Neuroscience
Another Reason I Blog
This blog was originally intended to provide a spot to put articles, links, etc. I found that would interest "my" faculty & staff at Hampshire College's School of Cognitive Science. I became more and more interested in the interdisciplinary topic of cognitive science as time went on, especially psychology, but also computer science, education, and animal science. And philosophy. Well,
ok, just about all aspects of cog sci interest me. As part of my own
education, I would browsed through journals in the field so I'd know what "my" faculty were thinking about. As part of my
job, I purchased books in the various fields, and I used the blog to highlight new books & databases. The focus of the blog was intended to be exclusively cognitive science.
Then I left Hampshire, and that was very sad because the faculty there is great fun. I have kept up my interest in cognitive science and I have taken to listening to
podcasts during my 2.5 hours in the car each day. The combination of the two has led to many blog posts, as I try to synthesize what I've learned and share it with the world. Posting about what I've heard helps me remember what I've learned within the cognitive science realm.
On the other hand, I am a working librarian and a teacher of library science at Simmons Simmons Graduate School of Library & Information Science
(at their Mount Holyoke College campus). There is some overlap between cognitive science and information science
(think usability) and everyone likes to or needs to search, so some posts appeal to both the
cogsci audience and the
LIS audience. Also, I suspect that many of my regular readers are educators of one kind or another, so the periodic posts about teaching appeal to the cog sci audience.
Some topics, however, are weighted heavily to
LIS and probably appeal more to my
LIS colleagues, friends, and even former students. My occasional rants about marketing are a good example, as are the rarer posts about reference, or anything labeled "library science."
Why the mix of topics and audiences? I want to naturally, personally, show scientists & psychologists what we librarians do and how we think. It's partly my nature to be inclusive, but it's partly a mechanism through which I can demonstrate the "marketing" of library science without being dreadfully obvious about it. I read somewhere -- and I can't go back to the source, because I read this a few weeks, months, years ago
(you all know how memory works, right?!) -- that it's a good idea for academic librarians to publish in the non-library literature to highlight what they do in a venue where their faculty colleagues congregate. I definitely can't get published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences or Trends in Cognitive Sciences, which some of you might read, but ... I can publish here and reach a few faculty / graduate students in cognitive science and psychology and philosophy.
It's a big Internet, but the nice thing is we can get to know each other in ways we can't quite in real life. So ... that's another reason I blog.
Welcome to readers of these science-y blogs ...
* BPS Research Digest (from the British Psychological Society)
* the Brain Science Podcast
* Channel N
* Combat Philosopher
and all you Googlers!
-
Leaving New England ... Moving To North Carolina!
The CogSci Librarian is on the move! I am leaving my position as Electronic Resource Librarian at the University of Connecticut on April 30. I'll be moving to North Carolina to serve as the director of the Park Library at the School of Journalism...
-
Library & Information Science Blog Posts
So I got an iPod Touch a few weeks ago, and it's swell. I love having the Internet anywhere in the house or at work, and this makes it much easier to keep up with blogs. Yay! Google Reader has a terrific mobile interface, which makes the blog posts...
-
Finding Cogsci Podcasts
In case you're wondering ... here are some ways to find nifty cognitive science & other podcasts. Here's a Google search trick I use to find podcasts of interviews with folks whom I'd like to hear: inurl:podcast + "name of person" (in...
-
Science Blogs
Science Librarian pal Naka Ishii receommended a cog sci blog I hadn't known about, which leads me to post this short list of science blogs new to me, and maybe to you. Naka points me to Mind Matters, a cognitive science blog by Scientific American....
-
Science (fact) Writing
John the Science Librarian just blogged Cognitive Daily: How to report scientific research to a general audience in his entry called Writing about science. Since I have some time on my hands (not teaching this semester, gasp!), I've been reading a...
Neuroscience