I met many more people in the online community than I did at #scio11,  the fact that there is a constant community presence online means that you are never without your science family.  If you’re interested in joining in the current hashtags in use are #scio12 and #scio13 (the tag for next year’s conference).  In many ways we are kinda like the science version of the Island of Misfit Toys, if you read the #IAmScience stories (started by Kevin Zelnio) curated on the I Am Science Tumbler (both on twitter and long form on blogs) you’ll see that over 140+ stories have been shared and very few if any of us fill the science stereotypes.  I suspect in part that people who are drawn to Science Online are the misfits, the risk takers, the innovators, the people who never stopped asking why.  If we were square pegs in square holes we’d never be interested in attending a conference built by a community, ran by a community, and based on discussion instead of presentation.   If you have a chance to attend next year I highly encourage you to try and grab a spot, but even if you can’t you can join the online family of science communicators that is Science Online.

To give you a taste of how diverse the participants on this conference are in every way please check out this fun and quirky music video put together by the smart, talented, and oh so witty @DrBondar

Notice the large number of people in the video, I know about half of them, what other conference video can you say that about?

People don’t usually understand why a science librarian would go to such a conference, here’s why I attend:

It’s the only conference I attend where I get to meet top people in every discipline I work with.  This is incredibly valuable to me, it gives me friends who I can trade advice with, insight into how researchers and students view specific resources, and increases my knowledge of their subject areas so that I can better serve the faculty and students at my school.

There is a huge science librarian contingent. Being part of the Science Online Science Librarians subfamily is a fantastic experience, these are the peers who do what I do, who solve the same problems, deal with the same challenges and many of them are not only subject specialists but also library directors and managers.  We always try and have a group lunch one of the days so that everyone knows what each other look like and then we seek each other out as time permits.  We dish the dirt on our pet projects, we ask for advice, we encourage, and we plot world domination through information dissemination

There is a huge Open Access Open Data contingent, I get to find out what just came out, and what’s in the works from the people who are working on these great projects.  I learn so much in just a few days about which projects are hot, what people think is really great that I’ve never heard of.  There’s so much great stuff out there that you can’t find it all on your own.

Networking.  Everyone who attends is amazing and with this group you never know when a request will come for career advise, peer-review, a speaking engagement, an invited paper or article, or for collaboration.  You may even get to help advise or become part of a new science non-profit or educational group.  But beyond the career benefits it’s simply wonderful to make friends with a group just as obsessed about science and diverse in their interests as you are.

I’ll write more another day on some of the things I learned at Science Online, but for today I’ll leave you with a question.  Who are your communities?  Where do you go for unconditional professional support, guidance, and friendship?

I’m very fortunate to have additional support communities through ALA, ACRL, and ARL.  That might seem like overkill but if we were honest we’d admit, people are rarely truly successful without support.

Link Roundup

Here’s a few items I thought were pretty darn neat most of which went public this year, with one very nifty exception.

The Ada Initiative http://adainitiative.org/

I think this new non-profit is really neat, and am all for “increasing participation of women in open technology and culture, which includes open source software, Wikipedia and other open data, and open social media.”  I am a little curious how things will work out as they go along, traditionally this sphere has been male dominated so it’ll be interesting to see what efforts are most successful in recruiting and retaining women in this field, and if those efforts change the culture of open technology and social media.

“The Ada Initiative is focused on helping women get careers in open technology through recruitment and training programs for women, education for community members who want to help women, and working with corporations and projects to improve their outreach to women.”

Bio Digital Human http://www.biodigitalhuman.com/ 
*Please note this is still in Beta Testing and they are still double checking images and information. Please note last time I checked it was more IE friendly than Firefox, at least the version of Firefox that I was using, no clue how it works with Chrome.

“The BioDigital Human is comprised of over 1900 scientifically accurate 3D anatomy models. View spatial relationships in unprecedented clarity.      Learn medical terms in a visual format.”  This one is just fun to play with, especially for people like me who know very little about human anatomy/biology.

JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiment) Basic Protocols http://www.jove.com 
*Okay, so this one isn’t as new, but it’s still very nifty and new to a lot of people.  I’d really love to see more publications like this and stop having budget cuts so that I could subscribe to the paid protocols!  Basic Protocols are freely available to all, but subject specific protocols require a subscription to view.

JoVE is a “..peer reviewed, PubMed indexed journal devoted to…biological, medical, chemical & physical research in a video format.”  As  former working chemist I can’t express how much simpler my life would have been if I could have seen a demonstration of a methodology in addition to reading the instructions.  Photos are nice, but actually seeing the motions etc. makes learning a new technique infinitely easier!

“Visualization greatly facilitates the understanding & efficient reproduction of both basic & complex experimental techniques, thereby addressing 2 of the biggest challenges faced by today’s life science research community: i) low transparency & poor reproducibility of biological experiments & ii) time & labor-intensive nature of learning new experimental technique.”

Out of Copyright.EU http://outofcopyright.eu

Copyright Calculators for the European Union, Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland.
Determining copyright for non-USA materials has always presented a challenge for American’s, in  large part because of the sheer number of countries and regulations that had to be translated and understood to determine what is and is not in the public domain.

Link Roundup

Here is a collection of links from my to be read folder about Open Data and Open Science.  Can one really separate the two? (Catching up and deleting bookmarks is a wonderful thing.)

Feel free to share this list or use the comments to add a suggested reading.  (FYI, all comments with links are moderated to prevent spam from showing up but will be approved ASAP, no site registration is required.)

Heather Piwowar’s ‘Who Shares? Who Doesn’t? PloS ONE

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0018657

Why Open Data Alone Is Not Enough

http://m.wired.com/magazine/2011/06/st_essay_datafireworks/

DataCite’s MetaData Serach

http://search.datacite.org/ui

New Tool Could Help Researchers Make Better Use of Oral Histories

http://chronicle.com/blogs/players/new-tool-could-help-researchers-make-better-use-of-oral-histories

From Deadly E. Coli to Endangered Polar Bear: GigaScience Provides First Citable Data (Slides)

http://www.slideshare.net/GigaScience/from-deadly-e-coli-to-endangered-polar-bear-gigascience-provides-first-citable-data

What Can We Learn From Download Statistics for Institutional Repositories?

http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/what-can-we-learn-from-download-statistics-for-institutional-repositories/

World Bank’s Open Data

http://data.worldbank.org/

PLoS ONE: Data Sharing by Scientists: Practices and Perceptions

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0021101

MacKenzie Smith on Open Licences for Data

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swQYX4oqfB4&feature=player_embedded

Data Cite Repository List

http://datacite.org/repolist

Data Sharing in the ‘Publish or Perish’ Era: Barriers and Current Solutions

http://idash.ucsd.edu/index.php/news-a-events/101-data-citation-who-cares

Digging into Data in the Humanities, Day 1

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/digging-into-data-in-the-humanities-day-one

Open Access v. Cultural Protocols: Indigenous Knowledge Management Systems

http://aliasydney.blogspot.com/2011/06/open-access-vs-cultural-protocols.html

Vancouver’s Open Data Catalogue

http://data.vancouver.ca/

National Academic Press Free PDFs of all Publication

http://www.nap.edu/about/about_pdf.html

Data Documentation Initiative (Meta-data specifications for social and behavioral sciences)

http://www.ddialliance.org/

BioMed Central Blog: On the unbearable lightness of mandatory data sharing

http://blogs.openaccesscentral.com/blogs/bmcblog/entry/on_the_unbearable_lightness_of

Data Citation Elephants

http://researchremix.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/data-citation-elephants/

Open Access Citation Advantage: An Annotated Bibliography

http://www.istl.org/10-winter/article2.html

Chickens in the Garden

When Omega Eggs (eggs containing Omega fatty acids) first appeared on the mass market in the early 2000s I had this bizarre image in my head of a semi-crazed scientist extracting the yolk with a giant syringe, swirling it about in a beaker with a neon blue solution to extract the bad fat, injecting it with Omega fatty acids and then pacing it carefully back inside the eggshell.

Of course my next thought was that would be a completely absurd and impossible  way to go about making healthier eggs and I labeled the image as a flight of fancy. I dismissed the question of how Omega Eggs are produced as interesting but not a priority and went about my life.

10 months ago I started working at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL).  The important thing to remember about UNL is that although it is a Research 1 institution it was chartered as a land grant university in 1869 under the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act. Approved under the auspices of President Abraham Lincoln it was titled: “An Act Donating Public Lands to the Several States and Territories which may provide Colleges for the Benefit of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts”.  For this reason UNL is dedicated not only to providing affordable traditional college degrees but also to research, development, and education regarding best practices in agriculture and food production.

Eggs

My colleagues anxious to extol the virtues of my new university to me mentioned in passing that Omega Eggs were first sold at the Dairy Store on our East Campus. Omega Eggs have been available for purchase there since 1995.  It turns out that Sheila Scheidler, then a poultry scientist with UNL, created a patented system (the university holds the patent and trade mark on Omega Eggs) to efficiently produce eggs high in Omega  fatty acids.

You Really Are What You Eat

It turns out that the old saying  you are what you eat is really true in the case of the chicken and then eggs.   By altering the hens diets to include grains rich in Omega fatty acids such as flax seed (Omega 3 fatty acids), chickens are able to produce healthier eggs.  Omega eggs have more omega fatty acids, lower cholesterol, and about half the fat of regular eggs.  Two Omega Eggs have the equivalent amount of Omega fatty acids of one serving of salmon.

Omega Eggs v. Standard Eggs

Not convinced? Check out this study by Nancy Lewis, (UNL professor of Nutrition Science), Sheila E. Scheidler (UNL professor of Animal Science), and Kim Schalch (a dietician in Lincoln, NE, formerly a UNL graduate research assistant at UNL.

Bizzare Imaginings

In a controlled experiment researchers studied 25 volunteers (13 men and 12 women) with high cholesterol (and no other diagnosed health conditions).   Volunteers were divided into three groups all of whom ate a self-selected diet.  These groups were differentiated by their egg consumption: two Omega eggs per day six days, versus those who ate two regular eggs six days a week,, and those who ate no eggs.  The study looked at several factors but the really interesting thing was that there was that those eating Omega Eggs showed no increase in cholesterol while their serum triglyceride levels decreased by 14%. (High triglycerides are bad because they increase your risk of heart disease.

One should, of course, eat all things in moderation; too much of anything is bad for you.  But if you’re a big egg fan like my husband, next time you’re in the grocery store you might think about buying those Omega Eggs even though they cost more.  They just might help you live longer, and they’re a lot tastier than fish oil pills!

Learn More:

NebGuide G2032: Omega-3 and Omega-6 Fatty Acids
(Learn about these important nutrients and foods rich in them.)
Published by University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension, Insitute of Agriculture and Natural Resources,  written by Lisa D. Fanzen-Castle and Paula Ritter-Gooder

Agreement Makes NU’s Omega Eggs Available at Hy-Vee Stores in Seven States
Published by the Scarlet
March 1st, 2001

Image Credits: 1)  Chicken in the Garden by HardworkingHippy CC BY-SA 2.0, 2) Eggs Copyright Jeffrey & Kiyomi Deards 2011 Used with permission. 3) Bizarre Imaginings Copyright Jeffrey & Kiyomi Deards 2011 Used with permission.