Passing of Former Colleague Dan Gawiak

Some of my readers who are librarians may not know that I started my career as a chemist.  My second was with a company that was known as UOP Fragrances where I started in June 1975.  While I was employed there one of my colleagues was Dan Gawiak. I remember eating lunch with him several times.  Shortly after I began there, the company was sold to a Dutch outfit called Naarden.  In late 1976 in a big reorganization they fired everyone from the research director to the bottle washer in one feel swoop leaving Dan and I on the unemployment line.  I ended up at Pfizer in Groton, Ct. while Dan landed a position at Sun Chemical Company in Carlstadt, NJ.  We keept in touch for several years.  I vaguely remember going out for pizza with him in the late 1970s.

I eventually became a chemistry librarian while Dan stayed as a laboratory chemist.  In 1987 or 1988 I ran into Dan at an STN International training session in midtown Manhattan while I worked for NYPL.  At that time Dan worked at Hexagon Laboratories in the Bronx and was interested in learning about chemical searching.  After that I lost touch with him.

Today, while reading the Chemical and Engineering News of July 18 I read that Dan passed away last November at age 60.  At the time of his untimely passing he worked at Baxter Healthcare in Cherry Hill, NJ.  I found an obituary of Dan at http://hosting-tributes-1611.tributes.com/show/Daniel-Gawiak-89980657.

It is very sad to read about the passing of colleagues at a young age.  In this professional blog, I previous reported the passings of:

• Reynaldo Alejandro from NYPL
• Jamie MacInnis from NJIT

In my personal journal I previously reported the passing of my University of Rhode Island friend and colleague Mike Frechette.

When I read about these untimely passings I must recall Harry Harrison's famous quote "Every Day Should be unrapped like a special gift."

Thinking About Patron Driven E-book Acquisitions

There is no doubt e-books have become more popular in academic and mainstream publishing.  I vaguely remember reading that during the last Christmas season sales of electronic books exceeded that of print books on Amazon.com. In the past academic librarians purchase books while taking suggestions from students and faculty.  This model has predominated in the early days of e-books.

The librarians at NJIT have mulled over the idea of patron driven e-book acquisitions.  We are thinking of allowing patrons to borrow any electronic they want.  If a book is borrowed five times, the library would purchase the book.  Like everything else, the devil is in the details.  How would we implement this?  In my opinion budgetary constraints would hamper this.  We would not want to offer a service and then retract it when funds dry out.

There are a few reports of how other libraries have implemented this:

The experience of Southern Illinois University Carbondale is doumented in

Nabe, Jonathan., Imre, Andrea. (2011). Let the Patron Drive: Purchase on Demand of E-books. The Serials Librarian, 60, 193-197.

There is a discussion in this blog entry http://edlab.tc.columbia.edu/index.php?q=node/6036

9000 selected MARC records were added to the catalog for student initiated e-book purchases.  If a book was accessed 3 times, purchase was automatically initiated.  470 e-books were purchased in this fashion while 235 were used again after purchase.

A similar initiative at Grand Valley State University in Michigan  was documented at http://www.libraries.wright.edu/noshelfrequired/?p=1099 

They loaded 50,000 EBL records and in 4 months had 2109 STLs at a cost of $20,382 and 160 purchases at a cost of $11,840 for a total of $32,322.

We will discuss this at NJIT in the days and weeks to come.  Hopefully, we will be able to implement some form of patron initiated e-book requests by the fall semester.

A New Model in Scientific Publishing

I have just read an article in the Chemical and Engineering News titled Research Funders to Start Journal.  The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Max Planck Society, and Wellcome Trust are launching a new open access biomedical journal to commence next summer.  It will be different since the peer review will be speeded up so that decisions will be made within three to four weeks.  Mark Walport, the director of the Wellcome Trust, states that the current process is too slow while the editors are no longer practicing scientists.  This new journal will be supported by the three funding agencies and will not charge author fees.

Time will tell if other funding agencies will follow and publish their own journals.  Will this yet unnamed journal attract top notch researchers?

Mashups

This morning I took a three hour course at METRO on mashups as they can be applied to libraries.  It was given by Nicole Engard who wrote the following book on the topic:

Engard, Nicole C. Library Mashups: Exploring New Ways to Deliver Library Data. Medford, N.J: Information Today, Inc, 2009. Print.

She defined a mashup as a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool.  Actually I had been working with Mashups even though I didn't relaize it.  Since I have one of my twitter feeds on this blog, it is considered a mashup.

She started the lecture by describing mashups such as http://nyc.bestparking.com/ which mashes Google Maps and parking data.  Later in the lecture she showed some library mashups.

I will now have to review my notes and visit the web sites that were mentioned in the lecture.

Summer Research Experience for Teachers at NJIT

For the first time in almost 19 years at NJIT I taught to a group of teacher in the Summer Research Experience for Teachers Program.  Teachers from high schools teaching science, technology, and pre-engineering are part of a research group engaged in studies of pharmaceutical particulate and composite systems.

I gave the standard lecture that I give to chemistry and chemical engineering students.  I gave it quickly since I wanted the teachers to get some hands on experience searching NJIT databases such as Scopus and Scifinder Scholar.  I was pleased to see these teachers interested in what I presented to them.  They will be at NJIT for about 6 weeks and hopefully they will use the information seeking skills that I taught them.