acad lib future
jdupuis | June 25, 2013After Your Job Is Gone
Disruptions: The Echo Chamber of Silicon Valley
MOOCs as a Lightning Rod
The Stories We Tell about MOOCs
Fixing the Digital Economy
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in the Academic Library
Stop Scaring Students
An Avalanche is Coming: Higher education and the revolution ahead
Role of librarians changes in digital age
Exploring the future of academic libraries: A definitional approach
Why You Should Never Have Taken That Prestigious Internship
Notes From an Academic Nobody
What's a Library?
The End of Ownership
If you live in a surveillance state for long enough, you create a…
jdupuis | June 22, 2013In Praise of Traditional Libraries
How not to be a dick to a librarian
What Librarians Lack: The Importance of the Entrepreneurial Spirit
In Service? A Further Provocation on Digital Humanities Research in Libraries
What I Wish I’d Known in Graduate School
Academics will need both the physical and virtual library for years to come
Throwing the Books at Each Other
ACRL Value of Academic Libraries Bibliography
The Librarian’s Love/Hate/Love Relationship with Books
Life Sciences Library – Consultation News, Next Steps and Cruess-Boyer Report (McGill)
Opportunities and Barriers for Librarians in…
jdupuis | June 11, 2013Joining a CHORUS, Publishers Offer the OSTP a Proactive, Modern, and Cost-Saving Public Access Solution
Publishers Propose Public-Private Partnership to Support Access to Research
CHORUS: hoping for re-enclosure
CHORUS: It’s actually spelled C-A-B-A-L
Scientific Publishers Aim To Get Ahead Of Agency Repositories
A CHORUS of boos: publishers offer their “solution” to public access
All joined with a single voice to praise CHORUS, thus: “meh.”
Chapter, Verse, and CHORUS: A first pass critique
SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE) Proposed by AAU, APLU, ARL (proposal here)
‘Federated System’…
jdupuis | June 5, 2013Don’t Panic: Why Catastrophism Fails Libraries
Breaking Up with Libraries
Resolved: All LIS students should not take that course
Once a Librarian, Always a Librarian?
Editorial: Libraries see opportunity in changing times
Look to the present of libraries to see the future
Results of the “Global Research Council” in Berlin Announced
Wellcome Trust extends open access policy to include scholarly monographs and book chapters
Open-access initiatives to benefit the academy
Economics of scholarly communication in transition (Is there enough money in library budgets to unleash all of scholarship…
jdupuis | May 30, 2013Academic library existence at risk?
The Myth and the Millennialism of "Disruptive Innovation"
Fending off university-attacking zombies
The online threat to the American professor
Educational Hucksterism: Or, MOOCs are not an Educational Technology
Laptop U: Has the future of college moved online?
Libraries into career centres, campus residences into senior homes
Embrace Moocs or face decline, warns v-c
Library holds consultation sessions on proposed closure of the Life Sciences Library (McGill)
Editorial: why academic freedom matters to librarians
The Librarian Doesn’t Exist
Harvard…
jdupuis | May 16, 2013Yes, We Should Talk About the MLS
On Big Name Librarians
The Loon’s job
Why am I getting my MLIS? Because I have to.
So You Think You Want to Be a Librarian?
The Adjunctification of Academic Librarianship
Your candidate pools
Fork the Academy (github as a model for scholarly communcation)
Massive (But Not Open) (new online cs degree program)
[Expletive Deleted] Ed-Tech #Edinnovation (relates ed tech history as it is often told to how Argo treats the Canadian contribution to that story)
Making the peer review process public
Why is Science Behind a Paywall?
The Delete Squad Google, Twitter,…
jdupuis | April 13, 2013Librarians 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 subversion
Unpacking “faculty status”
Postscript: faculty status and “administrative bloat”
What Is the Business of Literature?
Facebook Leans In
Digital Research, Not Teaching and Ithaka report here.
Free to Profit (Coursera makes some profit)
Systematic Errors of Judgement (bias against women in…
jdupuis | March 24, 2013The 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 conflicts with the publisher around what kind of author rights regime the journal should use. Here is the note he received from the board:
The Board believes that the licensing terms in the Taylor & Francis author agreement are too restrictive and out-of-step with the expectations of authors in the LIS…
jdupuis | March 23, 2013What 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 Eroding the Profession?
Of Hybrarians, Scholar-Librarians, Academic Refugees, & Feral Professionals
Fending off university-attacking zombies
Defining the library ... reflexively
The Powerful Art Of Resilience
Pages of History (end of the scholarly journal article?)
Topic Pages: PLoS…
jdupuis | March 18, 2013Hacking 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 DPLA
The Basic Skills of All Librarians
Poaching jobs
Is coding an essential library skill?
Beyond the Bullet Points: Rock Stars
Why I Ignore Gurus, Sherpas, Ninjas, Mavens, and Other Sages
Cracking the Code: Librarians Acquiring Essential Coding Skills
Research Librarians Discuss New Ways to Support…
jdupuis | March 8, 2013Just 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 little satire and shudder at the possibilities.
The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL!
The World Wide Web has been great, but to be honest, it's also been a lot harder than it needs to be. I know some of you love creating new web pages and participating in online discussions, but the last thing most…
jdupuis | 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 far into the mainstream. The library world has been no exception, with quite a few of the items below being from our world.
How has the library world reacted? If anything, I would hope that we have been challenged to examine our core values very carefully, to reflect deeply about how we make…
jdupuis | February 9, 2013So 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, librarians have lots of opinions about publishers and share them all the time around the water cooler, at conferences and online. But perhaps foreshadowing what was coming, Askey remarked in his post: "Given how closely Mellen guards its reputation against all critics, perhaps I should just put on my…
jdupuis | February 8, 2013Librarians 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 directly than most: 20 heroic librarians who save the world.
Here's a couple, but definitely go on over to the post and check the rest out:
Rex Libris in the Rex Libris comics
Rex Libris is the "tough-as-nails Head Librarian at Middleton Public Library," who strikes fear into recalcitrant borrowers —…
jdupuis | January 20, 2013The 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 selection of the posts would get a good idea of all the dimensions of the story. I've also tried to perhaps give a bit of a library/academia slant in the selection.
As usual with these compilations, readers should feel free to suggest further readings in the comments especially those that add a…
jdupuis | January 17, 2013On January 10, 2013 Rick Anderson published a post at The Scholarly Kitchen published on six mistakes library staff are making when dealing with our vendors. Most of them were fairly standard stuff like don't be rude, don't waste people's time. That sort of thing. (Yes, sometimes I think that every time I link to a Scholarly Kitchen article, an open access journal loses its wings.)
The sixth, however, was a bit different.
Putting political library concerns above patron needs. I’ve saved for last the “mistake” that I know is likely to be the most controversial, but I think it must be said.…
jdupuis | December 31, 2012While it has not generally been my practice to do year end review posts, artificially trying to tie the various and disparate strands of my blogging habits together into some sort of coherent story, I think for this year it's worth doing. And that's because my blogging year did seem to have a coherent theme -- advocating for a fairer and more just scholarly publishing ecosystem.
In particular I spent an awful lot of time advocating for Open Access in one way, shape or form. Not that I haven't always done so, but with all the various events happening in the academic and library worlds this…
jdupuis | December 18, 2012The End of the University as We Know It
The future of online vs. residential education by futurist Ray Kurzweil
Librarians or Baristas?
Prioritizing Academic Programs
Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College
Assessing Campus Libraries (space, yes, services...)
Where is Library Technology going?
MLA President Offers a Sobering Critique of Graduate Education in the Humanities
Confessions of a (former) gatekeeper
Full Text Of The Grim Meathook Future Thing
Massive Open Online Courses -- A Threat Or Opportunity To Universities?
jdupuis | November 29, 2012Like the old saying goes, information wants to be free. In particular, the consumers of information would prefer for the most part not to have to directly pay for the information they are consuming. The information itself, if I may anthropomorphize for a moment, also wants to circulate as freely as possible, to be as consumed as widely as possible, to be as highly regarded as possible. That way it gets to be the information that "wins" the best-used-most-used information sweepstakes.
This seems to me to be a first principle for scholarly communications. Both the users of the information and…
jdupuis | November 28, 2012Or, more precisely, a university designed by libertarians.
Over the last number of months, I've featured a fair bit of apocalyptic MOOC Disruptionism in my regular Around the Web posts. Recently, the libertarian think tank, The Cato Institute (Wikipedia) via their Cato Unbound site, has put online a series of essays discussing just how the traditional academic system can be radically reworked and rethought via a highly commercialized online academy. It's interesting because they've also included some responses questioning their assumptions and the overall MOOC triumphalism that's floating…