CIF: Common Industry Format

I have been generating a lot of reports lately, and it is always an effort to put them in a format that will make the stakeholders want to read them! A new method that I am incorporating is the Common Industry Format: CIF.  Here’s an article about the full version: http://www.idemployee.id.tue.nl/g.w.m.rauterberg/lecturenotes/common-industry-format.pdf Since I always seem to be interested in streamlining things, I am thinking about what parts of these long format could I incorporate to bring consistency to my reports. And here is a nice example of a usability test that used the CIF: http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/iusr/documents/diarymate_v32.htm  I am going to spend some more time thinking about this, but I think the CIF has some nice features that are worth using each study. I also think making it into a online form, might streamline the report out phase of a study.

Where did the time go? A short post about Rapid Ethnography

Well, it happened. I let over six months go by with nary a blog post! Ack! And the thing is, I have been so busy, with lots of exciting UX stuff going on. So, I should have been writing about it all along. So, if you are still out there, and occasionally read my blog, thanks for that! I am going to write more. I took a great class last Fall-Methods in Human Computer Interaction. It was pretty intensive-I helped design a parking lot system-which is totally outside of my experience. That was incredibly useful. I think it helps to sometimes look at complex problems outside of your normal focus.

The class, because it focused on methods, introduced new methods each week. Some of them are so closely related, it makes one confused. But, my old favorites were there, although sometimes renamed. Bootstrap UX–who knew, a lot of folks call that Rapid Ethnography. There are some great articles out there: “Rapid Ethnography: Time Deepeining Strategies for HCI Field Research,” includes a nice case study that illustrates the main components of the method. I like this article because it confirms the importance of ethnographic research in the design process. The case study mentioned did replace open-ended interviews with a “condensed ethnographic interview,” which specifically covered specific project bottlenecks and benefits. The acceleration of this method gets at the heart of how I have stream-lined my approach. It states, “Time spent looking at the broad landscape is time that is not focused in the area of critical importance to a product design team,” and “While there may be nuggets of gold in the data, they are just too hard to mine.”  I love the concept of applying an ethnographic approach to usability problems.

I have to go mine some usability screen casts done last week now, but I’ll be back tomorrow!

Scientists and how they do their research

A few weeks ago I went to a great conference at Rice, called Scientia. The theme was Research and Innovation in Undergraduate Science and Engineering Education.  One of the most interesting speakers was Wendy Newstetter, Director of Learning Science Research, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. She talked about her ethnographic work looking at labs, and her most recent book arrived on my desk today. Science as Psychology: Sense-Making and Identity in Science Practice. This is an inside, cognitive look, at a large number of labs, and how learning and science happens in them. I am so excited about this approach, because it directly relates to the Research Flow problem the UX team will be working on over the next six months. Leah Krevit, AUL for Public Services, pondered last Fall, essentially, How does research happen? And how can the library make a tool that will include all of the things that researchers need in one place? We are calling this Research Flow, and it probably includes the initial research process, communicating with lab partners, publishing, printing, posters, discovery layers, catalog, journal articles and PDFs, citation needs, plagiarism education needs, and more.

It is exciting when the cognitive sciences, librarianship, and scientific research can all collectively work and solve problems together, especially complex problems like scientific communication and information organization.

Web Reviews

One of my favorite librarians published a great little “web review” in the Special Libraries Association Sci-Tech News yesterday. Lisa Johnston covers (2011) “Web Reviews: User Experience (UX) in Libraries: Web,” Sci-Tech News: Vol. 65: Iss. 1, Article 11. Available at: http://jdc.jefferson.edu/scitechnews/vol65/iss1/11 SciTech News, is the official bulletin of the Chemistry, Engineering, and Science-Technology Divisions, the Aerospace Section of the Engineering Division, and the Materials Research and Manufacturing Section of the Chemistry Division of the Special Libraries Association. Web Reviews is a great column. It is a nicely organized, concise, colorful, everything-you-need-to-know look at different topics, with nice reviews of web resources, and great screenshots. I highly recommend it.

Lisa Johnston had a great write-up in AIP Library Matters in 2009, and you can see how she writes her column, and some of her views about why tech and libraries go hand in hand.

A mathematician that never existed!

Bourbaki : a secret society of mathematics. Mashaal, Maurice. QA29 .B692 M3713 2006 The artist and the mathematician : the story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the genius mathematician who never existed. Aczel, Amir D. QA29 .B692 A29 2006 An interesting bit of mathematics history! From an article by Borel in the Notices of the AMS: In 1934 A. Weil and H. Cartan were Maîtres de Conférences (the equivalent of assistant professors) at the University of Strasbourg. One main duty was, of course, the teaching of differential and integral calculus. The standard text was the Traité d’Analyse of E. Goursat, which they found wanting in many ways. Cartan was frequently bugging Weil with questions on how to present this material, so that at some point, to get it over with once and for all, Weil suggested they write themselves a new Traité d’Analyse. This suggestion was spread around, and soon a group of about ten mathematicians began to meet regularly to plan this treatise. It was soon decided that the work would be collective, without any acknowledgment of individual contributions. In summer 1935 the pen name Nicolas Bourbaki was chosen.4

New Search Engine!

WolframAlpha "officially" launched today. 

They are having  a live update at 3pm Central today on justin.tv/wolframalpha   This photo is from their blog post: Burning the midnight oil!
Kind of reminds me of "NASA, we have launch!"

Cool photo program

I love the befunky website which lets you do all sorts of interesting things to your photographs!
http://www.befunky.com

Here is a photo of me with Martin Blume, the former Editor-in-Chief of The American Physical Society.
Marty always says, concerning new ideas in publishing: "Test on an obscure part of the garment!"  Advice I live by!

Tips from Fondren: Nanotechnology sources

Looking for information on Nanotechnology?
Here are a few sources! (Sources may only be available to users with a Rice affliation, or another university affliation that subscribes to the material.)
Reference Works:

Schwarz, James A., Contescu, Cristian I., and Petyera, Karol, editors, 2004. Dekker encyclopedia of nanoscience and nanotechnology. New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc. T174.7 .D43 or online:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713172968~db=refwork

Nalwa, Hari Singh, editor. 2001. Handbook of nanostructured materials and nanothechnology. San Diego: Academic Press. TA418.9 .N35 H36 2000

Booker, Richard. 2005. Nanotechnology for dummies. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2005.  T174.7 .B66 2005

Bhushan, Bharat, editor, 2007. Springer Handbook of Nanotechnology, 2nd edition. Berlin, New York: Springer. T174.7 .S67 2007

Fondren 2.0

We are working on putting together a webpage that details all of Fondren Library's efforts at Web2.0 information.
Thought I would share the links here too:

Fondren Facebook Fan Page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Houston-TX/Fondren-Library/15587285151

Fondren Library on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/FondrenLibrary
(I want to add some content here this summer...screencasts, short videos 
etc.)

Podcasts:
http://podcast.com/show/74123/fondrenlibrarys-Podcast/

Woodson Blog:
http://woodsononline.wordpress.com/

We are looking for new places to meet you. We are thinking about Twitter, Flicker–is there a place on the Internet that you would like to see Fondren information? Let me know!

April Fools!

The jokes are coming in…here is a great one:

Continuing the trend of consolidation, the heads of the largest STM publishers will form a single, publicly-held company.  While details are still being worked out, the name of the publisher will be be Springer-Elsevier-Wiley-Blackwell, or SPEW for short.

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/04/01/mergers-create-uber-publisher/