When I was in library school, one concept I remember being covered was the subject-based query versus the known-item query. These were used to represent two basic but very different types of library usage and required of librarians different search and related skills.
The Smithsonian has introduced Smithsonian Profiles, a searchable directory of the Smithsonian’s scholarly experts.
The Smithsonian’s dedication to research supports hundreds of staff scholars and every year it attracts more than 1,000 fellows and research associates from around the world, all of whom work within the Institution’s 19 museums, nine research centers, three cultural centers and the National Zoo. Smithsonian Profiles outlines the expertise of current Smithsonian-affiliated scholars, connecting its audiences with curators, historians, researchers and fellows who continually discover new knowledge to share worldwide.
Aloha! I’m a second-year graduate student with the University of Hawaii’s LIS program, planning to graduate with an MLISc and a certificate in Archival Studies, in May 2017.
In this tech-driven world we live in, librarianship has evolved to include positions that specialize in caring for digital objects and collections. This summer, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to intern with the Digital Programs and Initiatives Division at Smithsonian Libraries, through the Minority Awards Program. Under the supervision of Joel Richard, Head of Web Services, I worked on three digital projects that focused on expanding the reach of the Libraries’ collections.
The Smithsonian staff publications below are those that have generated the most media and online 
activity for 2015. Congratulations to those authors whose work has been picked up by news, bloggers and other social media users and whose ideas therefore are propagated beyond readership of the source publication.
This group was culled from among 1500 publications tracked by the online service, Altmetric and assigned a score based on online attention paid by interested parties. Those with the top 25 Altmetric scores are shown here.
The staff at the Max Planck Digital Library released a white paper 
earlier this year called, “Disrupting the subscription journals’ business model for the necessary large-scale transformation to open access.” While the title may be a mouthful, the paper put forth a simple idea: That the total worldwide amount spent by libraries on subscriptions to scientific journals is enough to pay the article processing fees if all journals operated on an open access (OA) model. In other words, instead of libraries paying for science journal subscriptions, what if every institution instead diverted that money and used it for article processing fees (APC) for gold open access publishing on behalf of its scholars? (A useful comparison might be that instead of purchasing a car and paying the costs associated with ownership, you instead spent the money on taxis, uber, car rental, home delivery charges, etc.)
Readers of the Sunday Washington Post are familiar with the weekly feature called, ‘5 Myths” where misconceptions about certain timely topics are discussed and debunked. (A recent issue clarified some popular myths about giant pandas, calling on the expertise of Dr. Bill McShea of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute). It may be helpful to point out some things about the Smithsonian Research Online (SRO) program that might be misunderstood by researchers and Smithsonian staff.
At a recent Open Access Futures presentation, speaker Rick Anderson noted that the music industry has moved from selling CDs to selling individual songs and he wondered whether academic journals might do the same. In other words, what if libraries one day stopped subscribing to scholarly journals but instead bought individual articles one at a time, in response to immediate needs by researchers?
