STEM Access

2nd Texas STEM Librarians Conference

Last Thursday to Saturday, I had the pleasure of attending the 2nd annual STEM librarians conference in Denton.  The conference almost doubled in size from last year and UNT did a great job of hosting. Librarians from all around Texas (but mainly the DFW area) presented on all different subjects even though the theme for the conference was e-books.  In addition, there were roundtable groups and panel discussions with various vendors. The pre-conference on Thursday was on gaming and education.  We spent the afternoon playing educational games from this list and heard an interesting talk about from an educational...
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User-Centered Spaces

As some of you may realize, in addition to working as the science librarian at Baylor, I’m taking classes towards my library degree.  We’ve been discussing innovative or renovated STEM libraries.  I am particularly interested in the Applied and Engineering Technology (AET) Library at the University of Texas San Antonio (UTSA).  I’m interested in this library because I am thinking about how the libraries at Baylor can have a presence in the Baylor Research and Innovation Collaborative (BRIC).  I’m hoping to use information from the UTSA library websites, newspaper articles, what I remember from a tour during Summer 2011, and...
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STEM Access

How to Deal with Rejection

So after last week, you’ve picked what journal to submit to, and you wait (and wait and wait) to see whether your paper is accepted.  When the day finally comes, your paper hasn’t been accepted.  And if you’re like me, you get filled with a range of emotion to the point of crying. But as was pointed out to me recently in an email from the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, we should think of rejection rates like batting averages.  A batting average of .4000 is almost unheard of.  And a batting average of .2500 is pretty...
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STEM Access

Where to Submit an Article

Since we seem to be talking about scientific writing this month, the question of where to submit your article arises.  Now the easiest thing to do is to look through the list of references you used and see which journal(s) you cited the most often, and then submit to that journal.  You can also ask your colleagues or adviser who have read the paper for suggestions. But if you’ve narrowed the list down to two or three journals, how do you decide which is best?  There are two things to consider:  relevance and accessibility. By narrowing down your list...
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STEM Access

Scientific Jargon

Following up on last week‘s post on the book Scientific English by Day and Sakaduski which has some useful lists of “Problem Words and Expressions” and “Words and Expressions to Avoid,” this week I present a list of terms that have different meanings to scientists and to the general public.  I was first alerted to this list on a blog by the Eric Berger, science writer at the Houston Chronicle. This list originally came from an article in Physics Today which discussed how climate scientists can improve how the present their findings to a general audience (hence, the inclusion...
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STEM Access

Book Review: Scientific English

On occasion I plan to review books on the blog.  Some will be of professional interest; others will be of general science interest.  I doubt if too many of them will be for fun (unless I find a really good mystery novel set in a science department of a university).  Today I will review Scientific Writing by Robert Day and Nancy Sakaduski. I was first introduced to this book by the writing center at my last institution.  We called it the dancing pencil book because that was what was on the cover of the second edition. As you can...
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STEM Access

Reading Library E-Books

So, finally after last week‘s e-book explanation, this week we will actually read library e-books on the Nook (I feel I should give the Nook a name).  We will download books from OverDrive, EbscoBooks, and Ebrary.  After trying, I am happy that I got a Nook instead of a Kindle because a Nook can read many more e-books especially those that have DRM. I started by downloading Adobe Digital Editions on both my work PC and my home Mac. This is a fairly simple process but does require registering a username with Adobe and authorizing each computer to access the...
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STEM Access

E-Books and DRM and E-Book Distributors

Last week, I said we’d look into downloading books onto the Nook, but I realized that before I could do that I should do some research on e-books and especially library e-books. The standard format for e-books is ePub (except for Kindles which use Mobi) although some ebooks use pdf.  There are many desktop, iOS, Android, and even Blackberry apps that read ePubs.  You can even find plugins so that you can read ePubs on your browser.  In general, any ePub reader will also be able to read a pdf.  ePub e-books are nice because they repaginate when you...
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STEM Access

Email and Web on the Nook

As I mentioned last time, I wanted to be able to use my new Nook to check email.  The Nook comes with an email program.  I wasn’t able to connect easily to my Baylor email account so I gave up.  I’m not sure whether it was something on the Nook side or the Baylor side, but I think it’s because my Baylor account is an Exchange account and that was not an option in the email settings as it would be in regular Android (if I interpreted the Baylor help page correctly).  However, connecting to my Yahoo account was...
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STEM Access

My New Nook Tablet

For my birthday, my husband who blogs here, bought me a Nook tablet.  Now you have to understand that we are not a smartphone family so a tablet was rather exciting.  I’ve been looking for something to bring on vacation with me that I can use to check and triage email, but only respond if absolutely necessary since typing is not as easy as it would be on a computer.  I also wanted an e-reader so I wouldn’t have to haul books around when traveling (I usually bring alumni magazines and newsletters to read and then just chuck them...
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