The day dawns

It's the deadline day for handing in our research papers. It feels a bit like the end of school term. I hope everyone managed to meet the deadline and here's wishing you all good luck with your results!

Social networking grows up

Have a look at this interesting article called Social networking grows up. It explores and lists social networking sites for scientists. I thought a link to this kind of site, or a networking site of our own, might be a good addition to our Portal...?

Plagiarism, Stealing and Cheating

We had an interesting conversation yesterday about plagiarism.

I've never really thought about the definition of plagiarism and what exactly it is. We were asked whether we thought it constituted a criminal act and a few of us thought that because it amounted to stealing someone else's work, it was a criminal act.

Karin's point really made me think: if you steal my laptop, then I no longer have it, but if you steal my words, they haven't been taken away from me. Can you steal someone's intellectual property? Is intellectual property actually property?

Colin also raised an interesting point: that plagiarism can take two forms: cheating - deliberate fraudulence - and incompetence - when a student is still learning about how to quote and cite other authors and fails to acknowledge an author by accident.

Memorable quote of the day

"I'm not only talking about librarians here. I'm talking about human beings and librarians."

Yes, but are we really extinct?

Today, Jasper Reese gave a provocative talk about whether the library as a place is really necessary. I don't think he presented his case very well, though. For example, he spoke about his department buying books. A few minutes later, he spoke about how irrelevant books are to his research and how in a few years time, we can expect all books to be digitised. He also showed us his PhD thesis (only in book form).

Huh?

I don't doubt that libraries are changing. That's pretty much all we're about, isn't it? We've moved from card catalogues to online catalogues, from sending photocopied journal alerts to departments to offering RSS feeds. We communicate on listservs, write blogs and teach students with PowerPoint presentations.

So are we irrelevant? I don't think so. We're the people who work behind the scenes to make the information available on Jasper's desktop. We're the people who train his students to find information in the first place. Yes, more and more journals and books will be digitised in years to come, but will they all be digitised and available on Google. Nope.

I have to say, I'm a bit bored by this approach. I've spoken to one too many academics who believe librarians are an extinct, irrelevant breed. We know our jobs are changing and that in the future, they probably won't look anything like they do at the moment. But to call us a dying breed is just short-sighted. Electronic journal subscriptions don't just magically appear on your desktop. They're there because librarians have spoken to academics and decided together that this is what they need. Students aren't born with the knowledge of how to look for information - it's a learned skill and generally, it's the librarian who teaches it to them.

If librarians were a dying breed, I'd be the first one outta here. There are plenty of other careers that interest me. But I'm willing to stick around for awhile. And that's only because I believe there's still a lot of work to do.

First Day

The first day is over and I'm a bit shattered. It's been intense, but incredibly stimulating.

Last night we started off by introducing ourselves to each other. We wore boards around our necks with post-it notes stuck to them, listing our personal and professional goals and our passions. It was something that, a few years ago, would probably have scared the living daylights out of me, but it was actually a lot of fun and it really helped break the ice.

This morning, we started with an overview of the research process, by Wieland Gevers. I've heard him talk before about this at UCT, but it was still helpful to be reminded that publication is the heart of scholarship and that there are unwritten rules of publication which all scholars have to follow.

After Prof. Gevers's talk, we were given an outline of the vision, plans and progress of the Carnegie Project by the three library directors. I still haven't quite got my mind around how exactly the Research Commons will operate, so it was good to put it into its context and begin to see how that might work. I also realised that staffing and operational policy will depend on the instititution - there are really no rules for how it should work, as long as it fulfills the goal of supporting research.

Luigi Nassimbeni was next, talking about the Emerging Researchers Programme at UCT. This was a brilliantly entertaining and enlightening talk about what new recruits are told about how to get published. I'd never heard of the h-index before, or that you could find out who has cited you simply by searching for your r name in Web of Science.

Our last talk of the day was by Don Foster on Research in Social Science. Don started by asking us what Knowledge is and more than that, How we know.

Um.

He interacted wonderfully with us and took us on a tour of the history of what qualifies as knowledge. Ah: I've finally found out what the term "epistemology" means!