online Ad Financed Textbooks in Business, Math, and Science

Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives

http://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/index.html

Deep Dyve Online Rental Service Announcement

http://www.deepdyve.com/corp/about/press/20091027

Directory of Open Access Journals

http://www.doaj.org

Government Information Sources for Science and Technology – ACRL wiki

http://wikis.ala.org/acrl/index.php/Government_Information_Sources_for_Science_and_Technology

Gray literature: Resources for locating unpublished research by Brian S. Mathews C&RL News, March 2004 Vol 65., No. 3

Green Foostep – An assessment tool for reducing carbon emissions from building construction projects by the Rocky Mountain Institute ~ I’ve seen several reference questions about carbon emissions recently; it’s also been suggested as a planning resource for creating new library buildings.

INFOMINE Scholarly Internet Resource Collections

http://infomine.ucr.edu

LibGuides by Springshare – Paid Service

http://www.springshare.com/libguides/

LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe)

http://www.lockss.org/lockss/Home

Mendeley Research Networks

http://www.mendeley.com/

NLM Gateway – Search multiple NLM resources in one search.

Orphan Data

http://orphandata.org/

Rethinking Science & Technology for the 21^st Century by Alan Maynard

http://2020science.org/rethinking-science-technology-for-the-21st-century/

RSABG Library: Research Sources in Botany by Harvey R. Brenneise and Gary D. Wallace ~ This was created to support an annual graduate level research class in the field of Botany.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography by Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

“The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (SEPB) presents selected English-language articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.”

Science: So what? – So what? By Alan Maynard

http://2020science.org/2009/11/27/science-so-what-so-what/

SPARC Guide: Income Models for Supporting Open Access

http://www.arl.org/sparc/publisher/incomemodels/

Top 10 Sci-Tech Books 2009 by Donna Seaman for Booklist Online

http://www.booklistonline.com/default.aspx?page=show_product&pid=3885134

Trailblazing Three and a half centuries of Royal Society publishing ~ 60 articles selected from over 60,000 published by the Royal Society (UK) between 1665 and 2010.

Translation resources on the Web: A guide to accurate, free sites by Rebecca A Martin and Sarah Mc-Hone-Chase C& RL News, June 2009 Vol 70, No. 6 ~ Due to the Internet access to scholarly information from foreign countries is increasing the need for translation, while I would not recommend using these resources to try and translate an entire article they may be use in translating abstracts, or enough of an article to determine whether or not it is worth having fully translated.

The UCverse

http://ucverse.universityofcalifornia.edu/

WolframAlpha ~ “Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything”


Blogs:

2020Science by Alan Maynard ~ Anything Alan writes is worth reading and, while he is involved with policy, he accurately represents a large portion of the scientific community’s thoughts.  He is also very good about citing sources and explaining in detail why he disagrees with alternate points of view, enabling the reader to make a more informed decision on whether or not they agree with him.

RSS Feed – http://feeds.feedburner.com/2020science

Confessions of a Science Librarian by John Dupuis

RSS Feed – http://scienceblogs.com/channel/rss.php

CS Librarian News by Missy Harvey ~ Missy is the Computer Science Librarian at Carnegie Mellon University.  The focus of her blog is to distribute information in the areas of computer science, electrical & computer engineering, and robotics.

RSS Feed – http://cslibrarian.net/feed

Discussion for best practices and links to Escience Portal, Supporting biomedical librarians everywhere…

RSS Feed – http://escienceportal.wordpress.com/feed/

Science Blogs – Scroll down the page and you can choose your news feed topic.  The definition of Science being used encompasses politics, and the arts, as well as the hard sciences and education.  Be warned it is easy to be overwhelmed by their subject specific news feeds, it may be better to choose a few frequent posters to follow than all people posting on a given subject.

Science in the open, An openwetware blog on the challenges of open and connected Science by Cameron Neylon

RSS Feed – http://feeds.feedburner.com/scienceintheopen


Just For Fun:

Drive for geothermal power heats up on US campuses by Dinesh Ramde

The new school year also heralds the beginning of new jobs and there are a few things I’d like people to consider.

For Employees-

• If you are unsure how to dress for your new job be more formal, a slacks suit is always good because you can dress it down a little by taking off your coat.  As you see how your colleagues dress you can adjust your work wardrobe according.  Remember that, regardless of the informal dress code where you work, there is a difference between looking polished and looking sloppy.  Always strive to look polished even if your dress code means wearing a t-shirt and jeans.  How people treat you is partially based on how much they subconsciously think you respect yourself.  Show you respect yourself and always putting your best foot forward.

• Realize that traffic will almost always be against you when you start a new internship or job, leave early and allow for it.  It is better to be early and have to sit and read in your car for half an hour than be late and make a bad impression.

• Accept the fact that you will have to ask questions and that no matter how hard you try you will make mistakes and someone will correct you, hopefully, in a kind a supporting manner.  When you are corrected remember that everyone goes through this when learning a new skill.  You do not have to feel great about it but accepting the fact that the person correcting you is helping you to become a better worker will help lessen the sting of embarrassment.  You should always acknowledge that you were wrong, thank the person for letting you know, and admit that they saved you from repeating the error in the future. Being willing and able to learn is key to succeeding in every job.

• Remember that everyone is different.  If you want others to accept you as you are then you must act them for who they are.  There is a difference between acknowledging someone’s differences and respecting them, and putting someone on the spot.  Do not put people on the spot, no one appreciates being treated like their background, lifestyle choice, race, religion, or gender is the most important thing about them.  Many people are happy to share about these things but not everyone is and you shouldn’t assume either way.

• Always respect your boss, do not start criticizing them, you do not even know them at this point.  Also, remember that no one wants to hear how much you hated xyz place of employment.  If you do that they will wonder if you will say the same thing about them if you leave.  Even if someone does not initially respect you they will appreciate it when you show them respect and a good work ethic.

• Selling yourself is about being genuine, being open to correction, respecting those around you, and respecting yourself.

For Employers-

• If your organization requires parking passes, especially paid parking passes which employees have to pay for help your new hire arrange this before their first day on the job whenever possible.

• Not all jobs allow time for a tour before getting to work but the following places should be shown to new employees regardless of time constraints, the employee break/lunch room and the location of the nearest bathroom.  If possible also introduce them to their co-workers and indicate if who should be contacted with specific questions or requests i.e. office supplies etc.  Keep in mind that people who ask questions when they are unsure instead of assuming tend to make less mistakes which saves you money.  Encourage the questions.

• If it wasn’t done in the interview process make sure and give your new employee a written description of their job and any quotas or standards they are supposed to meet.  People are much better at meeting or exceeding your expectations if they know what it is that you want them to do.

• Being in charge it is up to you to set the tone for your workers.  Remember that you were new once and you would not be where you are today if people had not taken the time to help you learn, when you were a new hire.  Demonstrating that you respect and value all of your employees, including the new hire, will increase efficiency and retention.  If there is a staff party scheduled on someone’s first day, invite them.  They may not choose to go but, no one likes to be left out and, it is a good opportunity to form bonds between your new hire and your other employees.

• Part of setting the tone is balancing acknowledging people’s differences and not putting them on the spot.  When you are not being judged on your own merits then it is a very negative and isolating experience even if you are not the only representative of your group.  It is the difference between being accepted as you are with your unique attributes acknowledged, and being held to a different standard, or being held up as an example while having your group put down, or being put down yourself because of your group.  Keep an eye out for the difference and if someone crosses the line speak with that person in private.  When people are corrected in front of a group of people it is not only humiliating, it undermines the effectiveness of the correction because now you are putting them on the spot.  It is usually unintentional when employees put each other on the spot so it is always best to assume that no harm was meant.  If you feel that this is a widespread problem have a mandatory workshop with a professional sensitivity trainer.

• Lastly remember that when you are in charge people mimic your behavior towards each other.  Set a good example, respect your subordinates and they will rise to the occasion, everyone wants to be treated as if they are special and valuable and it is amazing how a small thing like believing in those around you can transform everyone’s work experience.