Philly wrap-up

I'm sick again! Poop. I'm not sure if it was the all nighter getting here (I got stuck in Cincinnati and got to take a nice 2 hour nap at a Holiday Inn) or 2 late nights with Rene, but my respiratory infection is back with a vengeance. Even after laying low for the weekend and starting a second course of antibiotics, I'm still coughing up bits of lung.

Anyway, the Open Access train at ACS got a little tiring after a while, but overall the conference was good. I didn't learn too much chemistry, but I did get a chance to meet some folks. Shout outs to Leah from Cornell (with a great analysis of journal usage based on IP stats), Patricia from PLU (for now) for leading me around, and Michael Leach from Harvard--possibly the next ASIS(&T) president.

I did catch up with Rene. It was good of him to take time from his busy dissertating schedule to hang out with me. He patiently explained the beer thing to me: turns out that there are very limited venues for purchasing six packs, and even then the markup is phenomenal. State liquor stores only sell full cases. Hence the expensive tavern bills. I never knew the Quakers were temperance folk. Maybe it was the Pennsylvania Dutch.

I also got a chance to hang with Brian and Stacy (who really is the first person I knew with a blog. I got to crash a dinner party they were having, which was fun. It gave me a chance to get away from the conference hubbub. (hub bub?) Their place is great, and it let me see a neighborhood of Philly that I wouldn't have gotten down to.

The Mutter Museum was worth the visit. The wax casts of skin diseases and skeletons were fine. But the fetusses (feti?) made me a little nauseous. Maybe that was just the cold coming back? Anyway, I never considered myself a squeamish person, but lately I've been having my doubts. Maybe I'm just getting soft.

The PMA was better than I remembered. Duchamp still rocks the house. But there was also a lot more cubist stuff than I remember.

It just sucks that I got sick again.

Oh--one more thing. And I've got to put this on my list: Don't try and save the state money by taking Greyhound to catch your plane. Greyhound sucks!

Live from ACS

Hmmm, a conference with poor wireless coverage. Who woulda thunk?

But at least it's there and it's free. At the moment though, I'm at the hotel taking a little break. I could use more air conditioning in my room.

Anyway, I'm very glad that I came. The main events for C-INF (the division I'm a part of) have so far been all about open access and scholarly publishing. There is one very amusing guy that insists that everyone needs to call it open access publishing, and that his model for open access is the only correct one. (He's into self-archiving.) He told a panelist that preservation isn't a problem, access is. (She begged to differ.) And insists that peer review won't go away and good journals will stay around just fine. He's a bit of a zealot.

Most everyone else has been well reasoned--enough so that I am a lot more hopeful now than when I showed up. There is such a mixture of models that one of them will float to the top. There does, however, seem to be a notion that open access = author pays and that it will never succeed because authors refuse to pay. (And did you know that Pergamon, which was swallowed up by Elsevier a few years back, started out as a publisher that was catering to authors who were fed up with page charges? I didn't.) While that is certainly the dominant model for free-subscription journals at this point, I think there's a bunch of different models that might work out.

Perhaps what will happen (picture me gazing into a crystal ball here) is that....

• The major journals will open their backfiles (ala PubMedCentral--free content after 6 or 12 months). They're just so important that library's will continue to subscribe anyone. I'm talking about the likes of Science, Nature, JACS, Cell, etc.


• Major journals for sub-discipliines will retain subsribers at institutions where that research gets done. So Duck U will retain Molecular Cell and Development, butpurge ourselves of every last botany and zoology title.


• A document delivery service will become the norm. But we need to remove all barriers to the end-user. Will we charge? I think we're going to have to. I imagine that every student will get X number of articles per year for free, every graduate student will get nX (where n is a multiplier that reflects their more intense reading habits--perhaps 5 or 10) and faculty will get mX (where m is a multiplier that puts them far enough above the graduate students to feel good about themselves, but low enough so that the library can still make a buck now and then. All available research tells me that graduate students would need MORE than faculty, but try and sell that one).


• Certain institutional repositories will evolve into subject-based e-print servers. So maybe Duck U gets vertebrate development and sports marketing and Beaver U gets West Nile virus and sustainable viticulture.


• Lots and lots of commercial journals will cease publishing.


• Commercial publishers will create free-floating editorial boards who will peer-review the vast amount of research that gets vetted out of the remaining big-name journals.


• Societies will step in to vet the research of niche-disciplines that are commercially un-viable.

So that's my first stab at crystal balling based on what I've heard. Perhaps I'll actually summarize the speakers later.

Now for Philly: It's a lot different than I remember it. But I was pretty focussed on the art last time. Took a walk last night past the Liberty Bell and Constitution Hall. You can't even got close after hours any more. It's a shame--I'm really glad they haven't taken the same approach with the Lincolm Monument (at least they hadn't when I was there in November of 2001). I also walked past the last remaining 18th century tavern. It is no longer a bar. That's too bad. I would have had a drink.

Oh--drinks. Decent beer here is $5. Is it that way in all big downtowns now, or am I just going in the wrong places?

Is Google better than the catalog?

Huh.

So I'm looking up journal articles. I've got the references--I'm just trying to get the text. So I start with the catalog.

No luck.

So I try FindText (our SFX server). Academic Search Premier has full text of the article, but only starting in 2003.

I'm looking for 2002.

So I Google the author--maybe she archived it herself.

I find her library, but no personal web page.

I add the first couple words of the title to the Google Search.

The first entry is a link to PubMedCentral, which has html and pdf full text of the article.

Would someone please tell me why I should keep using the library catalog to see if we have access to the full text of a given title?

PLEASE NOTE: this is an extremely geeky post which will be of no interest to anyone that doesn't work in technical services. I apologize in advance to my other 3 readers.

BTW: I'll post that banana bread recipe as soon as I get copyright clearance from the cookbook

Oh, falafel!

Why hasn't anyone recommended the falafel cart that sits outside the bookstore before today? Maybe it's because I haven't had one in a long time, or maybe it's because I don't have my finger as closely on the culinary pulse of Eugene as I'd like to think, but that was a dang good falafel!

So the main library here has a pretty big reference room, with many many public access computers. It also has a huge current periodicals room, with many many empty shelves. As we move toward electronic journals, and we gather research that says professors and students only want 'core titles' in print (and electronic access to everything else), and as we can afford to buy fewer and fewer titles in print anyway, why don't we:

• Move the journal collection into the reference room. Let's admit it, not too many people are using those encyclopedias anyway.


• Convert the current periodicals room to a larger computer lab. With the existing lab frequently running at capacity, and so many people in the reference room only checking their email anyway, let's consolidate those services into a mega-lab. Look at OUGL at UW as a model.

There's two really good advantages here for traditional library services (ala reference). First: it's gets the e-mail checkers, chess players, and wankers out of the reference room. The librarians will get to spend less time policing, and more time answering questions. Second: students would have to take a long walk through the reference room and current periodicals to get to the computer lab. They might just stop and take a look along the way.

It would be a really pretty lab too. The existing quiet area could be moved to the old computer lab.

Fruit potstickers

3 folks have asked for this now, so here it is:

The original recipe called for 1/3 of a plum in each one. We’ve used cherries, raspberries, nectarines, and peaches—they’re all good. This recipe makes about a dozen. Serve hot with cinnamon ice cream (the best!) or vanilla ice cream with cinnamon garnish.

Sauce

• 3 chopped medium red plums


• 1/2 cup plum wine (or 2 tblsp rice vinegar, 1 tblsp sugar, ¼ cup water


• adding a fresh, ripe peach puts this sauce over the top.
  

Cook on stovetop over low heat until skins fall apart. Puree in blender.

Dumplings

Wonton wrappers
Butter and vegetable oil for frying.

Filling:

• 2 tblsp almond butter (cashew or peanut butter works too)
  
  • Do NOT use almost paste: too sickly sweet!


• 2 tblsp flour


• 1 tblsp sugar


• 1 egg yolk (save white to seal wontons)


• pinch nutmeg

Mix ingredients in bowl. Chop plums into small bite-size pieces (about a third or a quarter each).

Place a small spoonful of filling and a piece of fruit or two (combos work too!) in the center of a wonton wrapper.

Brush edge of wonton with egg white. (Dumplings can be stored at this point for up to 6 hours.)

Boil in batches until dumpling floats, then place on wax paper. (Dumplings can be stored at this point overnight.)

Melt butter in oil. Brown the dumplings a few at a time. Serve warm over the plum sauce and ice cream.

Back to school

I'm actually doing a literature review for work. If feels like I'm in school again--except I'm being much more careful and I'm not constrained by the typical 2-week deadline.

There's a lot I'd like to be saying here, but it's been pretty busy. We have folks coming in from out of town this weekend, so I gave the house a good cleaning last night in L's absence. I'll also be applying for a new job, so I've been brushing up the old C.V.. Y'all know how much time that takes.

It's also turning into tomato season. There are now more coming in each day than I can eat. I'm less than impressed with the Black Siletz. But the Oregon Springs are great. Time for freezing. Next year we're gonna can. Really.

I also made banana bread for a party tonight. 2 sticks of butter.

2 sticks.

That's a lot of butter.

Summer colds

Coming off a big one. I hate being sick.

Welcome to those of you who read the Register-Guard article. Wanna hear about what color my phlegm was last week?

Nothing to see here folks. Move along.