iTunes has a Reference section

A couple of times, as I was promoting the LibX Firefox toolbar, I was told by librarians that we should not expect our users to take any extra effort to add functionality to their browser.

To them, I say, have you visited the Apple App Store recently?

The night bookmobile

If you've read The time traveler's wife, then you know that visual artist and author Audrey Niffenegger has a thing for librarians. In her graphic novel The Night Bookmobile you can find out what happens when this fetish for books and libraries goes a little too far for comfort.

One reason books are beautiful - less diapers to worry about

OK, I am fully aware how silly this story will sound but parenting is serious business dammit.

The day after my son first read his new book Uh-Oh Gotta Go by Bob From Sesame Street he started using the potty on a consistent basis.

Its pretty incredible, when you think about it, that a simple picture book depicting happy toddlers using the potty can inspire a real two year old to do the same.

Books that scientists use - an addendum

Some years ago when I started my tenure as Science Librarian at the Leddy Library, I worked on a particularly tedious project that really helped me get a better understanding on what books scientists actually use in their work (as opposed to so many other titles).

Using Web of Science, I would search for a year's worth of articles from Science, Nature and PNAS, download these articles' references into an Excel spreadsheet and try to decipher which ones were books. It was a very very mechanical and time-consuming process. But it made me a better science librarian.

Now, I'm pleased to say, that Scopus makes this same task possible in less than 30 seconds:

1. in search for box type in journal name (e.g. Nature) and select Source Title from drop-down menu
2. limit date range to a particular time period (e.g. 2007)
3. hit search button
4. in the Refine Results box, limit your results to just the journal name in question (e.g. Nature and not Nature Biochemistry)
5. in the Results box, click the Select All box and the hit the References button
6. If your initial search results brought more than 2000 hits, you will be informed that only the first 2000 articles will have their references retrieved.
7. review the list of most cited references of that journal from most cited to least

Here's a list of the 10 most cited books by Nature, Science, and PNAS*. The second number in the list represents where in the journal's list of most cited items can the book be found.

Most Cited Books in Nature, 2007**
1. [1] Molecular cloning: a laboratory manual (1989)
2. [2] Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1994)
3. [3] Numerical Recipes (1992)
4. [4] Biometry (1995)
5. [5] Biostastical Analysis (1984)
6. [7] The Rat Brain in Stereotaxic Coordinates (1986)
7. [13] Principles of Optics (1980)
8. [15] Physics of Semiconductor Devices (1981)
9. [19] Intermolecular and Surface Forces (1992)
10. [21] Co-Planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain (1988)

Most Cited Books in Science, 2007**
1. [1] Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1994)
2. [2] CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (2005)
3. [3] Biometry (1995)
4. [4] Biostastical Analysis (1984)
5. [5] The Rat Brain in Stereotaxic Coordinates (1986)
6. [9] Principles of Optics (1980)
7. [10] Computer Simulation of Liquids (1987)
8. [11] Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R (1990)
9. [12] Advanced Organic Chemistry (1988)
10. [14] An Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications (1971)

Most Cited Books in PNAS, 2007**
1. [1] Molecular cloning: a laboratory manual (1989)
2. [4] Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1994)
3. [6] Numerical Recipes (1992)
4. [8] CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (2005)
5. [9] Biometry (1995)
6. [10] Biostatistical Analysis (1984)
7. [12] The Rat Brain in Stereotaxic Coordinates (1986)
8. [13] Handbook of Mathematical Functions (1972)
9. [22] Stastical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences (1988)
10. [23] Statistical Methods (1980)

*Nature and Science published almost 2000 items in 2007 and PNAS published closer to 3000 items in 2007.

I'm planning to use this method to determine if there are any important books my library is missing by reviewing the references of the key journals in various fields for 2007. Its still a largely mechanical process (although the Foxy Leddy LibX toolbar makes book-checking much faster than typing titles into the library catalogue) but its a good task to slowly start the work of the new year.

**Addendum:
I've been thinking further about these lists and I think I am in grievous error.

For example: the approximately 2000 articles in Nature evidently produce 24,660 references. That's about 200 items in each item's bibliography - which sounds high but its in the realm of possibility. But what confuses me is the cited by column which says that the first item in the list, Molecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual, has been cited 103, 825 times. So that must refer to how many times the item has been cited within the Scopus database. The fact that the some of the books in the list appear in the same relative order when performing the same procedure using the journals PNAS and Science, means that these lists reflect the most popular science books within Scopus and not necessarily within each journal.

Rats.

A Collection Development Secret

Some years ago when I began ordering science books for my library, I asked a colleague of mine for some advice on what I should be selecting. He gave me some suggestions and he also told me a story.

My colleague was visiting a friend of his who was a senior researcher in one of the sciences at a prestigious university and while they were talking in his friend's office, the phone rang. After the researcher and the other person on the line exchanged short pleasantries, the researcher told the person, who was evidently returning a previous call, that he had been made editor of a forthcoming book on ___ and he asked whether the caller had a paper to submit. The answer was affirmative, quick arrangements were made and the call was shortly finished.

So while some scholarly monographs reflect years and years of sweat and toil, you too should be aware that there also exists a set of scholarly books that are merely collections of recently published or never-published articles.

In a possibly related aside, I have noticed when I have reviewed the circulation counts for the science books that I am responsible for, that there is a tendency for books with very vague titles not to be borrowed as many times as books with very specific titles.

Take these two points together and now you know why I very rarely order books that have titles like these:

• key topics in ____
• frontiers in ___ research
• ___ research advances
• ___ research trends
• new aspects of ___
• perspectives on ___
• new research on ___
• focus on ___ research
• new topics in ___ research
• new frontiers in ___
• ___ research frontiers

Leddy Library Has A LeddyLibraryThing

We haven't advertised it on campus yet, but the staff of the Leddy Library have listed some of the books that they have enjoyed on LeddyLibraryThing.

Arrested Collection Development

Inspired by the collection policies thoughts of Peter Zimmerman, I thought I would try to briefly summarize my largely antagonistic feelings towards collection development policies. That being said I should state that I have hostile feelings towards the policies I was taught in library school long ago.

From what I recall, a collection development policy can be summed up as several pages of call number ranges with words that essentially express: "we are trying to get lots of this", "we want some of this stuff", and "there's not much on this subject that we want".

Now I collect in the sciences for a middle-sized Canadian university and I am responsible for selecting books that support the research needs of our faculty and graduate students as well as learning resources for our undergraduate population. This means I collect for very specific research topics (e.g. apoptosis and nitric oxide ) and for very general areas (Chemical composition of everyday products). It is possible to describe what I collect using the above collection development method, but it is uninspiring, to say the very least.

And what does it mean to 'collect generally for the sciences' really mean, anyway? Does it mean I buy 'real science' for the faculty and 'popular science' for the undergraduates? Or does it mean I try to buy "the canon" for all the sciences and simply buy more books on local research interests? And how can I - a layperson - describe to my community what I consider 'the canon'?

And so over time I developed a one sentence description of my collection development goals: "I will collect the books necessary to follow the research of the university's faculty and to collect the books most cited by the research published in Nature, Science, and PNAS, supplemented with books dealing with local geography and ecology and well-received popular science". IMHO, I think this one sentence is more useful than a twenty page wish list of call number ranges.

Over the years, I have internalized a number of possible 'rule-based' collection development guidelines that I think could be appropriate for academic or public libraries:

"We strive to collect the books ...
- in Oprah's Book Club
- nominated for the Man Booker Prize in Literature
- published by faculty
- suggested by faculty and graduate students
- published by local authors and publishers
- on the topic of local history and geography (Windsor, Essex County, Detroit) and ecology (Tall Grass Prairie, Carolinian, Great Lakes Watershed)
- that were most frequently requested by Interlibrary Loan
- that make the New York Times 100 Most Notable Books of the Year
- are reviewed in Highly Important Journal in field in question"

Other than being clear and concise, an additional benefit of using 'rules' is that it gives you a means to measure whether you have achieved what you set yourself out to do. If you say that your library is going to have up-to-date dictionaries for the top ten languages spoken on campus, then you can measure your success at present and then again in five year's time. Your community can judge your efforts as easily as well.

I understand that there may be reticence to this form of collection development policies because it appears to hand over the collection making decisions away from the librarian to outside forces, some of them being commercial interests. While I am not in anyway trying to negate the role of the collections librarian, I do think it is about time that libraries try to align the way we decide to add material to our collections to the way that our communities decide what next book they want to read. They certainly aren't decided what to read next based on our collection development policies.

Anti-social Software: The book

Daytime television is so unbelievably bad that I regularly choose to watch TV shows about video games rather than suffer the constant chirping of celebrities, even though I'm not much a gamer myself. I'm treating it as a learning experience.

One thing I've learned by watching video game review shows is that there is a very strong emphasis on multiplayer gaming. If a hot new PC, console, or handheld game doesn't doesn't allow you to play over the web, connect to a service like XBOX Live, or allow wireless play, then the makers of these games are called on the carpet. No one is content playing just against a computer anymore.

I thought of this as I was reading Everything Bad is Good For You. Steven Johnson imagines a world that's identicle to ours except that video games are invented before books. He then guesses what teachers and parents would have to say about reading:

Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound-scapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of sensory and motor cortices.

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new "libraries" that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sittle alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers...

But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. . . . This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to "follow the plot" instead of learning to lead.

While Steven Johnson is trying to make a point how much video games have been demonized by parents and pundits, I think we can still take some of the passages at pure face-value. To an outsider, reading looks terribly anti-social. To a non-reader, the library wouldn't been seen a social place (much less as a lauded "third-place") but as somewhere where people can be alone, together.

If we want libraries to be perceived as social places (and thus, have a place in a society where TV channels are dedicated to video games), we are going to have do more than provide chairs where people can read.