David L Osterbur: Drop Your Tools and Run Faster
Mood:  caffeinated
Notes by Christina Pikas

Weik 1996 Drop Your Tools: An Allegory for Organizational Studies. Administrative Science Quarterly 41(2):

Brown and Marek 2005 applied this in Library Admin and Mgmt 19(2): 68-74

Explanations for failure (to survive for firefighters in forest fire)
-listening (hearing, taking in, understanding that there's a different perspective)
-justification
-trust
-control
-skill at dropping
-admit failure (if you drop your tools you're admitting failure)
-social dynamics (following the crowd)
-consequences (proof that dropping tools will be a benefit)
-identity (how much is your identity tied up with those tools)
-replacement skill

Replacement skills
-bioinformatics support
big open access area, all of the data is available for free online... yet libraries aren't teaching these tools
-cheminformatics
who has control (luddites in control)
-adding value

Bioinformatics support
-we don't have to pay for, it's out there and used extensively
-no good service model for providing that support
-bioinformatics support groups don't have service mindsets -- they're researchers themselves and are interested in research, not in helping
-like driving school vs. building the car
-librarians like to search (librarians have a rich source of things to show users that users don't know about)
-libraries need to regain role

Why don't libraries do it?
- "we have a support group" (help the support group, provide a service they don't offer, enough information for everyone)
-no one trained in it
NLM offers regional introductory course
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Class/MLACourse/index.html
advanced course yearly in Bethesda (5 day 9-5 course)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Class/NAWBIS/index.html
13% of participants in the advanced course have humanities degrees.
-tricks of the trade... free full text textbooks other fab things that you can show in bioinformatics research
example: article re h5n1 increase virulence in mamals... sequence... blast... OR genbank, click on blink look up protein (never use keyword in genbank), gets to the point where he can show the differences between the 1918 pandemic flu virus and the avian flu currently of concern

can draw both sequences in 3d structure and see the differences (rotate, align, etc)

July in J MLA, article telling you how to do this and who is doing it... then just do it

Cheminformatics
ACS biggest provider (*cough* luddites)
Peter Murray-Rust
mass spec, machine readable vs. picture for pub or human understanding... also only give maxima

grad student takes 100 hours to take information away from what he has to
Chemical Markup Language (CML), XML markup... want to make searches for chemicals google-like... semantic grid for chemistry

Value Added
Notre Dame DSpace implementation services offered

Word about digital archives--
we won't be able to migrate fast enough (can't migrate all the data before it has to be migrated again)
Stuart Scheiber Microtome Publishing... ascii text

Conclusion
stay adaptable

from audience:
don't limit your constituency


daser2005
Updated: 12/5 to add tag and picture