Quantifying literature citations, index terms, and Gene Ontology annotations in the Saccharomyces Genome Database to assess results-set clustering utility

A set of 37,325 unique literature citations was identified from 120,078 literature-based annotations in the Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD). The citations, gene products, and related Gene Ontology (GO) annotations were analyzed to quantify unique articles, journals, genes, and to rank by publication year, language, and GO term frequency. GO terms, MeSH indexing terms, MeSH Journal Descriptors, and SGD Literature Topics were quantified and analyzed to assess their potential utility for results set clustering. Results: Bradford’s Law of Scattering was shown to hold for the citations, journals, gene products, and GO annotations. Only the MeSH terms and article title/abstract pairs had significant numbers of term co-occurrence. Multiple term types may be useful for faceted searching and clustered results set browsing if the strengths of each are leveraged

Junior Faculty Engagement at iSchools: Personal Experience during the First Several Years

This roundtable discussion will explore how junior faculty at iSchools have been able to embed their research, teaching, and service activities within their schools, the larger institutions, and broader communities. The session will also focus on the ways in which junior faculty have received guidance in their roles--from the job search through the first several years in a tenure-track position. Roundtable leaders represent a variety of institutions and experiences--as faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [WJM], the University of Maryland [SP], the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill [PME], and the University of Texas at Austin [MW], and with doctoral-level preparation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill [WJM, MW], the University of Toronto [SP], and the University of Washington [PME]. While the annual junior faculty mentoring event at the iConference specifically targets junior faculty as participants, this roundtable session offers a more inclusive environment for the discussion of this topic, specifically engaging doctoral students and senior faculty as well as their junior colleagues

Effects of geographic factors on the education and training of health sciences librarians in the mid-Atlantic states

Investigates potential relationships between the geographic location of health sciences librarians’ graduate education and training, native place of residence, and their subsequent employment and continuing education, in order to assess demand for HSL education within the region.Ope

Contextual Analysis of Variation and Quality in Human-curated Gene Ontology Annotations

Two prospective randomized controlled studies of scientific curators of model organism databases (MODs) were conducted using common document collections to investigate the origins, nature, and extent of variation in curators' Gene Ontology (GO) annotations. Additional contextual data about curators' backgrounds, experience, personal annotation behaviors, and work practices were also collected to provide additional means of explaining variation. A corpus of nearly 4,000 new GO annotations covering 5 organisms was generated by 31 curators and analyzed at the paper, instance, and GO element levels. Variation was observed by organism expertise, by group assignment, and between individual and consensus annotations. Years of GO curation experience was found to not be a predictor of annotation instance quantities. Five facets of GO annotation quality (Consistency, Specificity, Completeness, Validity, and Reliability) were evaluated for utility, and showed promise for use in training novice curators. Pairwise matching and comparison of instances was found to be difficult and atypical, limiting the usefulness of the quality measures. Content analysis was performed on more than 600 pages of curators' hand-annotated paper journal articles used in GO annotation, yielding six types of common notations

Understanding biocurators: Attributes and roles of model organism database curators.

This project describes biocurators' educational backgrounds and biological expertise, organisms with which they have laboratory- and Gene Ontology annotation experience, and details about their work tasks and roles.Ope

Planning Bioinformatics Education and Information Services in an Academic Health Sciences Library

This article describes a planning process for the development of bioinformatics education and information services in an academic health sciences library. The project’s five goals were to:(1) understand the changing environment for information related to bioinformatics;(2) understand the information needs of faculty whose work involves bioinformatics; (3) explore potential service offerings; (4) anticipate factors influencing the implementation of new services; and (5) envision strategies for recruiting and training information professionals to fill these roles. The authors describe the library’s practice environment and review recent research on the information needs of biomedical researchers and clinicians. A variety of potential library-based services in relation to bioinformatics are enumerated, and the institutional, environmental, and personnel factors affecting the deployment of services are examined. Finally, the authors describe the educational and training context of the library, and explore potential roles for librarians and information professionals in the context of bioinformatics services