Comments on the library and information science world
Yesterday I tried to follow a link from Twitter -courtesy to Janneke Staaks- to a reading suggestion. To na avail. It was a useful reading tip to an article on ScienceDirect. Well…. on a mobile phone with network access from a commercial operator that’s not going to work. Not yet, at least. So Elsevier and other publishers, are you ready for the mobile Web yet?
I do sincerely apologize for this boring video, a few talking heads is not the right medium to pass a message. An important message that is. But I couldn’t find any palatable alternatives on YouTube. Has nobody tried to make an attractive, short film on this subject?Anyway, a couple of bigshots from the Dutch University world passing the message on the importance of Open Access. They talk in Dutch, but this version has English sub-titles.
Today an editorial of Nature stressed -yet again- the importance for scientists to blog about their research (and what’s more, that editorial is freely available on-line). I can’t agree more and I do try to follow some Dutch scientists that blog -parts of- their research. Quite a succesful example is Lilia Efimova who’s about to finish her PhD, the other example is Anne Helmond who is just on the brink of starting her PhD research.
Today Anne had a post that really did make me wonder. In her post of Anne is… for which she apperently searched in Google, which should actually read Anne Helmond is…The first hit is
Which statement really amazes me. Certainly for social scientists. If the research question was phrased differently, such as “are Bloggers (really) working for Google?”, then it was a valid research question. But if the research question is stated as it is, it takes me actually by surprise. Value free research? I know that sounds idealistic, but we have to keep up to some ideals.
The facts are, that certainly on my Dutch blog I have build an audience for whom I am writing. Combined with the direct visitors they combine for half of the blog visitors. And yes indeed, the other 50% of the visitors, do stop by because of maily Google. And they are more than wellcome.
The photo in the header is the street where we live. You can actually see our house, it is behind the completely brown cow. An old brick house, in a row of 4 houses, built in 1931 or thereabout. The photo has been taken from the floodplains of the Rhine. These are flooded on a regular basis. Between the cows and the street there is a small water which a kind of artificial creek.
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