First off, my disclaimer: these are my opinions and thoughts; not necessarily those of TRB's.
I just attended Carol Tenopir's session called "Interdisciplinary Science and Its Impact on Information Professionals" on Tuesday, June 16 at the SLA 2009 conference. As a transportation librarian, I must say that I highly recommend attending her talks. Dr. Tenopir is a professor at the School of Information Services at University of Tennessee. She has performed numerous studies on how scientists and engineers perform their research from their use of journals, books, conference proceedings, and colleagues.
I saw her speak for the first time at TRB's annual meeting during January 2005; her talk was called "Communication Patterns of Engineers." She had just published a book of the same title: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047148492X.html. She has also contributed an article to July-Aug 2007 issue of TR News at http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/trnews/trnews251.pdf
Here are some points which I learned from her recent SLA 2009 talk:
- In the scientific community there has been an increase in e-journal readings and a decrease in personal subscriptions over the past few years.
- Scientists are reading more studies and but spending less time per article.
- Interdisciplinary readings are more likely to be electronic. More often read on screen. More often, articles come from the library.
- Conference proceedings are valued slightly higher than journal articles.
- More articles are found through citation links.
- The number one reason that research gets lost is because somebody retires. This is more common than disasters such as floods.
- As information professionals, it's important for us to provide collection and access to interdisciplinary works.
Overall, through her studies and talks, Dr. Tenopir has helped me to better understand the patrons who I am serving in my position since transportation is an interdisciplinary science.
Jessica Fomalont
Librarian
Transportation Research Board