A Blog for the Science Community and Beyond (From Your Science Librarian’s Desk) - College of Charleston Libraries

Science Reference Librarian Dongmei Cao started a blog “From Your Science Librarian’s Desk” (http://scilibrarian.wordpress.com) on January 23, 2006 as a new communication tool to keep the College’s science community informed of newly acquired library resources and open Internet resources that related to science and technology.

The blog is featured on the hot spot of the Library’s Web site. If you use any RSS feeds reader/news aggregator (Bloglines, Google Reader, Sharpreader, etc.), the blog’s RSS feed URL is: http://scilibrarian.wordpress.com/feed.

What’s the purpose of the blog? It’s intended to provide the following to the College’s science community, other fellow science and technology/engineering librarians (and those cool next generation librarians):

• science related library news (e.g. databases, e-journals, database features, etc. that related to the sciences);
• info about science and technology related Internet resources (e.g. Web resources for specific subjects esp. those related to biology and chemistry, open access resources related to the sciences);
• info about information and Web technology (e.g. specialized/vertical search engines, open source software, Google news, Web 2.0 technology such as blogs, wikis, social book-marking and tagging, etc.);
• other info that will be of interest to the science community, and to the sci-tech librarians in general.

The blog is now featured prominently on Librarian.net (“Science Librarian” on the Sidebar), one of the 10 Blogs to Read in 2006 that published on LISNews.org. It’s also linked from Canada’s National Science Library and Publisher NRC CISTI’s technology architect Richard Akerman’s blog Science Library Pad as one of the science library blogs. The blog’s feed is indexed in LISFeeds.com, a main directory and search engine for librarian oriented blogs and feeds around the world.

Considering the blog’s rather young life (2 months and 9 days old), its statistics is quite encouraging: for the past 30 days, it had average 25 views per day, the most viewed post had 34 views for the past month; over the 2 months period, it had over 120 views pay day for several peak days, the most viewed post had 58 views in just one month (the stats doesn’t count the blogger/author’s own visits). Some of the original writings/posts were cited by other well-known researchers/bloggers such as the open access researcher Steven Suber (Open Access News).

She would love to hear from faculty and students in the CofC’s science community and others, let her know what you think, what you would like to see included on this science librarian blog (please email her). Any ideas, suggestions, observations are welcome.

Submitted by Dongmei Cao, 3/31/2006.