Science Fiction Meme

Inspired by an entry in Baby Boomer Librarian, who got it from Librarian in Black, who got it from Walt Crawford's blog.

Below is a Science Fiction Book Club list most significant SF novels between 1953-2006. The meme part of this works like so: Bold the ones you have read, strike through the ones you read and hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put a star next to the ones you love."

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien *

2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov

3. Dune, Frank Herbert

4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein

5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

6. Neuromancer, William Gibson

7. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke

8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick

9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley

10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury*

11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe

12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.*

13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov

14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras

15. Cities in Flight, James Blish

16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett*

17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison

18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison

19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester

20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany

21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey*

22. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card

23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson

24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman*

25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl

26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling*

27. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams*

28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson

29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice

30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin

31. Little, Big, John Crowley

32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny

33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick*

34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement

35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon

36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith

37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute

38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke

39. Ringworld, Larry Niven

40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys

41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien

42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut

43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner

45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester

46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein

47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock

48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks

49. Timescape, Gregory Benford

50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

Charleston Conference: Sessions I wish I could have attended

There were a number of sessions I wish I could have attended at Charleston, but was unable to due to scheduling conflict or the room being too full. I'll be checking the conference site for the presentations.

• Surprising Subscriptions: How Electronic Journal Publishing Has Affected the Partnership Among Subscription Agents, Publishers and Librarians


• Canceling Print Journals for Electronic-Only: Developing Guidelines for Decision Making


• IRs by the Numbers: Rumors and Realities of Institutional Repositories


• Promoting Primary Source Research: A Partnership


• Views on Usage Statistics and Value


• E-journal Big Deal Price Caps: Do They Really Benefit Libraries?


• E-Book Evolution: How Far Have We Come and Where Are We Now?


• Managing unwanted Gift Book Donations


• eBooks and Libraries - Near and Future eBook Trends


• Trends in Scientific Publishing: The Editorial Perspective


• Datasets: a New Paradigm for Library Collections?


• Collection Analysis: From Data Harvesting to Decision Making


• Dancing in Tandem with E-resources Life-Cycle


• Weed with Ease: Tracking your collection review project


• So, What Happens Next? An update on Illinois' statewide science serial collection assessment


• Subject Encyclopedias: A Subjective Scrutiny


• Economics of information as an Instructional Strategy


• SUSHI - Standardizing Usage Data Can Make Your Life Easier


• Subject Fingerprinting: New Insights into the Journals Ecosystem


• Options for Citation Tracking: Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science


• How Digital Library Services Contribute to Undergraduate Learning


• Collection Analysis Activities at Southeastern Research Libraries - Initial Findings & Results


• Library Strategic Planning for the Transition Away from Print Journals

Up to 29

With my recent trip to South Carolina, I've visiting 29 US states (not counting a few I was in before I was a year old).



create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

My countries visited map is a lot more boring:



create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Charleston Conference - Saturday morning

The day started with what they call the "Beastly Breakfast". At our table, we talked cooperative collection development.

After breakfast, Anthony Ferguson from the University of Hong Kong talked about the 10 ideas he will be taking from this conference. I'll have to mull on my own and post my list after I've thought about it a bit more.

Stephen Rhind-Tuft from Alexander Street Press spoke on Web 2.0 - What's in it for you, or as he changed his presentation title, "How I learned to stop worrying and love Web 2.0." One key point I took away from this session was the idea that users want to interact with information at all levels - the word, the phrase, the page, the chapter, the book, and the series.

David Warlock from Electronic Publishing Services, Ltd., spoke about STM in 2020, where he foresees scientific research being built on a foundation with a network of productivity and compliance, using electronic lab notebooks with links to everything they use in the research process.

Jane Burke from Serials Solution then spoke on Managing the Virtual Library and our need to align our priorities with reality, align out behaviors with reality, stop doing stuff that isn't appreciated, and hurry up.

The next session I attended was an update on last year's Janus Conference at Cornell and the 6 key challenges for collection development.

The last session was titled the "Chuck and Tony Show" with Chuck Hamacker and Anthony Ferguson. The focus on this session was on four issues:

• We just don't get respect


• Why we have lost it


• What we still have to offer


• What can we do to change the situation
(audience suggestions on what they are doing at their institutions)

Overall, a very good conference and several things that I will be thinking about and commenting on further after I've had a chance to think about them more.

Charleston Conference - Friday afternoon

The next session I went to was "Scatter and Decay: E-Journal Usage Patterns". Carol Tenopir and Gayle Baker from the University of Tennessee and David Nicholas from University College London spoke on some of the results they obtained from their Maxdata project, which compared various statistics sources - data logs on scholarly journal usage at 4 OhioLink libraries, surveys of faculty and students at the University of Tennessee, the OhioLink libraries and 2 Australian universities, and COUNTER reports from vendors at the University of Tennessee. They have published an article of some of their findings in the November 2006 JASIST - "Article decay in the digital environment: An analysis of usage of OhioLINK by date of publication, employing deep log methods."

"Less Searching, More Finding: The Future of Information Retrieval" was the next session I attended. William Mischo of UIUC spoke on what we know about how end users search, including the principle of least effort and satisficing results. Jay Datema, Library Journal Technology Editor and the LJ Tech Blog talked about SDI, Alerts, RSS/OPML, recommender systems and searching in context. Marydee Ojala, Editor of Online, spoke about the difference of searching(what information professionals love to do) and finding (what users want to do) and orchestrating findability.

The last session of the day was on collecting fugitive literature. Karen Schmidt, Wendy Shellane, and David Vess of UIUC spoke about their project using a webcrawler to collect and archive information from blogs and websites produced by hate groups in the Midwest, using information from the Southern Poverty Law Center to identify the groups for the project. An interesting discussion of the challenges and ethics of this sort of archiving.

Dinner was with a few friends at Cru Cafe, a very nice restaurant in an old house on Pinckney St. We ate on the veranda. I had an excellent pork tenderloin and shared a flourless chocolate torte.

Charleston Conference - Friday morning

First session was I Hear the Train a Comin'

The first speaker was Andrew Pace from North Carolina State University spoke on continuation strategies in a new ecosystem - patron technologies like ebooks, content ecosystems and ILS. Andrew has a blog, Hectic Pace. The second speaker was Peter Banks from Banks Publishing; his topic was "Everything I Know About Scholarly Publishing's Future I Learned from ITunes and he spoke on various business models for scholarly publishing. Ann Okerson from Yale spoke next on penguins, hedgehogs, and foxes as metaphors for types of users. Her main theme was letting users' real needs come first, not offering the latest Web 2.0 resource because it is new and cool. The final speaker was Isabella Hinds from Blackboard on transforming educational institutions. They recently surveyed 50 senior university administrators - the highest priority they listed was students. The drivers she saw were breaking down of course walls, the rise of learning outcomes, a revolution in digital content, and the need for a common user interface. She had some interesting statistics on Course Management Software (CMS) systems like Blackboard - 90% of the institutions surveyed have selected a standard CMS, SIS is integrated into 80% of these CMS systems, but libraries in only 25%. Questions from the audience included a plea to make the library's resources the default for instructors to select from when setting up a CMS course instead of making something like Questia or Google Scholar the default.

The next speaker was Matthew Bruccoli, the Emily Brown Jeffries Distinguised Professor Emeritus, University of South Carolina, who made an impassioned plea for books. He believes that the book as a printed artifact is what makes a library - a library without books is not a library and a scanned image is not a book. May well be true for some disciplines in literature or history but I wasn't convinced with respect to science and engineering.

The next panel was on Open Access - Beyond Declarations: What Steps Towards What Future. Mark Patterson from the Public Library of Science spoke in the network of literature and other data (e.g., PubMed Central with articles and links to data sets like the Genome Project) and text mining (going beyond mining titles and abstracts to mining the full text). He also discussed the upcoming PLOSOne, which will combine social software with articles so articles can generate comments and discussion. Dr. Astrid Wissenburg, from one of the UK Research Councils, spoke on the public funding of research perspective. She referenced a recent Baseline Report on analysis of data on scholarly journals publishing, which looks interesting. I missed the third speaker's presentation to make the next session.

Over lunch, I attended a hands-on demo of Endeavour's ERMS system. Seemed a good opportunity to compare with our own III ERMS. Have some ideas to talk about when I get back to the library. The session was in the College of Charleston's Addlestone Library, which is a nice-looking building with a large information commons area on the main floor. It was a nice walk over to the library on a beautiful sunny day.

Charleston Conference - Thursday afternoon

Shared a table at lunch with some folks from Better World Books, which buys unwanted gift books, and Glenda Lammers from OCLC, who is responsible for Worldcat Collection Analysis. We had a nice chat describing Conspectus and collection assessment to the Better World Books folks.

After lunch, I attended an interesting session by librarians at the University of Denver and the University of Colorado, Boulder, regarding their pilot cooperative collection development approval plan. Planning and implementing 4 approval plans (Economics, Mathematics, Political Science and Religion) for 8 of the 24 CARL libraries took approximately 9 months, using Spectra Dimension to analyze the libraries’ collections - overlap, usage, total number of titles. The first books under the new profiles began arriving last month. They are planning on doing a lot of assessment, using both qualitative and quantitative measures.

I then attended a session on the new Resources for College Libraries, the new edition of Books for College Libraries. This was an overview of the process used to develop the new lists of core titles in 58 subject areas. More information is available at http://www.RCLInfo.net.

The final session of the day was a product development session. This one was for Blackwell’s new Blackwell Reference Online, which is launching at the end of this month. It is a 300 reference title collection, available as one big package or 6 subject collections. To start, they are only doing social science, humanities and business titles. Science titles will be available later, beginning with medical titles. We discussed pricing models, the interface, printing options, citations to the resources, the need to be able to select individual titles rather than packages, and Z39.50 and OpenURL compliance. Trials will be available beginning in November. In subjects covered, there appears to be considerable overlap with Oxford Reference Online.

This is a good conference for meeting people. Ran into more familiar faces: Pam Rebarcak (we used to work together at Iowa State University), Nina Bakkalbasi from Yale, Doug LaFrenier & Christine Orr from the American Institute of Physics, Jerry Cowhig & Steve Moss from the Institute of Physics (all PAM members), Sue Anderson from Eastern Washington University, Jack Levine from Reed College (Orbis Cascades librarians). I’ve also chatted with collection development and acquisition librarians from CalTech, Eli Lilly and Company, Middle Tennessee State University, Penn State University, Plymouth State University, University of Alabama Birmingham, University of Georgia, University of Houston, University of Southern Indiana, and vendors from Ambassador Books & Media, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, Blackwell Publishing, Coutts Library Services, and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

At the Charleston Conference 2006

This year I am attending the Charleston Conference for the first time. This conference (in Charleston, SC) focuses on book and serials acquisition issues.

So far, I've run into 5 familiar faces - Joe Toth (who used to work at OSU), Michael Fosmire from Purdue, Cynthia Holt from George Washington University and Christine Orr from the American Institute of Physics (all active in SLA's PAM Division) and Sue Anderson from Eastern Washington University (also a member of the Orbis Cascades Alliance Electronic Resources Committee).

There are 1,019 registrants at this conference - much smaller than SLA's annual conference (which I've been attending for over a decade now), but much bigger than the Acquisitions Institute at Timberline Lodge, the other acquisition conference I've attended.

The conference started with a keynote address by Ray English from Oberlin College on the unintended consequences of serials prices and the open access movement. This talk was interesting and raised a lot of questions at the end.

David Lankes from Syracuse spoke next on Massive Scale Librarianship. Slides from this talk are on his website. The most interesting idea I got from this talk was the concept of participating librarianship, which included the ideas of knowledge being created through conversations and the need to handle large scale data at the conversation level.

Michael Pelikan from Penn State gave an entertaining talk with many quotes from F. W. Lancaster on "After the Dinosaur Killer: Adaptation and Survival."

The conference organizers then put on a funny skit "Captain Acronym meets Bureaucracy Babe" on ERMs promising magic solutions.

The morning ended with presentations by Stanley Wilder (University of Rochester) on their C4 interface, Andrew Pace (NC State) on their Endeca catalog interface and Paul Miller (Talis) on the latest developments in Library 2.0.

Off to lunch now.