On Monday, I attended the Oberlin Group meeting for science librarians at Oberlin College. I was hoping for cooler weather, but we reached 80 degrees Monday afternoon. Oh well. Here's a summary of what we discussed.
Throughout the day, open access was a prominent topic. We had Ray English, director of libraries at Oberlin and SPARC-er, open the day with a pep talk on open access, which seemed to follow us throughout the day's discussions. The first official program was on social software, called Virtual Outreach and Reference. Several librarians presented how their libraries are using IM, YouTube, and blogs to push information to users. One thing I noticed is that every single library had a prominent IM presence. Every library uses Meebo and has a common account that all librarians use, much like we use at the reference desk. They seem to be having a lot of success with IM reference, and they all have the chat box appear on the library homepage as well as other pages.
The next interesting presentation was on Scientific Literacy, which is often mistaken for information literacy. Scientific literacy goes a step beyond and uses concepts in science to enable users to interpret and analyze scientific information rather than just absorb facts. There seems to be a big problem, which I have noticed at W&L as well, with people relying on the mainstream media for their science. Often, the media misinterpret findings, or purposely skew results to fit an agenda. I mentioned that we get people in the science library looking for the "latest headline" who are disappointed when they read the original research and find that the results were drastically altered for mainstream consumption. I suggested that this be discussed more in-depth at the next meeting.
The last part of the day we talked about periodicals. I gave my presentation on our JSTOR project from ALA Midwinter, which is not news to anyone here. Another librarian talked about how her library at Trinity had dropped the Elsevier contract in favor of a "pay-per-view" model for ScienceDirect. I found this extremely interesting, considering we subscribe to journals via ScienceDirect that have very high cost per use. Her argument was that it was better to spend $90 on 3 articles than $5,000 on a year's subscription that would still only be used 3 times. When asked about browsing, my first thought was that not many folks come in to browse current periodicals. My second thought was that we need to continue to push RSS, as I think this the new version of browsing.
At the end of the day, we talked about future meetings. I would like to see an annual meeting, but that didn't seem feasible to some of the rest of the participants. (Oh, how lucky we are here at W&L!) I hope that future meetings will build on this first one, so that we don't have to catch up every time and can just get to business.
UPDATE: We are currently the only library dropping WoS in favor of Scopus. Trinity is currently thinking of doing the same, but haven't made a concrete decision, and Thomson is apparently giving them a little extra time to decide. People were shocked when I announced what we were doing, but when I mentioned that we had no backfiles and that we were getting a good deal on Scopus, they were actually jealous. Most of the schools had backfiles to at least 1960, so it was obvious that giving up WoS would be a bad move on their part.
