Why are you here?

Over the weekend I attended the 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference.  It was a great program and I learned a lot about the current state of science blogging.  My biggest conclusion is: why are you here?  If you dig science bloggery, you need to hit ScienceBlogs, truly the world clearinghouse on science blogging, and home to numerous excellent writers, bloggers, and scientists.

One project I've been working on of late has been the PAMS reference wiki.  It's been sort of chugging along as I've been thinking about exactly how I wanted to use it, but my interest in the wiki was greatly renewed during the conference after a talk by Dr. Jean-Claude Bradley of the UsefulChem Project.  He's doing some really interesting work, with a commitment to open source science.  I really like the interactivity and ease of wikis, and recognize that wikipedia is the default first stop for information needs for a significant portion of internetters these days, no matter what the topic.  Which is to say, it's easy and relevant and most everyone likes it, so as a librarian I'm totally on board.    For professional research, the library is still (easily) the place to go, but eventually the two concepts are going to merge.  I'll be fascinating to see exactly how.

Science! will probably continue to be home to interesting anecdotes I come across, but I don't anticipate posting any more frequently than I do now, unless I am hit with some kind of repurposing brainstorm.  Mostly ScienceBlogs, The Annals of Improbable Research, and Modern Mechanix cover what my first thoughts were about this blog, and the PES News blog covers most of the new happenings in the library relevant to what I'm doing.

Posted at 12:08PM Jan 23, 2007 by WILSON, JOSHUA in General  |