#science libraries

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Innovation in libraries: USTLG meeting

Yesterday I attended a day conference run by USTLG (University Science and Technology Libraries Group), which was a chance to learn from colleagues and share some innovative practice of my own. It was also a great opportunity to visit a library in a very different sector — in this case, industry — as the venue was TWI, an organisation providing advice and safety assurance about welding, joining,…

I’ve been working on a systematic review with several academic colleagues at the Institute for Public Health. I helped them develop the search strategy, and then spent a lot of time running the search in various databases and exporting the results, which will then undergo data extraction by one of the researchers. Our protocol was recently published, and you can read it here (it’s an open-access…

I recently attended a session on bibliometrics, led by Yvonne Nobis of the Betty & Gordon Moore Library at the University of Cambridge. Bibliometrics is the statistical analysis of written publications. Although it was developed for use in a library context to understand the relationships between different publications, and make decisions about journal purchasing, in recent times it is used more…

Critical appraisal is the process by which students and researchers evaluate the quality of a research article to assess the the usefulness of its findings. My library runs critical appraisal training, and at present it is the only course we offer that I don’t teach myself. This is mainly due to a lack of confidence on my part – my background is in the humanities, not the sciences, and the…

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been participating in GSLSDoT, a ‘ten days of Twitter’ activity designed for students and researchers at the Graduate School of Life Sciences at the University of Cambridge. The aim is to get people up and running on Twitter, either setting up accounts and tweeting for the first time, or gaining hints and tips about how to use Twitter more effectively in the case of…

New year, new job

My life has become somewhat simpler, in that I have gone from three part-time jobs to one full-time and one part-time job. So now I’m working in two libraries instead of three. My new full-time job is in a science library, and since I had only worked in humanities libraries before now, I had a lot of learning to do in my first week. Thankfully, my new colleagues have been very patient with me,…