University of Oslo Science Library at night

I took some photos for the University of Oslo’s Science Library in December 2011. The library is in the process of consolidating eight separate science and math libraries into one large Science Library that will be moving into the newly-renovated Vilhelm Bjerknes’ building on the Blindern campus. I was asked to take some night photos outside the new building as well as to take some indoor photos on one of our inspection tours of the building. Here is one of my photos of the Science Library at night.

(update as of March 2012--this photo was used in an announcement for the official opening of the Science Library on March 12, 2012 that was published in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten)

From pimp my ride to pimp my research

I attended another interesting event sponsored by the UiO Science library this morning, a lecture about how to ‘pimp’ your research, followed by a really interesting discussion about pimping of research in general—should it be pimped, how it should be done, and who should be responsible for pimping. The scientist who held the lecture and who guided the discussion afterwards was Gro Amdam, whom I’ve mentioned before in a previous post. Professor Amdam is a Norwegian scientist who runs two research labs, one at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Aas Norway, the other at Arizona State University in the USA. She is a honeybee researcher and a top scientist, with many publications in top international journals; you can read more about her labs, work, publications and view her journal covers here: http://amdamlab.asu.edu/. Some of the scientists I talked to about this event when I was promoting it a few weeks ago were a bit skeptical; perhaps mostly skeptical to the terminology—pimping. They weren’t sure what was meant by pimping research, and instead of being curious enough to find out more about it, they didn’t attend. They should have, because they missed a really good and professional presentation about the subject and an interesting discussion afterwards. Pimping is defined as ‘giving something a smarter or more interesting appearance’; some excellent examples in my opinion are Amdam's journal covers—beautiful photos of bees and flowers that add an important visual aspect to the research work that was published inside the specific issue. She emphasized that it was pimping the (high-quality) work that was important; this was not a talk about how to pimp the scientist. But the scientist can become well-known because of the quality of the work via good pimping—and that’s a good thing. It helps get research grants, funding, and international recognition.

There was a good deal of discussion about the cultural differences and approaches to pimping between the USA and Norway. In the USA, research pimping is an accepted and encouraged activity at universities; the idea is relatively new in Norway. Most of the Norwegian attendees were very positive to the idea, some were skeptical. But that’s the point of a good discussion—to get the ideas out there and to get people started talking about them.

What struck me afterwards was that the Science library (Realfagsbiblioteket) has done a fair amount of pimping in its own right. The beautiful and professionally-done trailers about the invited scientists who come to the library to hold lectures and workshops are a good example of the library (KBH and AC) pimping the work and careers of these scientists; these trailers have been uploaded to SlideShare if you are interested in seeing them: http://www.slideshare.net/Realfagsbiblioteket/presentations. 

On Twitter: from Zombie Pandemics to the Northern Lights

I continue to do part-time consultant work for the university science library and enjoy it. It's pretty cool to get paid for a job that is actually a lot of fun--maintaining and updating their Facebook and Twitter pages and helping to promote their events (lectures and conferences). It's also pretty amazing what's out there on Twitter. Twitter is a world of its own, and very unlike Facebook, because if you want to keep a professional profile, you can. So I also have a personal Twitter profile now, but have decided to use it to promote scientific and health issues of interest to me. So besides updates from research journals, popular science journals and the like, I also follow the New York Times and a host of different health and charity organizations. And of course it's very interesting the type of people who end up following you, based on your word usage. Your Twitter comments are actually like 'tag bites'. I recently promoted an event for the library that will take place in mid-November--'Pimp your research'--a lecture by the world-renowned bee researcher Gro Amdam, followed by a discussion about how to and whether to make your research sexier. Wouldn't you know it, but the next day, I had three new women following me on Twitter, all of whom were working in the porn industry. It's easy to block these types of people, but it amuses me that your word usage has such an immediate effect. We are being profiled all the time as long as we're online and actively using internet, and anyone who believes otherwise, just doesn't get it or doesn't want to.

This week I have so far stumbled upon two interesting links on Twitter that I want to share with you. The first one is from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia--the city now known for The Walking Dead. The CDC has now published an interesting pamphlet in comic strip form just in time for Halloween, entitled "Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic". It's actually quite a clever way of educating people on how to prepare for any type of disaster. You can check it out here: http://www.cdc.gov/phpr/documents/11_225700_A_Zombie_Final.pdf

The other interesting link had to do with the beautiful displays of the Northern Lights in the USA on Monday; folks in the Midwest and even in the Deep South were treated to spectacular light shows courtesy of Mother Nature. The point is that this type of happening is rare, and was due to an intense geomagnetic storm. National Geographic has made available some gorgeous shots of these Northern Lights, and you can see them here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/10/pictures/111025-northern-lights-aurora-borealis-united-states-south/?source=link_tw20111025news-aurora#/northern-lights-aurora-borealis-reach-south-united-states-michigan-trees_42517_600x450.jpg   All in all, pretty amazing, and I sure wish I had been there to see them!

Information at our fingertips, all the time if we want it. What a brave new world we live in, and it's mostly within the past ten years that the information highway has grown by leaps and bounds. I remember when I was preparing two lectures in connection with my doctoral defense in 1999; I had to physically walk into the medical library with a list of the articles I needed to be printed out, and the librarians found them for me, or requested them from other libraries, and then printed them out and mailed them to me. In some cases, this could take days or even a week if the journals were not on hand. Nowadays, I can find the articles myself online, print them out at work or at home, and if our library doesn't subscribe to the journal, I can order a copy through the library online and they will fax it to me within a day of my order. Overall, if I need fifty articles, I can find at least ninety-five percent of them myself without help. That's progress. The libraries have adapted to the changes, and now that I do consulting work for a university library, I see just how far they've come. They haven't stuck their heads in the sand and ignored the world around them; they are information providers for the digital age, and if you haven't stuck your head inside a library for a while, I suggest you take a trip to one and check out the changes for yourself. The books are still there, but so are PCs, Macs, iPads, Kindles, digital projectors, SmartBoards and more computers, all ready for use, all offering instant connection to the information highway, which, if used ethically and wisely, is a real time-saver and an endless source of knowledge, even knowledge you didn't set out to find originally.