April 13, 2013
Librarians as faculty? It's a red herring.
Why I think faculty status for librarians is (generally) a bad idea
Library employees protest changed title
As Role of Librarians Evolves, Some Colleges End Their Faculty Status
Stratification and losing faculty status
Gender, “thought leaders”, ego, and…
April 12, 2013
McSweeny's is brilliant at skewering fads. And there is no bigger fad in higher education than Massive Open Online Courses. MOOCs, as they are known.
Now I'm not quibbling with whether or not MOOCs are an interesting and potentially extremely valuable addition to the landscape of higher education,…
April 9, 2013
I have a son who's currently a first year physics student. As you can imagine, I occasionally pass along a link or two to him pointing to stuff on the web I think he might find particularly interesting or useful. Thinking on that fact, I surmised that perhaps other science students might find…
April 8, 2013
Every once in a while a review copy of a book comes over the transom and it just makes your day. Nothing else that could happen is going to put a damper on the bright sunny mood that springs from such a happy moment.
One that arrived a few days ago that I can wait to read is Lance Fortnow's The…
March 30, 2013
Considering the librarian tech skills gap
Ten Easy Pieces on the Profession of Librarianship
Nation's first bookless library on university campus is thriving at UTSA
Conference Report: Beyond PDF 2
Opinions, Morals and What Science Could but Shouldn’t Tell Us
Degrees of Certainty
The Ethics of…
March 26, 2013
I have a son who's currently a first year physics student. As you can imagine, I occasionally pass along a link or two to him pointing to stuff on the web I think he might find particularly interesting or useful. Thinking on that fact, I surmised that perhaps other science students might find…
March 24, 2013
The Journal of Library Administration is published by Taylor & Francis, a big publishing conglomerate. According to Brian Mathews, while he was in the middle of putting together a special issue on the future of libraries he received notice that the editorial board was resigning due to…
March 23, 2013
What makes one a librarian?
Goodbye, Faculty Status
Library employees protest changed title: New designation for incoming employee provokes heated debate
why should librarians learn python? (a better answer)
Why Not Grow Coders from the inside of Libraries?
Alt-Ac: Breathing Life into Libraries or…
March 22, 2013
You would think that such apple pie issues as public science, basic research and the free and open exchange of scientific information would be hard to disagree with. You would think that a resolution in the Canadian parliament would to such effect would meet with resounding support, resulting in a…
March 18, 2013
Hacking at Education: TED, Technology Entrepreneurship, Uncollege, and the Hole in the Wall
Why MOOCs May Drive Up Higher Ed Costs
California Bill Seeks Campus Credit for Online Study
The great librarian identity crisis of 2013
Q&A: Dan Cohen on His Role as the Founding Executive Director of…
March 13, 2013
Why I Ignore Gurus, Sherpas, Ninjas, Mavens, and Other Sages
Open Access and the Author-Pays Problem: Assuring Access for Readers and Authors in a Global Community of Scholars
Tenure-Track Science Faculty and the 'Open Access Citation Effect'
Academic Libraries as Data Quality Hubs
Writing for…
March 11, 2013
I have a son who's currently a first year physics student. As you can imagine, I occasionally pass along a link or two to him pointing to stuff on the web I think he might find particularly interesting or useful. Thinking on that fact, I surmised that perhaps other science students might find…
March 8, 2013
Just like the author of this piece, I too attended a recent talk by Cory Doctorow -- a brilliant talk relating the life and death of Aaron Swartz with the theme of his latest novel Homeland -- and similarly I often marvel at how lucky we are that the web is free and open.
Enjoy this wonderful…
March 7, 2013
The Myth of the Successful College Dropout: Why It Could Make Millions of Young Americans Poorer
Faculty consider the future of research libraries
In Defense of Librarians
The Real Reason Journal Articles Should Be Free
The Genius Of Raising Brilliant Kids: A Conversation With Jack Andraka's…
March 2, 2013
(This post supersedes the previous post listing items related to the Aaron Swartz story. That post was from January 20, 2013.)
A few comments.
Aaron Swartz's story has had a huge impact, it has reverberated far and wide not just through the interlinking worlds of technology and online activism but…
March 1, 2013
A fun sentiment if I've ever heard one. And I'm sure we all have a band/performer that we'd like to nominate as the "Performer most likely to keep aliens away from earth." Being Canadian, I think I can safely nominate Celine Dion.
"We never visited because we hate The Carpenters" say aliens…
March 1, 2013
The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists—in 7 Charts
The Ph.D. Bust, Pt. II: How Bad Is the Job Market For Young American-Born Scientists?
Tenure Track as Alt-Ac
Ph.D. Job Woes
How Many Ph.D.'s Actually Get to Become College Professors?
Government vs. the Public: Mind the science…
February 23, 2013
Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research
Increasing Public Access to the Results of Scientific Research
Second shoe drops: new White House Directive mandates OA
AAP Supports OSTP Policy Urging Collaboration in Public Access
White House Public Access Policy Is Out
White…
February 22, 2013
Cracked is as Cracked does. Especially in this case, where some researchers do some especially cracked things. Or more precisely, things they only could have thought of after being cracked on the head.
Librarian researchers, don't try this at your library!
The 5 Most Badass Things Ever Done in the…
February 20, 2013
You Build A Library with Books
Beware the Big Errors of ‘Big Data’
Some Preliminary Theses on MOOCs
Tear it down, build it up: the Research Output Team, or the library-as-publisher
Publishers versus libraries>Waking Up to New Approaches to Community Media and Librarianship
Wikipedia vs…
February 13, 2013
The biennial Western Conference on Science Education will be taking place this coming July 9–July 11, 2013.
I'm thinking very seriously of going and I think science/engineering librarians in general should consider doing so as well.
Here's how they describe it:
The biennial Western Conference…
February 9, 2013
So here's the rather strange story.
Way back in 2010, librarian Dale Askey, then of Kansas State University, wrote a blog post critical of the humanities monograph publisher Edwin Mellen. Basically, he stated that the publishers' low quality did not justify their high prices. No big deal, really,…
February 8, 2013
Librarians seem to be under siege these days, both from within and without.
But at our core, librarians no matter where they work just want to make the world a better place.
io9 has a wonderful older post with a list of fictional librarians who've perhaps put that motto into action a little more…
February 7, 2013
Like lunch, writing isn’t free
when librarians lend their politics - or, information wants to be doctrinaire
OLITA Resolution on Opposition to Access Copyright License Agreements
Calling out nonsense - Access Copyright
On (Access) Copyright
What is the government's interest in copyright? Not that…
February 4, 2013
Jonathan Fetter-Vorm's Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb is a real gem of a graphic novel, yet another stunning exemplar of what is possible with the graphic novel format.
As I've often said, there are basically two kinds of science graphic novels -- those that use the format to…
January 31, 2013
Some colleagues and I are presenting tomorrow at the latest Ontario Library Association Super Conference. Here's the info:
Session: #1307:
Friday 3:45 PM 5:00 PM
IF I KNEW THEN WHAT I KNOW NOW
Career development
Speaker(s)
John Dupuis, Acting Associate University Librarian, Information Services,…
January 30, 2013
I'm doing a session at the Ontario Library Conference tomorrow with a few colleagues. The topic is Creative Commons licensing and I'm doing the section on Open Data. It's a kind of a replay of what we did for library staff about a year ago.
Here's the info this time:
Session: #308
Thursday 9:05 AM…
January 28, 2013
Every year for the last several years I've collated and extracted the science books from all the various "best books of the year" lists in different mainstream media and various other outlets. I've done the same this year for books published in 2011! I can tell it's been popular among my readers…
January 20, 2013
The recent death of Aaron Swartz has provoked a lot of commentary on the web so I thought I would gather some of it here. This is by no means an attempt to be comprehensive as the amount of commentary has been truly vast. I've tried to gather enough so that someone working through even a small…
January 19, 2013
Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure.
Every year for the last bunch of years I’ve been linking to and posting about all the “year’s best sciencey books” lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year.
All the…
