Next METRO Science Librarians SIG Meeting set for October 6

The METRO Science Librarians SIG meeting set for the afternoon of Monday October 6 is titled:

Retraction Watch at Four -- What Retractions Tell Us About the Failures (and Successes) of Scholarly Publishing

The speaker is Adam Marcus the managing editor of Gastroenterology & Endoscopy News and Anesthesiology News. His freelance articles have appeared in Science, The Economist, The Christian Science Monitor, The Scientist, Birder’s World, Sciam.com, and many other publications and web sites.

For further information and instructions on how to register, please go to http://metro.org/events/538/

You can contact me at bruce.slutsky@njit.edu for more information as well.

Reference Librarians Must Face Ingratitude

Reference librarians often must face ingratitude by patrons.   I have worked with patrons that are most appreciative of the services I provide to them in my 35 years in this profession.  Academic librarians are responsible to serve the students, faculty, and staff of their respective institutions.  I have received few requests from businesses in the local community in recent years.

Last week one of my colleagues left me a message that F.S. asked for assistance from the chemistry librarian.  I was away from the office for a few days, so I phoned him back yesterday and asked what he wanted.  He had a relatively complicated question about sugar cane bagasse.

I spent about an hour on his query and sent my results to him via e-mail with suggestions on how he could pursue his research further.  He never responded to me.  Don’t I deserve a “thank you” for doing work “beyond the call of duty”?  He is not part of my university’s community and I was certainly not under any obligation to him.  He would have to pay an information consultant big bucks for this service.

All in a days work.

Accepted for Publication!

I got some good news. I collaborated on the following paper with Selenay Aytac: Publication Patterns of Science, Technology, and Medical Librarians: Review of the 2008-2012 Published Research. It was just accepted for publications in Science and Technology Libraries. It is much different than my thousands of blog entries, tweets, and Facebook posts.  Thank you Selena for working on this project with me for over a year.  Sometimes perserverance pays off.