Trading Knowledge

Stephen Curry’s FMD virus video post seems to have inspired a good deal of video activity on NN. Presentations have also inspired a few posts, including Martin Fenner’s and another from Stephen Curry .
In this context, a recent post from Brian Kelly Experiments With Video Blogging To Support Presentations may be of interest.
For those who are unfamiliar with Brian, I should explain that he is one of the UK’s national treasures. He is the UK Web Focus , a national Web coordinator post part-funded by JISC . He was responsible for installing one of the UK’s first web servers, all the way back in 1993 at Leeds University, and he has been an opinion leader in all things web-related ever since.
In this blog post he explains how he came to give a presentation by recorded video, but also asks whether videos should be left to the professionals.
I would argue that this is another case of disintermediation – the AV experts and videographers will remain the experts but as the technology develops so it becomes possible for those with lower-level skills to produce reasonable-looking work. Hopefully the professional videographers will help the rest of us to develop our skills, and give us pointers to good practice.
Finally, Brian mentions video micro-blogging. I suppose it had to happen.

Seesmic has been described as “the “Twitter of video” – you record a brief video giving your thoughts on a topic and people can respond, also using video.

Brian comments that:

this type of use addresses … the concern that the linear nature of audio and video tends to defy attempts at scanning the content

something that troubles me too.

I saw a news story on The Scientist newsblog, about stem cell banks in particular the number of different stem cell banks both in the USA and elsewhere. Asking whether there was a point in duplicating effort, they concluded that there was some benefit but that the need for economies of scale and developing expertise meant there was a limit to how many stem cell banks would persist.
Another item from The Scientist community gave notice of a new forum to help scientists whose first language is not English. Fairly quickly a reply was posted pointing out that another couple of services aimed to provide similar assistance. So, more duplication of effort.
Then I saw a message on psci-com about a new website to track academics . Steffi Suhr posted a reply pointing out that it was a bit like some aspects of Facebook and Nature Network. I also pointed out the existence of services like Community of Science and Biomedexperts . Roddy Macleod listed still more:
MyNetResearch , ResearchGate , Academici , allResearchers , iBreadcrumbs , ResearcherID
It does seem we love to duplicate services, to start new things to do the same job as other things. I suppose it’s partly because setting something up is fun, partly because many of these services are not widely known about, partly because we all think we can do it better and partly because there are many different niches to be served.
But I can’t help wondering whether a bit of collaboration might sometimes be better than so much diversification.

“You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine”. That just about sums up the whole web 2.0 thing. Sharing what you like, and hoping to discover something you didn’t know before.
I think I first saw the principle applied in Amazon. You know the sort of thing “People who bought X and Y also bought Z”. It was an obvious retailer’s trick but honed to perfection by Amazon. Then suddenly that idea was everywhere – for music with iTunes, for web bookmarks with delicious, scholarly web content with connotea, and even private book collections could get in on the act with LibraryThing . I loved LibraryThing when I first read about it mainly because of the name. It is so wonderfully unspecific but somehow apt. It allows you to create a personal catalogue of your book collection with minimal effort, by tapping into the bibliographic riches of library catalogues online.
When I first looked at LibraryThing a couple of years back I observed that there few science book collections in it, but that has definitely changed. Two years on there are also some other players in this book-sharing arena: Anobii , Book Rabbit , GoodReads and Shelfari .
I asked myself, which of them has a good network of scientific users? So I have taken a closer look at all these sites. Not a very close look mind you, but you can find a summary of LibraryThing, GoodReads and Shelfari
elsewhere. I noted recently that Tim O’Reilly recommends Goodreads .
I had an idea for a little experiment to test out a) the coverage of some biomedical topics in these catalogue sites and b) the numbers of users who have catalogued some key biomedical textbooks on these sites. This brief foray into experimental librarianship brought home to me that research is not always plain sailing!
The first results – to test the coverage of some biomedical topics – may seem conclusive but are not.

I grew suspicious at the large numbers reported in Shelfari. It wasn’t just that the search for “homeobox” included titles with “hump back whale” in the title, or that the search for “synapse” also brought up “clan apis” and “space sex”. It was also the fact that none of the scientific titles I examined on Shelfari seemed to have any readers on that site. The same seemed to be true at BookRabbit. Finally, I couldn’t help noticing the prominently positioned icons to “Buy this” by each title listing in Shelfari and BookRabbit. Both sites had much more the look of an online book retailer than a site dedicated to sharing and knowledge discovery. In other words, searching on those sites was just searching a bookseller’s catalogue rather than searching for items in people’s collections.
The second batch of results – to test the numbers of users who included specified key textbooks in their collection – also fell at the first hurdle. For a start, two of the sites didn’t seem to have any readers for these titles, or at least I couldn’t see them. The remaining three sites did report some healthy figures but I wasn’t sure they were all measuring the same thing – two showed the number of readers, the third showed the number of reviews.

The text came out a bit small here – the books in question were:
Molecular Cell Biology (Lodish)
Molecular Biology of the Cell (Alberts)
Immunobiology (Janeway)
Principles of Neural Science (Kandel)
My overall conclusions:

• Both LibraryThing and GoodReads have a reasonable base of users with biomedical science interests
• Anobii is a little behind, but BookRabbit and Shelfari have very few
• You need to be very careful searching Shelfari as it broadens the search unhelpfully
• Proper research takes time

• Even half-baked research takes time

Interesting to note that Amazon own Shelfari and also have a major (but not majority) share in LibraryThing.
Also interesting – Google have just announced a new set of API tools that enable full-text search and partial browsing of books, embedding onto websites, and integration into social book sites.

One of my methods for professional development is to try and read things that I really don’t understand. It can be frustrating and fruitless, but sometimes leads me to stray into interesting domains on the periphery of library and information concerns. Internet, webbery, bioinformatics, science policy, public engagement, even blogging – all have been ripe for my ignorant eye. Sometimes I even try to read Henry Gee’s blog ;-).
Earlier on I perused the latest issue of JANET News (usually a publication I do not linger over, concerned as it is with the technicalities of the UK academic computer network). I was nearly through skimming for comprehensible morsels when I found some extraordinary statements about the end of the world as we know it¹. I am usually averse to apocalyptic pronouncements but this article gives some food for thought, speaking of a coming technological singularity
our technological progress in a number of key areas is just starting to reach … the point where … near-imperceptible increases in the rate of progress suddenly become large enough to demand our attention. The relatively slow accumulation of knowledge in the past is set to accelerate beyond our ability to imagine
OK, so things are changing. No surprises there really. And I’m sure you, dear readers, have an almost infinite capacity to imagine. But hang on a moment, next it says:
The technology curve will go vertical some time in the 2020s, causing technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history
Ouch. That sounds potentially painful and probably rather dangerous. But it gets worse:
the half-life of any given skill we might learn will get shorter as these changes accelerate. The key skill will therefore be the ability to learn
So no sooner have I mastered one technical trick or new piece of kit than it’ll be old hat and I’ll have to forget it and learn it over. Actually, on reflection, I usually forget and have to learn over again anyway so maybe there’s not so much difference.
Just as I’m starting to despair about the future, the article concludes with a sheepish admission that:
there are of course those who dispute either the timetable or the possibility of singularity at all
Oh, so it’s all just a high-grade Daily Mail-style piece of flummery then? No need to worry after all. Or is there?

¹ JANET News, Sept 2008. It’s the end of the data networking world as we know it (this links to the whole issue as a pdf. The article in question is on page 11)

If you’ve been to Liverpool this year you can’t have missed the superlambananas:

There are about 100 of them scattered around the city in a variety of colours and decorations, one of the many ways the city is marking Liverpool – capital of culture 2008 . The sculptures just beg to be photographed, and on a recent visit to Liverpool I got a bit carried away. I won’t inflict them all on you but a collage is below, with a link to my mini-collection on Flickr (I only got about 15 of the beasties).
I enjoyed the sense of fun, colour and creativity that these sculptures showed – there was a bronze one in front of the Walker Art Gallery and one made up to look like a dinosaur in front of the World Museum (which covers natural history amongst other things). And adjacent to a fitness centre there was even one on a bicycle (sadly not on a unicycle).
What better place then than Liverpool to host the British Association’s Festival of Science – the annual science jamboree? Science shown to be part of our culture, in a city having fun. All the associations are positive, no?
Well, I thought so but then I happened to read a small detail about the origin of the superlambanana . It was created to warn of the dangers of genetically modified food. Something about a cross between a lamb and a banana, you see. (Quite a revolting mixture of tastes I would have said!).
So, an apparently harmless bit of fun turns out to originate as anti-GM propaganda. It’s somewhat ironic therefore that Sir David King’s address at the BA Festival included a complaint about “anti-science and anti-technology attitudes that lead to organic farming rather than GM“. I wonder if he knew that
very close to him were 100 sculptures bearing witness to those anti-science attitudes!
Here is my collage (click to see them separately on Flickr):

If you really want to see all 100 superlambananas, the Liverpool Echo collection of photos does the trick.

I’ve never been to a scientific conference before. I’ve been to plenty of Library conferences, and quite a few on digital information, publishing or the web, but not a scientific one. I’m not sure whether Science Blogging 2008 strictly speaking counts as a scientific conference, but it was definitely a conference and there were many scientists present so I’m chalking it up as my first.
It was a stimulating day – a very friendly and lively group of people and a well-focused theme covering a variety of viewpoints. I did notice that amongst the speakers the Anglo-American-Australian contingent dominated, apart from two presenters from Germany. It would’ve been good to have a stronger view from other European countries. I wonder too what is happening in the Asian scientific blogosphere (is there an Asian Science Blogging conference?). There is such growth in Asian science activity and publishing activity (e.g. NPG’s new Asian journals ) I would imagine there ought to be blogging activity too. Perhaps NPG’s Tony Bouquet can give us an update sometime.
Two things at Sciblog08 impressed me particularly, and four other things I found particularly interesting. I did have a few regrets too.

I’m impressed

I was impressed by the amount of online activity – before, during and after the conference. This includes all the remote participants watching the live video or following via livebloggers. I wonder if all this could be tied in to the conference better, but perhaps the answer is to bring my own laptop next time. (Actually I’m tempted to follow Henry Gee’s example and buy some crocs an Asus eePC).
I was also impressed at the zeal and seriousness of the discussion about scientific communication and how to improve it. There wasn’t quite an overarching vision of the future of scientific communication, but plenty of elements of that future were discussed, from the semantic web and open notebook science to microblogging and feed aggregation. The sense that “something big is happening” put me in mind of the early 1990s as the web was getting underway, and particularly the lively discussion about UNITE (the Universal Network Interface To Everything) in ca. 1993.

I’m interested

I was interested to learn more about researchblogging.com – and the forthcoming Nature Network service to make it easier to track blog reports of published literature. I’m glad they dropped the “peer-reviewed” from the title – as it is based on DOIs I presume that it is not limited to peer-reviewed literature.
Shortly before the conference I was persuaded to sign up to FriendFeed, having been meaning to explore it for some time. Matt Wood’s session on microblogging – mostly Twitter and FriendFeed – therefore interested me. Later on I looked at the FriendFeed room for the conference and I really started to get a sense of the power of FriendFeed and I am almost hooked now. I still have a questions, but that’s for another time.
After the conference Martin Fenner posted on his blog an interesting categorisation of blogs which I think is also very interesting. There are so many kinds of scientific blogs it is difficult now to make a meaningful statement about all of them together.
The final challenge of the conference – to persuade a senior scientist to start blogging – also caught my imagination. I have three targets in mind already, but am not very sure how much success I will have.

I regret

I’m sorry I missed some of the parallel sessions. “Bored of blogging” and “How to make your blog better” were probably very interesting but I did not attend them. Since I’ve only just started to blog I’m not yet bored of it, and I struggle to make my blog at all let alone make it better. I also regretted not being able to talk to more people, though I think I spoke to about 30 people in total which is a lot for me. There’s never enough time.
I hope to catch some of the attendees again at the next Nature Networks drinks evening. I suppose NN drinks are like SciBlog Tweets – microconferences in between the main events. People keep talking about “the next conference” so I assume there will be another.

Music is one of my enduring passions and I have for many years enjoyed attending London’s summer music festival – the Proms. I recently attended a concert featuring Olivier Messiaen’s music and was struck by one piece: Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum. There were several movements but they did have not dull, numerical titles such as “first movement”, “second movement” etc. In fact they didn’t really have titles per se at all, but whole quotations from the Bible. A couple of examples:
Ils ressusciteront, glorieux, avec un nom nouveau – dans le concert joyeux des étoiles et les acclamations des fils du ciel
(They will be raised in glory, with a new name, in the joyful concert of the stars and the shouts of the sons of heaven)
L’Heure Vient Ou Les Morts Entendront la Voix Du Fils de Dieu
(The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God)
This got me wondering about titles and the relative merits of literal versus poetic titles. I am usually pretty ascetic about titles – I like them to be meaningful. The title is a surrogate for the thing itself and is an advertisement for or presentiment of that thing. It should give a first clue to help us decide buy / don’t buy or read / don’t read. Many years ago, in a lecture on cataloguing, I recall learning about an article by the eminent librarian Maurice Line entitled “On the construction and care of white elephants”. It was a tirade against the excesses of library cataloguing practices back in 1968, but our lecturer pointed out the horror of this non-meaningful title.
Perhaps Messiaen is onto something though with his obscure titles. They capture some essence of “aboutness” by using a kind of text-cloud of quotation; revelation through obscurity. Perhaps that is a definition of poetry. If a picture is worth a thousand words then a poem is somewhere in between, conjuring up a mental picture with rather fewer than 1000 words. I suppose the danger is that it may miss the target entirely if it is too unspecific.
Anyway, my musings led me to wonder what high-flown quotations (sourced from the Bible, Shakespeare, Goethe and that kind of thing) might make good titles for scientific articles?
If there was a gene called Dag^ger^ then a paper on visualising its expression pattern might be called Is this a Dag^ger^ I see before me?. A paper on immortalising cell lines could be Oh Death, where is thy sting?
Have you ever been tempted to give your paper a poetic title? Spill the beans here.

In this week’s issue of The Lancet Richard Horton’s editorial)61264-7 extols the role of libraries in the modern world. My first instinct on reading it was to applaud. It’s always nice when someone notices libraries and librarians and nicer still when they say positive and energetic things such as

libraries … are radical institutions

and talk about the library as a

catalyst for deepening notions of citizenship….

My second instinct though is to wonder exactly what he is talking about. His thoughtful but rambling editorial ranges far and wide. He talks about characteristics of the modern library reader:

the user has no mind, only a search box; no thought, only keywords

and he describes Google as

the world’s head librarian [whose mission is to] organise the world’s information and, where it can, to squeeze money out of that information.

He suggests that librarians have been sceptical of grand digitisation schemes. I think we do remain to be convinced about Google’s intentions but are probably also a little bit jealous of what they can do.
Richard Horton also talks about “archives” and this is where I begin to lose him. The word has a variety of meanings and he seems to conflate these when he discusses digital archives. He goes on to examine various ideas of what a library should be. I think his underlying point is that the explosion of online availability of all kinds of information has great potential to change the world:

Libraries … are under-recognised forces for global change

but he bemoans our passivity:

_In the health community today, librarians are too quiet. The public rarely hears the voice of the library world in debates about improving health literacy… _.

He calls for a global alliance of library leaders

to strengthen the notion of international libraries of science

suggesting an acronym of DiPLOMAT (Digital Preservation of Library Organisations, Materials and Archives under Threat).
This kind of talk always makes me feel rather inadequate. Running a relatively small library as I do and dedicating my time to serving the needs of a particular group of scientists, I struggle to raise my eyes to such a vast and distant horizon. I rather imagine that many other librarians would feel the same way, as they must prioritise the need to keep their service running smoothly. In fairness Richard Horton does talk of “leaders of the world’s great libraries” so perhaps he is not addressing me but those with higher responsibilities, higher ideals and higher salaries.
IFLA (the International Federation of Library Associations) holds an annual conference dedicated to such lofty topics as “Libraries without borders” and “Libraries: Dynamic Engines for the Knowledge and Information Society”. It has also been active in following up actions agreed at the UN World Summit on the Information Society back in 2003 and 2005. IFLA also co-sponsors the quadrennial International Congress of Medical Librarianship (ICML), the next one of which will be held in Brisbane in 2009 . The previous ICML (Bahia, 2005) included sessions on information for all, access to information for equity and health, open access, and even “Evidence and democracy in health-related decision making”.
I think I can sleep easy in the knowledge that even as I write someone in Brisbane is probably organising a discussion session on DiPLOMAT.

Sitting in a café recently I had a laughing fit into my double expresso over a cartoon in the newspaper I was browsing. It depicted two English Literature professors (you knew they were English Literature professors because they sported bad hair, old-fashioned-looking spectacles and jackets, and bow ties). One was saying to the other “I’ve unearthed some fascinating D.H. Lawrence juvenilia”. In his hand was a piece of paper as shown below:

Anyway, once I had regained my composure this cartoon set me thinking. Literary juvenilia always excite the interest of the literati. I suppose it’s like seeing old photos of your loved one when they were much younger: you’re enchanted to see the early signs of those features that you have come to love in the mature individual. However, scientific juvenilia are not so celebrated, indeed they are hardly known. So, where might one start to look for such things?
How early should we look? I think we can discount earliest school years, though some such as Carl Friedrich Gauss show extraordinary talent very young. Usually serious science instruction does not start until a bit later, if at all (see the CBI’s call for more children in the UK to study triple science
and DIUS asking for ideas on how to encourage young people to study science). Perhaps the first enthusiasm for science will be spurred by a school science fair, as Jenny Rohn blogged recently, or by a University open day, as Matt Brown blogged . But these events leave no public trace, important though they may be to the participants’ development.
The Nuffield Science Bursary scheme also aims to give school students a taste of science – by working on a real research project for 6 weeks. Michael Sargent recently wrote in The Biochemist about the scheme as it works at NIMR. Students will get a real feeling of being engaged in science, especially if they are encouraged to prepare a poster or report of their mini-project. Sadly there is no public archive of such reports (as far as I can find) so again no record is left for posterity unless the work finds its way later on into a formal publication.
Undergraduate research also traditionally languishes, unloved, in bottom drawers but there are journals that specialise in publishing this material. Earlier this year Bioscience Horizons launched, with support from a number of UK Universities. In the USA they’ve been doing it for longer – the UCLA undergraduate Science Journal and the Journal of Young Investigators both go back many years. They provide a real chance to read about the first scientific exploits of future scientific aces.
Normally though the scientific coming of age is the PhD thesis. Representing three years of work, it is the first mature product of the aspiring professional scientist. It is formalised like a scientific paper though rather longer. But since it is not disseminated widely, at any rate in printed form, it is not widely read. A thesis usually contains an excellent literature review and so should be worth reading for that alone, but often they are ignored. I suppose the presumption is that anything worth reading will find its way into a journal article in due course. And of course they are not always easily discovered or obtained. This has been changing with the advent of electronic theses. The USA-based Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations is an international organization devoted to promoting e-theses and their website allows you to search through several e-thesis collections. In the UK the British Library’s EThOS service will launch next month, making all those youthful researches easier to find for future juvenilia hunters.
Finally, if a literary enthusiast is a member of the literati, what do you call a scientific enthusiast?

Alan Bennett is a fine dramatist. His television monologues can hold your attention with just one character, and can be uncomfortably truthful. In A woman of no importance (1982) office worker Peggy Schofield is a fussy middle-aged spinster obsessed with order. She believes that her skill with the photocopier is indispensable. And what’s more she assumes her colleagues in the office appreciate and value her skills. It’s clear that she overvalues the importance of her expertise. The uncomfortable truth is that her skill has become universal and is regarded by everyone else as no skill at all since everyone these days can operate the photocopier. They don’t need her – she is a victim of disintermediation but she doesn’t know it.
In my early days as a librarian I envied the information wizards who performed online literature searches – they had mastered the arcane system commands and database indexing and could react quickly to adjust their search as results came through. Then I became a wizard myself and enjoyed being able to pull bibliographic rabbits out of digital hats. When disintermediation hit, searching moved from the esoteric to the commonplace. Everyone could have a go at it and they did.
Hence, I think of Miss Schofield sometimes. Perhaps her biggest problem was her lack of self-awareness: she was not self-critical or reflective. Librarians have had to be more adaptable and we don’t jealously guard access to searching but seek to disseminate our skills. We train library users to be searchers and now information literacy is a major campaign in academic and research libraries. Sadly, rather like Miss Schofield’s colleagues, many academics and researchers are still deaf to the message of information literacy. They assume that information searching and handling skills are self-evident and innate and require no added training.
Early in 2008 year the JISC/BL report The Google Generation looked at the information-seeking behaviour of students and researchers. The report found that impatience with search and navigation was common and that people rely on only the most basic search tools. It called for more information literacy programmes and for libraries to respond better to users’ needs.
Now another report, from the Research Information Network (RIN), goes further. Mind the Skills Gap – Information handling training for researchers looks at the information training that is provided for researchers by libraries and other bodies. Although it focuses only on higher education libraries (RIN seem to have forgotten that research goes on in research institutes too!) it finds that training is uncoordinated between the different training bodies, and there is insufficient assessment of training needs. It does re-emphasise the importance of information skills:

There is evidence to suggest that research information skills and competencies have not kept pace with rapid change in this area. Library and information specialists consider that even when researchers regard themselves as competent, they often show alarming deficits in their skills.

This raises important questions about how researchers acquire the appropriate skills in discovering and handling research information resources and services, the training opportunities provided for them, and the take-up of those opportunities.

What do you think – do the modern-day Miss Schofields have anything to teach you about information skills or are they, like her, living in the past?