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.

There’s only really one update to speak of, but I didn’t want to title this post ‘guess what guys, I was selected to be an ALA Emerging Leader for 2012′.

There’s only one update, you see, because this fall semester really kicked my butt. For the first time since I’ve started, I really felt like I couldn’t run fast enough to keep up with everything. This was due to a number of factors, I think. First, we were running a pilot project on using online modules to replace face-to-face instruction in a number of courses. My role in the project was to evaluate the success of the project, which involved doing a lot of tasks with which I had little experience: ethics applications, survey design, qualitative research, etc. I also had to pick up a few Engineering courses, due to the departure of our Engineering liaison librarian. Finally, the iSci program is now running at three years simultaneously, which from a workload perspective is about as high as it will get for me, so I have to find the right balance.

Before the Great Onslaught, however, I took a few days this past summer to apply for the ALA Emerging Leader program. It was admittedly on something of a whim (I hadn’t heard of it previously), and was recommended to me by my supervisor at the time. Some thoughtful words on paper + two recommendation letters later, the application was in. After about three months or so, I found out I was selected and quickly signed up for ALA Midwinter & Annual (two conferences I’ve never been to & are required for the program).

The last bit to add is that the EL program is founded on project work for ALA committees and roundtables, culminating in a poster presentation at ALA annual. There is some choice in which project to work on, and I was quite pleased to see a video game focused project, based on ALA’s Gaming Roundtable. My impression is that the work will be centred on drafting policy and language about video game collections for libraries, with some thought toward a library videogame award.

Videogames are a broad medium, and stretch from indie art projects (Passage) to causal (Angry Birds) to blockbusters (Skyrim), plus countless genres, sub-genres and non-genres in between. It will certainly be an interesting conversation to figure out what ought to be important to libraries.

In conclusion, I’m ready for my holiday vacation days.

–
Links:

1. News Release, McMaster Libraries 
2. ALA Emerging Leaders webpage

I had a brief, but enjoyable, visit to the Western Conference on Science Education at UWO (July 6-8, 2011). I attended on the Thursday to share with educators in attendance some of the things we’re experimenting with in the Science Literacy component of iSci. The format was interesting – speakers were paired up by topic similarity, and after those there was a discussion period lasting about a half hour. I was paired up with Francis Jones out of UBC, who was doing some very cool things in a second-year Earth and Ocean Science course to develop ‘scientific skills’. Some of the things that Francis and we are trying overlap, and some diverge, but that’s where great idea sharing can happen. I’ll be getting in touch with Francis to get more detail on a few areas, particularly his approach to students developing a good scientific question.

My presentation is below. I was particularly chuffed when one of the attendees told me that I had the best designed slides at the conference.

Explaining Science: Embedding Science Literacy into a Research-Based Undergraduate Program

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.

I’m running for the Board of Governors at McMaster University. It ought to be a pretty good race, because there’s eight of us on the ballot, all from different parts of the university. My motivation for running is twofold: 1) I think there should be representation from the library in university governance, since we cater to such a large and diverse user-base and 2) I want to have an inside look at how the university is governed, so I can better understand it. I want to be an active contributor instead of a passive observer. I am happy to share what I learn with you.

If you’re a non-teaching staff member at McMaster, I hope you’ll vote for me on April 12/13, 2011.

[update, April 27, 2011: Alas, I wasn't elected to the Board, but not for lack of trying. I think I was the only candidate that postered the campus. Next time..]

Poster inspiration after the jump.

On Thursday March 31st, Krista Godfrey, Karen Nicholson and I participated in a panel presentation on three models of embedded librarianship at ACRL 2011. In an unusual twist, we had no convener to introduce us, so we ran the show ourselves. We were playing to packed house, probably due to a combination of talking about a hot topic, and being in an ideal timeslot (10:30am on the first day). Our ‘hook’ was that we were presenting our models as if they were the best, and we were debating each other to prove to the audience, and let them be our jury (plus, a beer was on the line).

One feature that ACRL offered was to print a twitter hashtag in the conference schedule (further reinforced by including it on our title slide). This led to a lively ‘backchannel’ conversation in the audience, which included thoughts, links and notes. A big plus of a twitter discussion is that it allows the presenters to read what the audience is thinking in a way that doesn’t often come across in questions. Furthermore, that ‘discussion’ can be saved and shared (which I’ve done below).
Thanks to all who participated! (And special thanks to those that personally approached us after the talk to say they enjoyed it)

Embedded Librarians: Three Models – ACRL 2011

Twitter archive after the jump.

Twitter Archive

By one of those funny coincidences, a day after we spent a science literacy class in iSci discussing some of the nuances of reading a scientific paper, Rob Weir’s ‘It’s not Harry Potter‘ appears in Inside Higher Ed detailing the same thing.

In the program, students are thrown into the deep-end of information research very quickly, and are expected to begin combing scientific articles in first year. As a result, we hear cries of: “I don’t know how to read this!” In response, we delivered two classes on this topic.

Part I

In the first class, I adapted the activity from How to Read Scientific Research Articles: A Hands-On Classroom Exercise by Bogucka and Wood (2009). In preparation for the class, I tracked down papers from a number of disciplines that had an explicit introduction, methods, conclusion, discussion format. I then carefully cut these papers up into sections, and distributed each section to students in such a way that pairs (or individuals) had one section of one paper.

This individual ‘bit’ of the paper became fodder for a series of questions I presented on a handout, designed to get the students thinking about what kind of information was in that section, and how much they could understand of the overall paper.

After this, they were asked to sit in groups that formed all of the sections of the larger paper, and discuss what they could glean from each section, eventually putting the paper together in a cohesive whole.

The activity culminates in a discussion of what sections provide the most context, and how we can use this information to decide on how we might tackle reading a paper — what order of reading would be most efficient?

Part II

We heard some feedback that while the activity in Part I gave insight into the order in which to read a paper, it didn’t actually help with the inherent problem of trying to read the text. As a result, we decided to try something a little different in Part II. For this class, students were asked to bring in scientific papers that were relevant to the research they were doing for their current project.

Using a series of instructions and leading questions (see the Prezi, below), we asked them to think about motivations (why did you choose this paper), barriers (what will hinder your understanding), paper elements (find the purpose, hypothesis, important result, etc.) and finally the relevance of the paper to their research.

Along the way, we tried to drop-in advice and hints not unlike what Weir suggested. The ‘small doses’ suggestion is important, I think. In addition, I think ‘don’t sweat the stuff you can’t understand’ is worth mentioning. Students can too-easily get bogged down in all the parts of a paper that are above their level of comprehension. Rather than do that, focus on the parts you can understand: the purpose and hypothesis, the plain-English discussion and significance. Later, when they are more adept, they can spend more time examining the details of the methods and results.

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.