Science Boot Camp for Librarians – Scholarship Recipient Post 6

Posted by karencoghlan on August 13th, 2018 Posted in: Blog
Tags: Data, data_science, eScience, science librarians

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This is the sixth blog post in a series authored by twelve individuals who received scholarships to attend the 2018 Science Boot Camp held at Brandeis University on June 13-15, 2018. In this installment, a view on how science boot camp helps a former science teacher who is now a new science librarian. Please watch for more posts about resources from this event and views from scholarship recipients in the upcoming weeks.
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Paige Scudder – Research and Education Librarian, Dartmouth College – Science Bootcamp for Librarians 2018

As a former biology teacher, I feel as though I stumbled into the realm of science librarianship by chance. I went to library school because I wanted to teach skills instead of facts and I wanted to stay in a field that was constantly evolving/growing/changing. In my mind, I would be a public branch librarian or work for a small public library. Maybe spend some time in the children’s department, maybe not. It wasn’t until my advisor asked me why I hadn’t thought of being a science or health sciences librarian that I even considered other ideas of what I could do as a librarian. It wasn’t until I interviewed at Tufts University for a position in their health sciences library that I truly became excited. It wasn’t until I started working there that I realized I found my people, and I thought I had found them just by attending library school.

Finding a cohort of individuals within the library community that have experience with science databases, research and education completely changed the direction that I wanted to take with my career. During my time at Tufts, I spent time working on tutorials for the dental curriculum, assisted with evidence based medicine, lead workshops and more. I am so grateful to have had the learning experience and environment as a paraprofessional, it has made the transition to my professional position exciting and the right level of comfortable.

My supervisor sent me the announcement for Science Boot Camp while I was still in school and I immediately bookmarked the web page so that I wouldn’t miss sign ups. I was excited to listen to speakers within the field I had gone to college in and learn about ways that I could aid their research. More importantly, I couldn’t wait to meet more people within my cohort and learn about what they do.

As a biology major, I took ecology and genetics during my time as an undergrad, but I went to a small school we didn’t spend time discussing real world research and methodology that was used in the field. The speakers were very engaging and I was thrilled to see female scientists discussing their research. It was also exciting to learn about the newest attempt at a Lyme vaccine, which is something that I now look up about once a week to stay up to date on the progress.

Materials Science, on the other hand, was a topic that was more foreign to me. Learning how the topic was discussed, some of the background and research was very helpful. I loved that they had physical examples to pass around, it took the talk to a new level and provided concrete understanding to a topic that would have otherwise been more abstract.

The session I got the most out of was the Friday morning capstone session where we discussed the evaluation of journals and data. We live in a world where we no longer take government gathered data for granted, so it was very helpful to look at guidelines for evaluating that data or published article. Retraction Watch was also a topic not really touched upon in library school, which meant that this session laid the groundwork for a more formal approach to journal/article/data assessment that I can use in my job at Dartmouth College.

Science Boot Camp was a wonderful experience and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to attend. It was the perfect mix of educational, networking and fun – hopefully I’ll be able to attend future events!

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I hope you enjoy the latest installment of the Science Boot Camp for librarians. To read the first post please click here. For information about last weeks reflection please click here. For more about this year’s Science Boot Camp resources or other upcoming events, please visit the NNLM NER website, or contact anyone in the NNLM NER office.