Background: I was contacted by a student from an US university working on a project that looked at alternative science careers. The student included a list of headings that formed the basis for this post. It’s a bit of a rush job, so please excuse the poor grammar and odd wording. If you have anything you think would be valuable for the student, please leave a comment.

Job description

As a caveat, I think you’ll find that depending on the science librarian you speak to, you’ll find quite diverse job descriptions. Some are quite specialized, others more generalist. My situation is somewhat unique.

My primary ‘job’ is teaching/instruction. I co-teach a component of the Integrated Science program called Science Literacy, which involves guiding students to understand the elements of science outside of the ‘core’ knowledge. We talk about writing for different audiences (formal and informal), finding and using information, peer-review, presentation skills, poster design, and many other topics. I also do a number of other tasks for iSci. In addition, I do a number of guest lectures in classes, mostly in Biology, Biochemistry and a little Engineering. This instruction is strongly centered around finding scientific literature using databases and organizing that information.

Being a librarian usually involves other project work throughout the library, often involving committee work. At the moment, I’m only on a handful of committees (mostly involving technology), but that will vary depending on what the library is working on. In the past, I’ve worked on promotional videos, staff training, etc. Opportunities to do different things often come up, and so it is possible to have quite a variety in your work.

The other part of my job is Professional Development and Service. The former involves presenting at conferences and publishing in the library literature. The latter involves volunteer type work for the university and library organizations.

Specific ways in which the scientific training is used or helpful

My science background has been invaluable in my position in the library. For teaching Science Literacy, I rely heavily on understanding how science is ‘done’ and drawing on my experience in both undergrad and in my MSc. I also draw heavily on my MSc., where I had lots of  practice searching for information.

Having a science background helps when communicating with other scientists. Understanding the ‘language’ of science is a big part of that, as well as them recognizing you as someone that is part of their sphere.

Type(s) of training/education required for that position

A science background is a huge asset for being a science academic librarian. In the past (and perhaps still), it was not necessary, but I think my job would be very difficult without it. Depending on the position, a Master’s degree (or higher) may be required, or may be considered as equivalent to ‘experience’. In my case, having the MSc. was a major contributor to my getting the job.

In addition to the science background, a science librarian also requires a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) (or Master of Library Science (MLS), depending on the institution). These are graduate programs that are accredited my the American Library Association. They can vary from 1 year long to 2 years long, depending on the program.

Manners in which jobs in that field can be found

There are a number of job boards that list library jobs.
In Canada, I would look at:

• http://www.cla.ca/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Job_Search&Template=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=1964
• http://www.libraryjobs.ca/
• http://www.ischool.utoronto.ca/jobsite
• http://www.fims.uwo.ca/alumni_careers/employment/index.htm

But there are lots of these out there.

Starting salaries

You can read about starting salaries for academic libraries here: http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/ss09.pdf (see page 28)

In general, they seem to run in the $40,000-$50,000 range.

Pros/cons of the field

Librarianship (and libraries) are at something of crisis point, and depending on your perspective, this is a pro or a con. The internet has changed the role of the library drastically, and so libraries need to figure out what they are best suited for going forward. This means that bright, passionate people can play a significant role in shaping that future.

For me, a significant benefit is being able to work in academia. I value higher education and believe it does important work in preparing future leaders. I also quite like the culture and being around intelligent engaged faculty, staff and students. Academic jobs often provide excellent benefits and competitive salaries, and usually offer flexible schedules.

Being a librarian involves working closely with people (for me, usually students, but also faculty and staff), and helping them get things done. This can be very rewarding. It also involves wading through information and becoming an expert navigator of the internet. For me, this is a lot of fun.

One downside of librarianship is perhaps the amount of job openings compared to the number of new graduates produced, as outlined below. This means that new graduates are not guaranteed to find work easily, and may need to spend some time filling contract and temporary positions before finding a full-time job.

Prospective job market in the field

This is a more complicated issue. The job market is dependent on two variables: the number of graduates from library programs and the number of retirements/new openings in libraries. The present landscape suggests there are far more graduates of library programs than new openings (even considering future retirements).

Having said that, librarians with science backgrounds, particularly at the graduate level, are rather rarer and will be desired at academic universities. Skills in technology are also an asset, as librarianship moves deeper into a tech field.

Outside of academia, there are jobs for librarians in other areas, including public and ‘special’ libraries. Special libraries encompass law, business, government and health, amongst others.

I was recently invited to guest lecture in an LIS class, speaking to and leading discussion around embedded librarianship and thinking beyond information literacy. For this latter topic, I had this notion that it would be interesting to get students to brainstorm broadly about what other literacies there might be, and what being literate in that area might mean. (activity instructions after the jump)

In preparation for this activity, I looked at online mind-mapping software that would be free to use for something like this. I had used bubbl.us previously, and I liked it for its simplicity. I also thought Mind Meister would work well. It’s more feature-rich (and therefore complicated), but made open collaboration easier. I would recommend both (and they are just two of many). Just before class, though, I read a tweet about something called popplet, a relatively new tool. It’s still in beta, and has a few bugs yet, but was super simple to use. I’m a sucker for trying something new, so I went with that.

I’m really pleased with the result. It’s both complicated and nice to look at. The students came up with some novel ideas that I’d not considered, and found ways to link different literacies together. Very cool. I hope the class got something out of it!

As I said, Popplet still has some kinks to work out. Export to PDF and JPG is low-resolution, not adequate for a popplet of this size. You can’t yet duplicate a whole sheet (so to make a backup copy). I’d like to see ways to collaborate with a group without requiring everyone to have an account. Lots of potential here, though.

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Many of them are interview based: Spark, On the Media, The Sound of Young America, etc. Invariably, at the end of the interview, the host says, “Thanks for being on this show” in some form.

Now, pay attention to what the interviewee says in response. It’s almost never “you’re welcome”, which is what so many of us were taught (as kids) to say.

Most of the time, the response is, “thank you“, or the variant, “thank you for having me”. More rarely, you’ll get, “it’s been a pleasure to be here”, or “my pleasure”. But the rarest is surely “you’re welcome”.

I don’t know why, but this bit of interview etiquette fascinates me. Listen for it.

Over at Confessions of a Science Librarian, John Dupuis dropped the gauntlet for all of us in academic librarianship content to go to the same library conferences and read the same library literature. He’s onto something – there’s much that can be learned from discovering where your faculty are reading/going and finding them there. This can be as simple as finding on-campus conferences that draw a broad faculty audience, and visit that. Here at McMaster, the Centre for Leadership in Learning annually hosts a teaching and learning conference, which draws internal faculty interested in pedagogical research, as well as faculty from other institutions. Typically, librarians have a showing at these kinds of events, which (I hope) reminds faculty that we are invested in student learning as well. I will often attend the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) conference, for similar reasons. At some point, I will definitely attend a science communication oriented conference, too.

You’ll find a modified version of John’s Manifesto below. I’ve ‘tamed’ it a touch, making it more of a compromise (yes, yes, I know I’m de-manifesto-izing it). I’m not about to abandon the expertise of other librarians entirely – I suspect that finding a (personal) balance between library and faculty ‘worlds’ is probably best. One can adjust depending on how long you’ve spent in a career, and on which aspects are more rewarding and challenging.

A Stealth Librarianship Manifesto

Small Update:

In the wake of John’s original post, there has been a lot of dialogue amongst librarians about the manifesto. In fact, John’s done a great job of collecting that dialogue, so I’ll point you there. The Lead Pipe team wrote so much that I haven’t yet psyched myself up to dive in. I was really intrigued, though, by what Bonnie Swoger wrote about a concerted, planned effort at her institution to dialogue with faculty that she supports. When Bonnie meets, they chat about:

• “What are they working on right now?
• Are they incorporating undergraduates into their research?  Have they co-authored publications with these students? (Quite often)
• How do they select which journal to publish in?  Do they pay attention to impact factors or not? (Although my faculty pay attention to general reputation, they rarely mention the metrics)
• Have they posted a copy of one of the publications online?  Do they know if they kept the right to do so? (They have no idea what rights they have to their papers)
• What kinds of data are they producing?  What do they do with it? (I’ve already learned a lot about the distinctions between the theorists and the applied folks in math and computer science)”

I think this is a fantastic idea, and I wish there were more hours in the day to do this kind of ‘investigative reporting’ myself. This could be an interesting information-gathering activity as well as an opportunity to remind faculty about the role of the library. Bonnie mentioned one insight she’s already gleaned from the first few sessions: “Scholarly communication may be changing, but many of the faculty I’ve talked with (including those who are still publishing actively) are barely aware of some of the fascinating changes and experiments taking place.” I don’t find this surprising. I wonder to what extent Bonnie’s dialogues actively change faculty’s impression of scholarly communication: kind of a Schrödinger’s cat Heisenberg uncertainty principle thing.

This won’t be a post about the wonderful sessions I attended at the OLA Superconference 2011, because I didn’t really attend any. I couldn’t find the time! Rather, this will be some reflections on being a presenter, twice.

1. Try something different. For one of my presentations (on active learning classrooms), my co-presenter and I used a web program called Prezi instead of a slide-deck (PPT, Keynote). It was the first time I’ve ever used it, and it was actually pretty fun. If it was both of us trying to use it for the first time, I wouldn’t have made a conference presentation our breakout event, but since it was just me that was inexperienced, it worked out well. Looking at how we used Prezi, it was really just flash and novelty, but that’s just fine for a first-time. You can’t expect that your first time doing anything will be a revelation, and you shouldn’t expect mastery the first time you use a tool. Now that I see what it can do, I can figure out ways to use it to full effect, particularly in showing connections between ideas and concepts.
2. Get creative. This can be considered in conjunction with point one, above. For the same presentation, I shot and edited my first video, ever. It didn’t have the highest production values, but that didn’t matter: it was far more interesting to watch compared me talking for five minutes. Just like all the best active learning approaches, it also took much more time and thought a priori. But now that I’ve done it, I have a better sense of how to do similar things next time, and how to make it better. Creativity breeds creativity.
3. Meet your audience. I wish I could have done more of it, but I managed to hang out in the audience a bit before my talk. I wanted to know why they were there. That may sound odd, but I was curious where they were coming from, and if that matched our conception of what the presentation was about. I’ve been in countless presentations where I came for one reason (based upon what I read in the title or abstract), and the presentation was about another thing entirely. I wish there was more time to engage the audience this way. Maybe I should build a few minutes into the beginning of the presentation to find out.
4. Listen to feedback, if you can get it. We were quite fortunate in my other presentation (on models of embedded librarianship) to hear from people afterward about what worked and what didn’t. In fact, there was some brief discussion during the question period which indicated some frustration with the broad question we were asking. Because we know we will have another chance to do this presentation, that kind of feedback is incredibly constructive. Most presentations could benefit from a tweak (or more!). Ours is no different.
5. Bring ‘business’ cards. I don’t know what it is with me, but I forget those things at every conference. Nonetheless, I am making a point of following up with every business card I get. I would hope for the same if it were the other way around. It’s like the golden rule of contact exchanging.
6. I don’t really like conferences. It’s quite possible that I’m doing it wrong, or it’s the introvert in me speaking, but I find conferences (of any kind) draining and stressful. Whether I am presenting or just attending. I can’t really do more than two days of conferencing. I’ll need to figure out what the trick to being an expert conference-goer is.

(with apologies to the Western Soundscape Archive)

Title: Thode Library, September 18, 2009 at 2:30 PM
thode-ambient.mp3
Subject: Places; Ambient Recordings; Environments; Indoor Sounds
Place Names: H.G. Thode Science and Engineering Library (McMaster University); Hamilton, Ontario
Creator of Audio Recording: Andrew Colgoni
Publisher: Andrew Colgoni
Date.Original: 2009-09-18
Date.Digital: 2009-09-18
Format: audio/mp3
Resource Type: sound
Digitization Specifications: Recorded natively to .mp3 format
Recording Equipment: Zoom Handy Recorder H4
Recording Description: Ambient Recording of the interior of Thode Library, midday

Toronto, MaRS Centre – July 29th, 2009 – Free Admission
Slides and Speaker List available

The title of the conference was slightly misleading, as it suggested a broad view of science 2.0 landscape. Instead, I found that at least half the talks were aimed at a specific type of researcher: those that do computational science research. There were, however, some interesting ideas that were of a broader nature, which I will discuss further.

Michael Nielsen – Doing Science Online

Nielsen opened his talk with a discussion of blogging in the sciences. In particular, he described the blog of Terrence Tao, a mathematician and Fields medalist. What makes Tao’s blog special is that it is a place for very high-level thinking and discussion.  Tao writes blog posts outlining a mathematical problem he’s working on, along with his ideas for how they might be solved, or introducing a new way to think about them. The comments section is full of other mathmaticians offering advice, rebuttal, criticism, and discussion. It has, in essence, become a forum for mathematical thought that cannot be replicated in traditional journal-style publishing. The output of Tao’s blog is professional enough that it has been formally published in two volumes: “Structure and Randomness: pages from year one of a mathematical blog” and “Poincaré’s legacies: pages from year two of a mathematical blog“.

Blogs allow for a rapid exchange of information, almost in real-time. It also makes the scientific conversation readily searchable, and open. While traditional scientific publishing methods are still critical, it is interesting to note that other media can be an important part of the process. Another example is the so-called open notebook approach to using the web. In a similar way, ideas and notes are published and made available for viewing.

Tao and Nielsen, amongst others, have started up another blog (and associated wiki) called Polymath Projects, designed to be “massively collaborative mathematical research projects”. Essentially, these spaces allow many mathematicians to combine their talents to solve larger, more difficult math problems, which will later be published (attributed to a polymath pseudonym). While not a new idea (see Bourbaki for collectives publishing under pseudonyms, and later, Crowdsourcing), it is still incredibly powerful.

What can the library do, then, to support this kind of work? The simplest action is to support the tools that researchers and scientists need, like blogs and wikis. These tools will not use themselves, however, so the librarian must play advocate. Another, more complex act is to find ways to support open data curation for scientists, that allows for data to be re-used and re-analyzed.

Cameron Neylon – A Web Native Research Record: Applying the Best of the Web to the Lab Notebook

Neylon opened his talk by suggesting that the traditional mode of distributing scientific information is waning, while other modes are rising. The problem, he suggests, is that current publishing methods are too static, too non-interactive. Beyond this, traditional publishing is slow, doesn’t allow for re-use, mashing-up, and does not necessarily accommodate the ‘size’ of a publishable idea. Neylon sees modern science as requiring strong connections to other science, suggesting that it be less like words in a book and more like a highly branched and interconnected network.

In his lab, he is using the web in a different way – rather than do a bit of research, then transcribing it to a paper notebook, and then possibly transcribing it again online, he skips the middle bit. He has wired his machines to take the results of an analysis and upload it automatically to his website. The online lab notebook, then, is partially automated, networked and linked, and very interactive. But, most of all, it is open. Failed experiments, unused or raw data, and so on – it is all present and accounted for, and available to be manipulated and mined by other researchers.  There are hurdles associated with such openness, though: most researchers are less willing to share results and findings so quickly, lest they be scooped by a competitor. According to the Wikipedia entry, there are also issues with curation and organization of such an incredible amount of data.

Jon Udell: Collaborative Curation of Public Events

Udell pointed out that when it comes to public events, the most common system of notification is simple tacked up poster (on poles, windows, etc.). At the community level, this is a more comprehensive event aggregator than anything that exists online. As such, most of these posters don’t have an associated webpage, nor is there a comprehensive index. While these posters have a low barrier to entry, they offer poor searchability.

A solution that Udell envisons is an event aggregator – an online tool that collects calendar information from a number of disparate sources, and can than output them back to the end user. More than that, however, Udell wants to maintain some core values for this platform: collaboration, open data, standards, transparency, and re-use. This project also asks that users do not only need to be subscribers of data and information, but can be producers of it. Udell sees members of the project as ‘curators’ – people that go out and collect event information, but also create it, and encourage that the community produces it, too.

There is a challenge in this, however. Many event producers (cities, tourism boards, universities, etc.) do not publish their event data in an open format – the ideal is .ICS or iCal – and so that information cannot be aggregated.

I have taken a personal stake in this project. (you can, too! – In fact, Udell sees librarians as having role in this kind of work.) After the talk, I volunteered myself to be an event curator for Guelph, ON. I have found it challenging, in the sense that many of the organizations that list events in the city lock up their information in RSS or email notifications that cannot be easily captured. Nonetheless, I have ‘nagged’ the major event producers to open their information up, and continue to scour the ‘net for iCal feeds.

And so…

In the land of Science 2.0, I see a role for librarians – whether it be providing access to technologies or curating data or other kinds of information. It is important to be listening to pioneering researchers, discovering their needs, and finding ways to meet them.

“Google brought books to life—instead of reading through survey texts, I could search for footnotes, which led me to more precise titles, which led to still others and others, in much the same way that we navigate the Web using hyperlinks. Eventually, of course, I had to drag myself to the library to pick up physical copies of the works in question—a step that I considered ridiculous. I would gladly have paid Google and the authors for the right to electronically review the books and papers, but there was no way to do so.”

Farhad Manjoo, Wednesday, May 6, 2009, “Your Search Returned 12 Million Books”. Slate.com

A sign of the times; I’ve suggested this previously, but I’ll do it again. Academic libraries need to figure out digital delivery of books, and soon. If Google or Amazon or somebody else does it better and easier, the library ‘market share’ will erode. If somebody manages to do it for ‘free’ (ad-driven, or otherwise), then we’re sunk.

In a week of thought-provoking ideas, I wish to touch on one in particular: should management in libraries necessarily be librarians?

We are seeing this issue come up again and again, and is an early theme in library education. “There will be a shortage of management in libraries, we need to be sure that new librarians have the appropriate skills.” Of course, the reality is that even with the new emphasis on management courses in the curriculum, librarians have little formal training in management. Furthermore, the vagaries of business and budget are often at odds with the principles that many librarians espouse. (Not only that, many are just uninterested..)

I recall a particular moment in during the degree program where we had a guest speaker from the local public library system. This individual was the director of the library system but was not a librarian, but rather a management professional. The class discussion afterward was very critical of the business-like changes that were being made.

So, then, should that give license to libraries to hire trained management personnel to perform management duties instead of librarians? The fundamental problem is clear: individuals trained in management do not have library training and MLIS grads have little management training. Where is the middle ground?

There is also another issue here. As professionals, there is some expectation that our peers and supervisors will also be professionals. Imagine a hospital that was managed by a non-doctor.  Is this an apt comparison?

“If I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, or improve my golf swing, or write HTML, “cheating” would be the last thing that would ever occur to me. It would be utterly irrelevant to the situation.

On the other hand, if I wanted a certificate saying that I could pick a jib, play a round in under 80, or produce a slick Web page (and never expected actually to perform the activity in question), I might well consider cheating (and consider it primarily a moral problem).

This is the situation we’ve built for our students: a system in which the only incentive or motives anyone cares about are marks, credits and certificates.”

Hunt, R. (2003). Let’s hear it for Internet plagarism. Teaching & Learning Bridges, University of Saskatchewan, 2(3), 2-5.