acad lib future
jdupuis | June 26, 2009Digital Natives will move markets and transform industries, education, and global politics. the changes they bring about as they move into the workforce could have an immendsely positive effect on the world we live in. By and large, the digital revolution has already made this world a better place. And Digital Natives have every chance of propelling society further forward in myriad ways -- if we let them. (p. 7)
Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser is a fine and useful book. Every page is brimming with facts and analysis…
jdupuis | June 24, 2009A thought experiment.
It all started with this Ray Bradbury quote in the New York Times:
"Libraries raised me," Mr. Bradbury said. "I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."
I've bolded the chunk that has resonated most strongly around the Internet, especially Twitter where it was widely tweeted and retweeted.
The tweeter that most piqued my interest was…
jdupuis | June 19, 2009This is the third in my informal trilogy on engaging in social media. The first two are here and here.
I left off last time with this sentiment:
It seems to me that one possibility if we want to engage these groups, is that we have to figure out where they already are and how we can fit into and improve that rather than try and build something completely new that we'll then try and entice everyone to join.
Where do we go from here? Maybe if the communities we build were more accepting, civil and inclusive, that would be a start.
Well, I like what Clay Shirky said recently about how our…
jdupuis | June 12, 2009My brain is completely overloaded at the moment after the two absolutely fabulous conferences I've attended in the past week. I'm going to do individual posts about each conference, but I thought I'd give some initial impressions in this post first.
As a reminder, the conferences were BookCamp Toronto and Managing Data for Science.
First of all, BookCamp Toronto, an unconference attended mostly by people from the trade book publishing industry, the Canadian version of which is centred here in Toronto. There were quite a few authors in attendance as well as some publishing people from other…
jdupuis | June 5, 2009I expect blogging will be lighter than usual between now and next Thursday as I have two conferences coming up.
First off, tomorrow here in Toronto I'll be attended BookCamp Toronto, an unconference on "he future of books, writing, publishing, and the book business in the digital age." The program looks very interesting and as you can all imagine I'll be keeping a keen eye out for ideas relevant to the future of libraries. I'm also looking forward to meeting Peter Brantley of Archive.org for the first time.
Tuesday and Wednesday next week, I'll be at Managing Data for Science, the ICSTI…
jdupuis | June 3, 2009After last year's success, the organizers put on a another great SciBarCamp show! It was this past May 8th and 9th at the University of Toronto's Hart House.
What is SciBarCamp, you ask?
SciBarCamp is a gathering of scientists, artists, and technologists for a day of talks and discussions. The second SciBarCamp event will take place at Hart House at the University of Toronto on May 9th, 2009, with an opening reception on the evening of May 8th. The goal is to create connections between science, entrepreneurs and local businesses, and arts and culture.
I'll just do some fairly detailed…
jdupuis | June 1, 2009First Principles is physicist Howard Burton's story of how Research in Motion founder and CEO Mike Lazaridis basically plucked him out of obscurity to become the founding executive director for The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. And quite a story it is.
Burton had just finished his PhD and was looking for work. He sent some CVs around and one of the responses was from Lazaridis, who was looking for do something both big and important with his considerable wealth. After a brief (and rather odd) interview, Burton got the job. It was then his job to figure…
jdupuis | May 29, 2009I'd like to pick up a little where I left off in my last posting on social networking. In that post, I was highlighting a post by Wayne Bivens-Tatum on how he prefers to interact in online environments. Or more precisely, how he prefers not to get too deeply involved.
Wayne's points are well thought-out and reasonable. And a kind of challenge to those that want to build online communities -- the people they probably need to listen to the most when they are designing their communities are people like him rather than just people in the social media echo chamber.
Now, of course Wayne got a…
jdupuis | May 26, 2009Yes, the book. My Job in 10 Years: The Future of Academic Libraries.
To rewind a bit, the story begins this past January. I did a little off-the-cuff post on how libraries could model their web presences on commercial book-related sites like Tor.com or the Globe & Mail Books site. It ended up being surprisingly popular, even getting picked up by AL Direct.
Shortly after that, I was contacted by Christopher Rhodes of ALA Editions to see if I was interested in proposing a book for them about designing library web pages that way. (Thanks, Chris!)
Well, like any good blogger, I've always…
jdupuis | May 25, 2009For those of you new to Confessions of a Science Librarian, I've been publishing various lists of books and reports/white papers for the last little while. The reports and books explore various ideas, issues and trends that I think will be important in the development of academic libraries over the next several years and range pretty far and wide in terms of subject matter.
I've done four lists so far, mentioning a rather frightening number of different items:
Sixteen books
Twenty-nine reports
Thirty-four books and eight reports
Nine reports and sixteen booksReports
Online Catalogs: What…
jdupuis | May 19, 2009As we race headlong into a future full of opportunities for online social networking, as we try and build systems to engage students, scientists, librarians or others, we have to remember one thing.
When we build these systems, we need to build them for everyone. Not just the coolest and most technophilic. We have to build for who our audience really is, not who we wish they would be.
And sometimes we just have to recognize that not everyone will be interested in what we have to offer, even if they seem to fit our profile in other ways.
Wayne Bivens-Tatum does a very good job of…