acad lib future
jdupuis | March 24, 2010Nice article by Delaney J. Kirk and Timothy L. Johnson on Blogs As A Knowledge Management Tool In The Classroom (via).
Based on their experiences in a combined 22 business courses over the past three years, the authors believe that weblogs (blogs) can be used as an effective pedagogical tool to increase efficiency by the professor, enhance participation and engagement in the course by the students, and create a learning community both within and outside the classroom. In this paper they discuss their decision to use blogs as an integral part of their course design to contribute to both…
jdupuis | March 2, 2010Continuing the ongoing discussion about the publication habits of computing researchers that I've recently blogged about:
Time for computer science to grow up?
ACM responds to the blogosphere
The Association for Computing Machinery on Open Access.
Conferences vs. journals in computing researchThis time around, we have Moshe Vardi Revisiting the Publication Culture in Computing Research in the latest Communications of the ACM.
The May 2009 editorial and the August 2009 column attracted a lot of attention in the blogosphere. The reaction has been mostly sympathetic to the point of view…
jdupuis | February 25, 2010My Lakehead University colleague Janice Mutz and I reprised the session I did at OLA two years ago this morning for an active and engaged crowd of about 50 librarians -- a great crowd for the very first session of the conference since a lot of people are still trickling in after arriving and registering.
This time around, we really put the emphasis on engagement and conversation, running the session like a combination Information Literacy and unconference session. Overall, we were really pleased with how it went and enjoyed the input from so many great librarians. Of the 20 or so "…
jdupuis | February 19, 2010On Thursday, February 4th, I attended the Social Media and the Modern Day Classroom session that's part of Social Media Week Toronto. It was hosted here at York and most of the presenters were local faculty or staff.
It was a very interesting session in which all the speakers brought something different and valuable to the table.
Neel Joshi moderated and gave an overall shape to the session, asking provocative questions and mostly focusing on Twitter as a learning and community building tool. Laura D'amelio is the Manager of Print & E-Media Content here and she talked about how York…
jdupuis | February 17, 2010A bit of self-promotion. Forgive me. I'll be brief.
My TAIGA fisking post from a while back is featured prominently in Walt Crawford's most recent Cites & Insights (March 2010) (pdf, html) with quite a bit of value-added comment from Walt on TAIGA, the Darien Statements and other topics. Thanks, Walt.
I'm flattered to be mentioned in Graham Lavender's presentation at the recent Web2.You conference in Montreal. His very fine presentation was on Blogs and Twitter for Individuals and Institutions. No doubt referring to my 2008 presentation at Web2.You, on slide 3 he mentions that "…
jdupuis | February 16, 2010As a follow up to my previous posts about the situation at Canada's national science library, NRC-CISTI, here, here and here, this was in the Ottawa Citizen today, NRC to lay off 86 workers in April.
The National Research Council is laying off 86 people as part of cuts announced last year to reduce costs at the country's leading research organization.
The layoffs begin in April and will affect employees at the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI), the country's national science library and leading publisher of scientific information. By the time it is over, CISTI…
jdupuis | January 29, 2010I couldn't agree more with Bonnie Swoger's sentiment that academic librarians need to stop going to library conferences, although I perhaps might not go that far.
In any case, the last couple of weeks have been pretty fallow blogging weeks for me and I just can't seem to come up with any original commentary on the topic. Fortunately, I have an post from way back in June 2008 expressing many of the same sentiments, though probably neither as well nor as succinctly as Bonnie has.
I'll also not that the post was excerpted in The Library Leadership Network.
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I saw…
jdupuis | January 22, 2010Horror author Cherie Priest has a very nice post from a couple of days ago called Control. It's basically about what mass market fiction authors do and don't have control over in the book production process. Now, the mass market fiction publishing niche is hardly the main concern on this blog, but I also think it's interesting to see what she comes up with and compare it with the list of things academic authors both do and don't have control over.
On some points it's strangely the same but mostly starkly different.
It's also worth contemplating how this list would be affected by an…
jdupuis | January 13, 2010I was chatting with a colleague during the long commute home the other day and he noticed I was reading this book. "What's it like?" he asked.
"Clay Shirky lite," I replied.
And that's about right. In Six Pixels of Separation, Mitch Joel comes to grips with the effects of social media on marketing, media, sales and promotions, he covers a lot of the same ground as in Clay Shirky's classic Here Comes Everybody (review). Glib, conversational, fast-paced bite-sized -- an easy read for sure -- Joel does a solid job of translating Shirky's more scholarly approach to a business audience.
Which…
jdupuis | January 12, 2010Or not. You can also feel free to subscribe. Or not.
Yes, my library has entered the Twitter age. I'll probably be the main tweeter but hopefully a couple of the other reference staff here will chip (chirp?) in from time to time.
It took me a while to decide whether or not it's worth it to join Twitter. When I do IL classes, I often poll the class informally to see who uses which of the various social networking software sites. Facebook is around 90%. Twitter is around 5-10%, although somewhat more than 50% seem to have at least heard of it. So, it's a fairly small percentage of…
Christensen, Clayton M. The innovator's dilemma. New York: Collins Business Essentials, 2006. 286pp.
jdupuis | January 8, 2010This book is about the failure of companies to stay atop their industries when the confront certain tyupes of market and technological change. It's not about the failure of simply any company, but of good companies -- the kinds that many managers have admired and tried to emulate, the companies known for their abilities to innovate and execute....It is about well-manged companies that have their competitive antennae up, listen astutely to their customers, invest aggressively in new technologies, and yet still lose market dominance. (p. xi)
Clayton M. Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma isn…
jdupuis | January 4, 2010Burn down the library. C'mon, all the books in the world are already digitized. Burn the thing down...Stop air conditioning the books. Enough already.
-Adrian Sannier (via)
Optimism seems like a strange thing for a librarian to have at the start of the second decade of the 21st century. There's no shortage of people who seem to think that we'll be completely replaced by Google, that everything is available online for free, that students don't read.
And we've all had experiences where we tell someone at a party what we do for a living and the person just gets a puzzled expression on their…
jdupuis | December 30, 2009A nice quote from Rick Salutin's most recent Globe and Mail column, In praise of words, not books, which I actually read in a print edition of the newspaper this morning. Yes, we get two daily print newspapers, The Globe and The Toronto Star. My teenaged sons read them too.
Anyways, the point Salutin is making is that true knowledge and wisdom aren't communicated by static media like books or articles, but by human interaction -- conversation is key in that human culture is essentially oral. Of course, you can define oral culture to include a lot of technologically mediated forms of…
jdupuis | December 17, 2009Thinking about the future is very hard.
You'd think I'd know just how hard it is, having engaged in it on numerous occasions during my blogging career and even writing a book about it. But the more I think about the future -- of the climate, of society, of the economy, of information, of publishing, of libraries and, ultimately, of librarians like me -- the harder it is to pin down what I really think is going to happen. The future has a nasty way of sneaking up on you and actually happening in the past. Some things happen faster than you thought, some slower. Some things you thought were…
jdupuis | December 12, 2009The latest issue of IT Professional (v11i6) has some interesting articles on strategic planning for IT organizations.
Information Technology Strategic Planning by Hong, Edward K
IT Innovations: Evaluate, Strategize, and Invest by Sahoo, Manas
Professional and Interpersonal Skills for ICT Specialists by Llorens-Garcia, Ariadna; Llinas-Audet, Xavier; Sabate, Ferran
IT and Business Alignment: The Effect on Productivity and Profitability by Nash, Elby M.
Finding Your True IT Transformation by Kraynak, Peter
Copyright Infringement and Protection in the Internet Age by Berti, John
Virtual Teams and…
jdupuis | November 30, 2009...present of public and academic libraries?
What got me thinking along these lines most recently was the recent Clay Shirky blog post,Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization. It's a pretty good post that puts a particular kind of physical retail into the context of current online retail and media shift realities.
In the first section of the post, Shirky basically outlines the trouble that physical bookstores are in, caught between the rock of the competition of online/big box store and the hard place of the coming media singularity.
Like record stores and video rental places,…
jdupuis | November 28, 2009From the most recent issue of Locus magazine, November 2009, talking about his most recent novel Makers:
The people in Makers experience a world in which technology giveth and taketh away. They live through the fallacy of the record and movie industries: the idea that technology will go just far enough to help them and then stop. That's totally not what happens. technology joes that far and them keeps on going. It's a cycle of booms and busts. There are some lovely things about when you're riding the wave and some scary things.
The Information Revolution is not bloodless. There's plenty…
jdupuis | November 18, 2009Or, Twitter & blogs as ways of knowing, Part 2.
A month or so ago, I poked a little gentle fun at social media extremists, basically exploring the idea that engaging online is the be-all and end-all of the library profession versus the idea that much of what we do online is peripheral to the main thrust of what librarianship is all about. To a certain degree, I guess I was setting up a couple of straw people just for the purpose of knocking them down but at the time it seemed like contrasting those extremes was a useful way of looking at the issue.
Of course, I don't believe either…
jdupuis | November 16, 2009Sort of related to my ongoing series of Best Science Books 2009 lists, here's a nice list of the top 5 social media books I found on Mashable, via Tara Hunt. They're all 2009 books, after all.
The list is from Steve Cunningham who interestingly frames the five books in terms of the lessons we should take away from them.
You Need to Build Trust: Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
Turn the Bullhorn Around: The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business by Tara Hunt
Learn the Pillars…
jdupuis | November 11, 2009I don't usually talk about local York stuff here, but I'd like to make an exception for the event we had last week (Tuesday, November 3rd) here at my library, The Steacie Science & Engineering Library.
The event is called YorkWrites and it's sponsored jointly by the Libraries and the Bookstore. Essentially, it's a big party in the library, with food, drink, music and speeches. In the past it was held at the Scott Library, the humanities & socials sciences library, but for 2009 we thought it would be nice to try a science and engineering focus.
What's it about:
YORKwrites is an…