Tag: science librarian

Tales from an Unintentional Science Liaison

I’m sure this comes as a surprise to literally no one, but I have a B.A. in English Literature, which, along with History, is one of the most common, librarian backgrounds. Many of the librarians at my current workplace have a similar background to my own, though some librarians have second Master’s degrees in areas outside of librarianship. At my workplace, librarians are given collection development and liaison duties to different subject areas, and if you have a second Master’s degree in, say, Business Management, you’ll most likely be the liaison in that subject area. You’ll build relationships with faculty in that department, purchase materials related to that subject area, and teach information literacy to students taking classes in that subject. Librarians who have worked at the library for a while have obtained liaison duties in areas that fit their backgrounds or interests. As the newest librarian at my workplace, I was left with slim pickings, which is how I ended up as a liaison to biology and environmental science.

I have a tiny bit of background in environmental science from my work with both the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management while getting my MLIS; however, it wasn’t the sciency stuff I was doing. I created online content and digital collections, which was super cool and in line with my library degree, but gave me no understanding of mechanical girdling and bark beetle fungi. As for biology, the last class I’d taken in that subject area was my freshman year of high school. Suffice it to say that these liaison subjects are not in my wheelhouse. Goodbye, Austen; hello, Darwin.

When I was first given biology and environmental science as liaison areas, I felt, and still do feel, that I would face some challenges establishing myself as the go-to person in these areas. For example, I was told that that library hadn’t done instruction in these subjects for a while, so it might be hard to get into classes. I had no idea how I was supposed to purchase books for biology because I wasn’t sure how to assess our current collection. Biology is basically every living thing ever, so it felt daunting to try and build a collection that encompassed all areas of life with such a limited budget. I also wasn’t sure how I’d connect to faculty with a PhD in areas I knew little about. At first I thought, maybe I’ll learn some stuff about plants so that I can contribute to a conversation. This turned out to be a bad idea because I can name about four houseplants while one faculty member was able to identify every type of grass on campus by sight. As Zoë recently talked about, the liaison imposter syndrome was real. How was I supposed to become a science liaison?

At the beginning of the semester, I decided to individually email all faculty members in my liaison area to introduce myself, let them know I would buy them stuff, and offer to come to their classes and talk to their students about research. This kind of worked. I got some responses thanking me, some requesting a particular book, and one or two who seemed interested in having me come to a class. I found the most luck in a new faculty group. Any faculty member who was new to campus was invited to a retreat and a learning community so that we could get to know the university and each other. There were three biology faculty in this group, and I was able to talk to and get to know them over the course of several days. They later invited me to their classes. Building in-person relationships was valuable to establishing myself as a liaison.

Building relationships with faculty is important to me, but I really wanted to support students and their information needs. I was initially concerned that students would balk at my un-scientific background and I felt most nervous about teaching a Master’s in Biomedical Sciences class at the beginning of the semester. I was to talk to them about scientific, primary literature, which I know a lot about, but I definitely felt out of my element talking to students who were working in medical fields and knew much more about bio-med than I did. It turns out, I didn’t need to worry. After teaching the class, multiple students scheduled consultations with me, not because they needed my limited knowledge about biology, but because they were still not confident they could identify primary, scientific literature; weren’t sure how to narrow down their topics; needed help with APA; or wanted help organizing their research.

What I learned from these consultations is that I don’t need to be an expert in biology to talk about research and information literacy to biology students (though I know our field is divided about who gets to be qualified for science librarianship). This was true for master’s students, and I had one memorable consultation with a student where we were trying to find information on receptors, and both outwardly cringed at a very jargon-heavy article title. We were instantly on the same page; neither of us wanted to click on that article because the title sucked and we had no idea what it was talking about. For the freshman biology courses I taught, I needed even less subject-specific knowledge because I know about as much about biology as freshmen do. What does a biology freshman need to know about research anyway? Probably the same as freshmen in other fields, which includes finding, identifying, understanding, and synthesizing sources into their own research (amongst other information skills).

I also realized that I know more about my liaison areas than I thought I did. For instance, I may not be able to describe every scientific fact driving climate change, but I am familiar with the conversations surrounding climate change, the change in terminology over time, the contentious and political nature of the subject, and that there is a scientific consensus that climate change is happening. I also know that genetics, CBD receptors, concussions, maternal mortality in the US, polio reemergence, cancer immunotherapy, antibiotic resistance, and renewable energy are hot topics right now as well. Guess what students are writing about? If I remain up-to-date on scientific news and understand the general conversations surrounding those topics, I’ll know what students care about researching. If I don’t know something about a subject, students have been really cool about sharing their own knowledge about a topic, and I get to learn something new.

Remaining up-to-date with student work and research trends is something that I can do on my own campus as well. I think it’s important for me to support student and faculty scholarship, especially in my liaison areas. I recently attended an event where students in science departments shared posters of the research they’d conducted over the semester. Biology faculty were there and several students I’d worked with over the semester were sharing their work. They were very excited to talk to me about their research and some students recognized me from classes or consultations. In fact, one of the biology faculty members introduced me to a student as the biology librarian, and the student responded, “I know. She talked to my class about primary research.” I’m considering everything about that interaction as a win.

Though I’m achieving small victories and growing my confidence that I can be a good liaison, most days, I feel a little anxious and unsure about what I’m doing. Collection development is still tricky, but luckily, I have colleagues that know this subject area fairly well and can help, and faculty in biology have made their own requests for materials. There’s also subject lists and all sorts of resources to help me figure out what materials to purchase. I still haven’t connected with every faculty member in my liaison area, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to. Despite the challenges, I’m enjoying science liaisonship more than I thought I would. I hope that my confidence continues to grow and I become even better at supporting the research needs of my institution.

Are you a subject liaison? What are your experiences with librarian liaison roles?

The Romanian Patent From Hell

(tl;dr version – tell students to look up this patent if they ever claim, like Thomas Friedman, that “Everything is on Google.”)

A few weeks ago, in my SciFinder key contact role I received this innocuous request:

patentrequest

This is the lowest hanging fruit among my reference requests – click the “Full Text” link, another click to Espacenet, download the full-text, send to graduate student, log the transaction. Read to finish time – under two minutes.

But Espacenet, had a grey font where the “Original document” link resides – the original was not available. Well, that’s sad, but hey – I’m a professional librarian. I found and searched the Romanian patent agency.

Nope.

I also tried the Derwent Patent Index (through Thomson Reuters for us) and Google Patents – I got an abstract from Derwent, but no full text.

So I invoked the nuclear option – an open question on the Chemical Information Sources Discussion List. This invaluable treasure has taught me well, and I once answered a query off list. But there was some trepidation about asking such a learned cadre of science librarians because, frankly, there might be some easy answer I missed which would make me feel dumb. But I decided this was the best-case scenario because I would learn something; so I asked the group mind.

What came back was ninja-level patent advice, but all for naught –

There are few remaining options – a document delivery service like FIZ AutoDoc or ordering the patent file wrapper of the citing U.S. patent, (RO89171 might be included in the original filing materials). But these services are relatively expensive compared to what we will generally pay, so I would have to kick it back to the user – which feels like defeat.

Yes, I have anthropomorphized a reference request into my nemesis.

This is really the first time I’m staring down a patent retrieval defeat – and it’s chafing a little. But in terms of my duties, I have a collection to analyze, my first convention coming up (cough, cough), and the metastasizing committee responsibilities inherent to the tenure track. Among other things (like the cold call that just eroded 5 minutes of productivity). I don’t think I’m going to “win” this one and I’ve probably spent too much time on it already.

So if you ever need something ungoogleable for a demonstration, trot out Romanian patent 89171 – at least until someone gets around to scanning it.

A New Career

Please welcome our new First Year Academic Librarian Experience blogger Ian McCullough, Physical Sciences Librarian at the University of Akron.

Librarianship seems like a career that many come to later, after some career missteps or dead ends. My career path falls into this broad category as I’ve switched from a relatively promising career in lab management into my current role as physical sciences librarian for the University of Akron. In my last job I received frequent praise, backed up with financial compensation. Funding was as secure as it gets in biomedical research (i.e. not grant funded) and a big promotion was being discussed. My users treated me with respect and genuine warmth.

So why did I switch careers? Some mundane reasons contributed, like years of irritation at chemicals eating holes in my clothing. But at heart I wanted more intellectual freedom. I have faculty status here and will get to do research and
pursue my intellectual curiosity. I still get to train users, which was the best part of my previous career. But also, looking at the next thirty years or so, I just couldn’t see myself doing facilities management into my old age. I’d like to say it was a surprise that so many equipment and facilities issues have surfaced this first month. But I’ve worked in academia for nine years and realize infrastructure problems are a fact of life.

My library has leaks. We have a brick exterior with some old mortar that allows water in during driving rain and a few weeks ago Akron enjoyed a torrential downpour. Leaks appeared over the computers, above some journals, along my window, in the bathroom, and in the halls. From my coworkers, I found this was the worst round of leaks in recent memory. We set up buckets, later called the physical plant, and have some new tiles coming. But the bottom line is that fixing the exterior would be incredibly expensive and they (A mysterious cabal of upper administrators? You got me.) may or may not want to erect a new building. So in the near term, we will have leaks.

At my first staff meeting there was some discussion of the leaks, and my boss asked whether I would have come if I had known about the leaks beforehand. “Yes” I answered, because it didn’t change anything. I used to deal with maintenance issues in my last job — some things can be fixed, some cannot and it’s always about budget. Over the long term, leaks can be patched, mortar tuck-pointed, books replaced, and buckets dumped. But intellectual freedom is not something I could get with a work order.