Citing Abstracts and reprints!

This doesn’t happen very often, but as it came up again this week, thought I would post!

Every now and then I will get a researcher that is looking for a paper that has a citation for The Bulletin of the American Physical Society. The Bulletin contains the technical programs of APS general meetings and various unit meetings of the Society. But, the researcher is expecting a PAPER, not an abstract.

If you are citing from an abstract use the same style format you are using, but please  add the word [Abstract] in front of the word retrieved.

A sample citation using the APA style:

Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (Year).
Title of article. Title of Periodical, xx, xxx-xxx.
Abstract retrieved month day, year, from source.

CBE style:

Swanson TA, Blair P, Madigan L. 2004. Reduction in medication errors through redesign of the medication use system [abstract]. In: American Society of Health-system Pharmacists 39^th midyear meeting; 2004 Dec5-9; Orlando. Bethesda (MD): American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. MCS-28

Somewhat related, I had a researcher that had what he thought was a reprint of an early Scientific American article. The article itself says, “Reprinted by permission from Scientific American of March, 1922.”  The researcher just needed to find the article, and get the page numbers.  The researcher then learned, from another source, that the paper was  a modified reprint of an article from Scientific American, March 1921, which was used as a fundraising document-it was never actually PUBLISHED in Scientific American–it just had gotten permission from the author to be used, and I suppose it was a part of a package of handouts that donors received.

It doesn’t help matters that there currently exists a huge gap in the digitization of Scientific American. It is available online from the publisher from 1993-forward, and available from 1845-1908 from Proquest.

These are somewhat strange bibliographic cases, to be sure, but the bottom line is the accurate citing of material solves mysteries across time.

List of Bibliographic Style Manuals from Diana Hacker.

Research A to Z libguide resource.

Embedded Librarianship

There has been alot of talk about embedded librarianship as of late. I have had the good fortune to hold office hours the past year in Rice’s math department, and thought I would share today a little of that experience.

Overall, it has been an incredibly rewarding experience, and I feel that I have been very useful, accessible, and have shared alot of information with the faculty and students, and have gotten some great suggestions. Originally, they had put me in an office, but I did get less traffic, and felt like I was hanging out in the hallway too much. I have now stationed myself in the coffee lounge, and that is a great location. There is a chalk board behind me, and I always write my name, math librarian, hours I am there, and phone and email address on it–I see people that look at it, and at least know who I am if they don’t speak to me. I have a wiki that I maintain in PBWORKS, and almost every session I pop it up, and keep some notes. Here are some of the entries, edited, to protect privacy.

Jan 7th, 2009
Giveaway–puzzle game. Faculty member didn’t like the access to Bulletin of LMJ. (OUTCOME: Improved access points to Bulletin of London Mathematical Journal. (Changed “current access” link to read “all issues” with input from the serials cataloger.)

Jan 14th, 2009
Have poster advertising library research award.  Have two books to give away–Calculus, 8th edition, Purcell, and Partial Differential Equations, Gockenbach.
SERVICE ISSUE on our website:

*     “If you simply want the item after the current user returns it, come to the circulation desk to place a hold. * The current user will not have to return the item early, but will not be able to renew it.
* When returned the item will be held for you for 10 days. You will be notified by email when the item is available. All items are subject to recall.
* ACTION ITEM: IT SHOULD NOT BE REQUIRED FOR A PERSON TO COME TO THE CIRCULATION DESK TO PLACE A HOLD!

Feb. 4th:
Ageed to buy backfiles of Communications on Pure & Applied Analysis, Discrete and continous Dynamical Systems when money becomes available.  Check on Annales de l’Institute Henri Poincare digitization earlier from 1997.

ACTION ITEM: Order:  Karatzas & Shreve Brownian motion & Stochastic Calculus, Springer; P.M Meyer Probability & Potentials Blaisdell; Weak Convergence of prob. measures Billingsley; Martin and England Entropy & Information. UPDATE: I ordered all on 2/5.
August, 26th 2009
Postdoc question: Who publishes in the Siberian Journal of Mathematics? Do you have the video about Julie Robertson?
Order Mathematical Physics–communications/reviews. Did search on Elliott Lieb in One search with fair results.
Postdocs -teaching math–order books to support them.

Several postdocs recommended that I take a look at the video library from MSRI UMichigan.

Sept. 10th, 2009
Several postdocs had the question about doing multiple professor names for the instructor of a course–that way they could put, say, three books on reserve, and all sections could share them.
Also, it would be nice if the Ares system worked the same way that ILL/Worldcat does–one could populate the form with data from worldcat, instead of typing everything in separately.

Takeaway points: I am positive most of these suggestions on collection development, and services WOULD NOT HAVE COME UP, if the user had not have happened to see me. They didn’t have to make the effort to come to the reference desk of the library, or to email me, or call me or anything. I was just there, they were just there, and it was conversational.

Is it always easy? No, you have to build relationships. I have had a faculty member ask me kindly, “Why are you here? ” Minutes later, after he had walked away, I had a new faculty member come and ask me about Interlibrary loan, and how to set up his account. THAT is why I am there.

I think more and more of this type of activity will happen–and embedded librarianship, whether it is office hours in a department, or being a part of a workgroup, or co-teaching with a professor.

It is about service, and going the extra mile to be where our users need us to be.

Steal this code!

February 2009, I had written a blog post, geared to my local users, that had the code to put widgets for the library catalog into their Pageflakes or iGoogle portal pages. Denis Galvin, our wonderful IT guy, had written it because I needed some cool local bells and whistles for an assignment for a physics class. The ISTL article comes out next week, coauthored by Michael Fosmire.

I was thrilled to read Steal this code! Please! Creating HTML widget generators for libraries, in this month’s College & Research Libraries by Nina McHale.  Twitter: @ninermac Brilliant!

I love it when someone connects the dots. Yes, create the widgets, create the code–and then…put it out there–we do not know what users will want to do with it–why limit them to our vision of the world. Let them create their own. McHale shows us how to create our own HTML generator.

McHale states, “following the steps in this article and creating a simple “Steal This Code!” Web page, academic librarians can provide platform-independent widget generators that teaching faculty can use to inject library content directly into their online course materials. Creating a widget-generating resource by using the HTML <textarea> tag is a low-tech, easy, and fun way to extend the reach of library resources beyond the environments that we control.“

I am feeling very happy to be in a world with McHale today–a leader in library thought that teaches, shares, and reveals to others how to create tools to serve user needs.

Twitter

Twitter is not about telling your friends what you had for breakfast. You can, but there is so much more.

It is about creating a knowledge net 140 characters at a time.

Twitter is a free microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based only and cannot exceed 140 characters. Log on to www.twitter.com to register.

I find that participating in Twitter conversations while attending virtual conferences is a great thing.  Speakers are wise to tap into what folks are twittering about–the Backchannel.

I meet folks that are also attending. We strike up conversations, and become friends after the conference.

I don’t tweet alot; maybe once or twice a day, unless an event is going on which begs for more tweeting.

I love reading the tweets of the folks that I follow, and do learn things before I get emails from other sources.

Beginner:

• A True Beginner’s Guide to Getting the Most Out of Twitter (great ebook posted online by Linden A. Mueller (@xgravity23) and Sarah Austin (@sarahjoaustin).

Learning more about Twitter:

• http://mashable.com/category/twitter-list
• http://mashable.com/2009/04/22/twitter-search-services/

Advanced:

Twitter search strategies

• http://www.twitip.com/7-%E2%80%98secret%E2%80%99-ways-to-use-twitter-search/

Using Twitter in the classroom

• http://oedb.org/blogs/ilibrarian/2009/100-tips-tools-and-resources-for-teaching-students-about-social-media/

Special thanks to Garrett Eastman at Harvard, Joe Kraus at University of Denver, Linden A. Mueller, Sarah Austin and Heather Braum.

Digital books…

Last week while on the reference desk, I had a faculty member that needed a book…fast. Our library has the copy he needed in our library service center; we could have gotten it into the library by that afternoon. But he would have missed an important deadline. So, I went searching online. I started, of course, at Google Books. Now I should point out at this time, this was a novel from the 1920′s.  Google Books had a few pages, and I let the faculty member know this. I cleared it with him that it would be fine to have a digital copy.

Next stop, I did a search in Worldcat, but only turned up the incomplete scanned version in Google Books.  Next, I turned to my iPhone, and did several quick checks in two of my online book readers: Stanza, and Bookshelf.  Nothing. After several searches in Google, I was lucky enough to come across a link to a University of Chicago catalog record. As I clicked through, it would not let me in, but once I edited out the proxy server information, and put that into the url box, I went directly to a beautiful scanned copy! I knew from the catalog record that the digital version was available with no restrictions, and it was just the University of Chicago proxy that was keeping me out.

As a fun exercise, I gave the task of finding an online version of this book to the head of our Interlibrary Loan department. He logged into his OCLC database, and quickly found a copy–it seems that OCLC has cataloged many of the digital copies in archives. We are still investigating why it showed up in OCLC, but not in Worldcat. Perhaps a secret beta test?

Take away points: I am making it a part of my reference process to think about digital repositories more. Fondren will be creating a Libguide to address searching in these digital archives. Also, the Hathi Trust is an excellent resource. It is a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California system to establish a repository for these universities to archive and share their digitized collections. This will enable greater searching into hidden repositories.

Of course, for math and physics articles, arxiv, Numdam, and Gallica remain the go to places.