Marcus' World

One Week Left to Complete Blog Readers Survey

Many thanks to the 202 colleagues who have completed my survey of regular health sciences librarian blog readers.  Special thanks to the colleagues who have promoted it on their own blogs.

The survey is up until Jan. 21, so if you haven't completed it please take 5-10 minutes to do so today. I'll share the results here after I give the paper at the NCNMLG meeting in early February.

Thank you very much. 

Much Worse than the Pina Colada Song

I heard about it this morning, and read about it just now: A man in Poland went to a brothel looking for some...err...umm...excitement, and discovered that his wife was an employee.  I'd say both people have some explaining to do. They're getting a divorce, which seems best.

All these years I've thought that the scenario in the "Pina Colada Song" was awkward enough--a guy places a personal ad (in a print paper!), and then his girlfriend responds to the ad. As you might recall, he didn't know that she enjoyed the taste of champagne, or liked making love at midnight on the dunes of the cape.

All's well that ends well, I guess, in Pina Colada land or in Warsaw.

Sentence of the Day

Michael Kimmelman on Philippe de Montebello stepping down after 30 years of directing the Metropolitan Museum of Art: "Any old Monet show will inflate the numbers [of visitors to the Met] without necessarily adding to the sum total of human understanding."

Wow. Now that's a tough standard.

Librarians collect the artifacts of human attempts at understanding, and in so doing build up the storehouse.  Kimmelman's talking about museums, our sisters in this enterprise.

But, honestly, what I'm most interested in are personal attempts to leave the world a better place, in ways that no library or museum could ever show.  Adding to the sum total of human understanding is just as worthy a cause, and just as hard to achieve, in our private lives.

Biomedical Digital Libraries Now Open for Business

I've blogged several times recently about the future of the open access journal Biomedical Digital Libraries.  After several years of successful publication by BioMed Central, the journal had become non-viable because of high author fees.

I'm very pleased to announce that we're now accepting new papers at a new web site, http://biodiglib.org.  We're publishing via Open Journal Systems, and hosted by Scholarly Exchange. There are no author fees.   

Prospective authors should register on the web site and then complete the submission process.  Author guidelines are available on the site, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

The first version of BDL had an automatic linkage with PubMed, which we do not have at this time. However, all papers published going forward will be deposited in one of two archives: DLIST or E-LIS.  We'll also seek to make the journal LOCKSS-compliant. All of these steps should ensure open access to new articles in perpetuity.  The articles already published will be available forever in PubMed Central.

Two years ago BDL took the innovative step of supporting open peer review, as a means of enhancing transparency and the rigor of reviews. We'll continue that commitment now. So if you're looking to publish  in a vibrant peer-reviewed journal, please consider submitting an article to Biomedical Digital Libraries.

Survey of Health Sciences Librarian Blog Readers

I'm working on a paper for a meeting in Las Vegas next month, called, "Delving into the Health Sciences Biblioblogosphere: How Has it Changed our Professional Practice?" The abstract is below. 

For the paper I'll include results of a survey of librarians who read blogs that are written by health sciences librarians and targeted to other professionals.  These blogs should generally focus on library issues (which excludes my humble home here).

If you read blogs by and for health sciences librarians, please take 5-10 minutes to complete the survey.   The survey is open until January 21, and I'm happy to answer any and all questions.

Thank you very much.

------
Abstract: 

What seemed strange a few years ago has now become mainstream. Today several health  sciences librarians maintain prominent blogs as a way to exchange information about new   resources and services; and to stimulate discussion and debate among colleagues. As a  means of gauging the impact of this development, this paper will report the results of two surveys: one of a targeted sample of high-profile health sciences librarian bloggers; and another of the larger base of regular blog readers. 

To some extent the blogs serve the same function as an old-fashioned email list like MEDLIB-L; for example, most blogs have a threaded comment function. But there are important differences. Blogs usually convey the "personality" of the author, link to other resources, and have a visual branding that is absent on email. Blogs remain a new (if no longer strange) phenomenon, and this paper is an attempt to understand their functions and potential. 

The surveys will address these questions: How has maintaining a blog changed the  professional interests of the authors? What functions do they hope to serve with their  blog? Do readers attempt to incorporate what they learn into everyday practice? Or are  the blogs mainly current awareness vehicles? Finally, to what extent has interaction with these blogs (either as an author or reader) displaced the use of email lists? Are the blogs a disruptive technology, or simply an additional means of communication in our field?  This paper will provisionally answer these questions, with the hopes of stimulating additional inquiry. 

Debate Wrap Up

The debate tape has ended.  The dominant story lines: how much Republicans loathe Mitt Romney, and the marriage of convenience between Barack Obama and John Edwards against Hillary Clinton.

George Stephanapoulos thought John Edwards won the Democratic debate with his "passion."  I disagree, but I'm biased against Edwards. He's all passion and no substance, whereas Clinton is usually all substance and no passion.  I still like Obama's mixture of heart and head the best.

Bill Richardson played the foil, by issuing trite laments against those "politicians in Washington DC" and lauding his own executive experience. He kept hitting the lectern, loudly, which was disconcerting.

On that note, I'm done. Now that this gorge fest of politics is over, so too is my somewhat silly (but fun) experiment in "live blogging."

Obama on Health Care/Kucinich's Exclusion

The Democrats are still slogging away on videotape.  I appreciated the early exchange about whether purchasing health insurance should be mandated--Edwards and Clinton say yes, Obama says no for adults, yes for children (through their parents).  Paul Krugman has pilloried Obama for this position. Krugman says that Obama echoes GOP talking points.

I liked Obama's argument--that people wouldn't need to be prodded into purchasing health insurance if it was affordable.   This effectively  rebutted Clinton's claim that the lack of a mandate "leaves people out."  The analogue here is car insurance; it's required for car owners, but people flout the law. One camp (Edwards, Clinton) says to stiffen enforcement. The other (Obama) says to recognize that mandates don't work.

A legitimate difference, but what's indisputable is that Obama's stance is not close to making him a GOP shill. Paul Krugman should pick new battles.

P.S. Read Ezra Klein on Dennis Kucinich's exclusion from tonight's debate. If Bill Richardson made the cut, Kucinich should be there too.

Impressed by Mitt Romney

The Republican debate just ended on tape delay, and there was a nice moment on stage when all the candidates from either party (all the candidates invited to the debate, that is) chatted with each other. The Democratic debate will start soon.

Of the Republicans, Mitt Romney impressed me.  On two occasions he went deep into policy points, sometimes beyond the surface where moderator Charlie Gibson wanted to stay: health care, and then immigration policy. While Governor Romney helped usher Massachusetts toward required health care at the state level, which is an achievement. I'm much less impressed by his hard line immigration stance, but at least Romney had a better grasp of John McCain's immigration plan than McCain himself did.

Romney was the target of most of the barbs from other candidates, because he has the most money to run a national campaign.  I won't vote for Romney, but do think he'd offer an interesting intellectual challenge to the Democrats.

"Live Blogging" the Facebook Debates

As ever, we're three hours behind here in California.  So right now I'm witnessing a GOP debate about health care that is three hours old.

In a way, it's thirty years old--full of tired harangues against government-regulated health care and shopworn tales of the horrors of the Canadian system.   Mitt Romney just said "Hillary-care."  (sigh).

The foreign policy debate a half hour ago was interesting. Ron Paul really is standing against the tide of US triumphalism within the GOP. He's spastic overall, but admirable on this issue.

William Kristol Joins the Times, and That's Fine with Me

This week there's been lots of outrage in the liberal blogosphere, and on the letters page, about the Times's decision to hire William Kristol as an Op Ed columnist.

Who is William Kristol? The son of Irving Kristol, one of the godfathers of the modern neoconservative movement. Chief of staff to former Vice President Dan Quayle. Founder of the Weekly Standard, an influential conservative publication. Fierce critic of the New York Times. And fierce defender of the virtue of the Iraq war.

If you present me with 100 issues, I'll disagree with Kristol on 99 of them (at least). That doesn't mean I won't read his weekly column, or that he should be denied the right to have it.  The left's hand-wringing about this is both unnecessary and unbecoming.  What's so hard about defeating Kristol in the realm of ideas? What's so attractive about denying him a column?

I'm looking forward to being enraged every Monday  morning by whatever Kristol says--it will get my juices flowing, and prompt me to think more carefully about why I believe what I do. Sounds good to me.