Wednesday, May 16, 2007

practice vs. t-shirt

I was at the University of Chicago for a training meeting yesterday. I saw a guy wearing a t-shirt that said: "that's all well and good in practice..."

persevering

I'm going to move forward with the study, but I've changed the source of my information to a more higly regarded resource. I'm using flashgot to collect the information and refworks to organize it. I can't use the raw information I get from flashgot, but I can scrape the pertinent data, resubmit it to a different database, gather more info, and then test it to prove my idea, or not depending on the results.

Monday, May 7, 2007

A possible collections study

My Promotion and Tenure Liaison has discouraged me from a study I want to perform because he thinks it would be too labor intensive and not publishable. Since he is a giant in Library Science research (well, if not a giant, a towering figure) I should listen to him. But I really want to do the study and I think I can make a case for it as a viable topic and not just a self evaluation as he seems to think it is. If there is a literature for it I'll continue. If not, I'll probably scrap it unless I make some progress on the argument. The study is an evaluation of the titles reviewed in a major book review journal but not acquired by our profile or by my selection. I want to see if there are salient characteristics of the non-acquired books that are either support or invalidate aspects of our profile and/or my selections. As an example, here is a stab at a google scholar search. Here is the tiny url preview link. The results are vague. I'll finesse it later.