acad lib future

A project I heartily endorse on a topic near and dear to my heart, launched by the Library Society of the World, Librarianship by Walking Around: The Library Society of the World is putting together an online and print-on-demand anthology of weblog posts, essays, articles, and other material entitled Librarianship by Walking Around, patterned after the successful Hacking the Academy project. Librarianship doesn't just happen in the library! Librarianship happens wherever information exchange happens--that is, just about everywhere. Librarianship by Walking Around celebrates librarians who…
As a former IT person and a current librarian, I've got to say that this article,Want Good IT Customer Service? Visit Your Library, has a lot of truth in it -- I definitely see the differences between my former profession and my current one. And as the article points out, many of those differences are on the plus side for librarians. Not all, of course, but that's a different post. Let's take a look: I believe IT professionals truly want to help others. However, we tend to focus on the technology, not the client. We believe our job is to fix problems, and we expend considerable time and…
Another issue full of interesting articles: E-Science Librarianship: Field Undefined by Elsa Alvaro, Heather Brooks, Monica Ham, Stephanie Poegel, and Sarah Rosencrans, Indiana University Comparison of the Contributions of CAPLUS and MEDLINE to the Performance of SciFinder in Retrieving the Drug Literature by Svetla Baykoucheva, University of Maryland Reference Management Software: a Comparative Analysis of Four Products by Ron Gilmour and Laura Cobus-Kuo, Ithaca College American Woods: Conservation of a Unique Item by Tierney Lyons, Penn State Worthington Scranton Local Food Systems:…
The theme at the upcoming Science Online NYC panel is Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils and I guess I'm the perils guy. The purpose of this post is helping me to get some of my thoughts down on pixels and, as a by-product, I guess it's tipping my hand a little bit for the other participants on the panel. This session and my role as skeptic comes out of the Science Online session on ebooks in North Carolina this past January. I believe I may have refereed to the emerging ebooks app ecosystem as "The Dark Side." My point was not to explicitly demonize app developers or…
Whoa. Now that was a intellectual reset button hitting if there ever was one. From July 31 to August 5 I attended the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians (LIAL) in Boston. It was a one-week, intensive, immersive course not so much on how to be a leader but how to think like a leader and how to understand a little more about the leadership process. Not solely aimed academic library leadership per se, but more broadly about leadership situated in an academic environment. In other words, it was about people who happen to be librarians leading…
I'll be speaking at the upcoming Science Online NYC event on September 20th. Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils Tuesday, September 20, 2011 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM (ET) New York, NY Weiss 305 Rockefeller University E66th and York Ave. New York, NY Enhanced ebooks and tablet apps clearly offer new ways to present material and engage readers. Yet some of the software restrictions and rights deals that these ebooks, apps and their platforms use can make them unfriendly to librarians, archivists, and future users. How can authors, designers, and publishers best exploit these…
No, the purpose of this post isn't to reveal the secrets of successful academic leadership. If I had those, believe you me I'd be writing this from my villa on the French Riviera. However, I am heading off to the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians in Boston next week where I hope to be a least a little more enlightened and educated along that path. Not surprisingly I've been watching the blogosphere these last few months for insightful posts and articles about academic leadership, in particular academic library leadership. I've found a few…
My previous post was about Brian Mathews moving his blog to the Chronicle, a non-librarian blog network. So for this post I thought I'd list all the academic and research librarians I know of that are embedded in non-library blogging communities. On the one hand, it's a pretty short list. On the other hand, it's not like there are that many relevant blogging communities out there! Needless to say, I think it's hugely important to get the librarian point of view in front of our patrons and getting ourselves into their blogging communities and talking about issues they care about is a great…
The latest D-Lib has a bunch of really interesting articles: Services for Academic Libraries in the New Era by Michalis Gerolimos and Rania Konsta Digital Librarianship & Social Media: the Digital Library as Conversation Facilitator Article by Robert A. Schrier Building a Sustainable Institutional Repository by Chenying Li, Mingjie Han, Chongyang Hong, Yan Wang, Yanqing Xu and Chunning Cheng Music to My Ears: The New York Philharmonic Digital Archives by Cynthia Tobar
A few weeks ago I answered the daily thought leadership countdown questions that were posed by the TEDxLibrariansTO conference. I enjoyed the process, forcing myself to respond to thoughtful and interesting questions every day, even on busy challenging days where I wouldn't normally make an effort to find the time for blogging. However, since they were all branded with "TEDxLibrarians" name in the title, I don't think people who weren't attending the conference bothered to read them. As such, several of the posts had unusually low readership. So I;m gathering them all here in the hopes…
I chose this one more for the humourous title of the post since the content itself is very seriously intentioned. I almost see this as a double sequel to both the social media evilness post and to some of my recent ramblings on thought leadership. The post in question is We Don't Need No Steenkin' Social Media Gurus by York prof Robert Kozinets. After I had left the stage and assumed a position within the audience, beer in hand, a woman began talking to me in the crowd. Let's call her "Jennifer." Jennifer told me that she knew nothing about social media even a few weeks ago, but that her…
Sometimes two posts just collide in my brain. I thought I'd share a recent case of this phenomenon. First up, marketing/PR/social media Rock Star Mitch Joel on taking the best advantage of the inherent evilness of social networks like Twitter in The New Media Pecking Order. Newsflash: the world is one big pecking order. My friend - the rock star - travels infrequently by plane. I'm a loyal customer of the airline. It doesn't seem fair and it doesn't make sense. C'est la vie. Klout, PeerIndex, Twitter Grader and others simply bring to light something we've all known for a very long time: it's…
As you read this, I'll be at TEDxLibrariansTO helping out with registration. And having a great time talking about librarians as thought leaders! As I've done for the last few days, here is my answer for yesterday's TEDxLibrariansTO Countdown Question: Question 1: What means should librarians choose to encourage their institutions to embrace change? I'm not sure I know how to approach even beginning to answer this question other than to just say 42! However, I was lucky enough to attend Drew Dudley's amazing keynote address at yesterday's York IT Day conference. He really talked about…
Following on from the last three days, here are my answers for today's TEDxLibrariansTO Countdown Questions: Question 1: What are the similarities or characteristics of thought leaders that you know? Tell us about the attributes that your ideal thought leader would have. I don't think any one person could actually have all the qualities of the idea thought leader but there are some commonalities across the ones I've encountered. Originality. A thought leader needs to bring something new to the public sphere, or at very least take an established idea and present it in a fresh, original way…
Following on from the last two days, here are my answers for today's TEDxLibrariansTO Coundown Questions: Question 1: How can experience of failure contribute to making an effective thought leader? Failure is useful for a thought leader in the same way that it's useful for everyone. We can learn a lot from our failures: how to dust ourselves off and start over, how to rethink what we've done before and learn from our mistakes, how to put what we do in a larger interpersonal, organizational and social context. After all, just as we rarely succeed alone, we also rarely fail alone. Sure, the…
Following on from yesterday, here are my answers for today's TEDxLibrariansTO Coundown Questions: Question 1: What should we expect/demand of our thought leaders? I'm not sure I like the way this question is phrased, preferring something like, "What do thought leaders actually do?" We certainly shouldn't demand anything of our thought leaders, it's not like we're paying them to do their jobs. Even "expectations" seems like a strong word. To a large extent, thought leaders just are. I'm not sure we can speak of "followers" having "expectations" of leaders in the same way we could in a…
The very fine TEDxLibrariansTO team is counting down to this Saturday's big event with some daily questions for us all to consider. The topic, of course, is Librarians as Thought Leaders! These are the questions for Day 5. I'll attempt to answer them and every day's questions very briefly. I figure if I go for extremely brief answers, there's actually a chance I'll get to them every day! Question 1: Name one thing we could do right now in order to be perceived as thought leaders outside the profession. My Answer: Predictably, perhaps, I'll answer that we should mostly (but not completely)…
Yes, the TEDx whirlwind is coming to libraryland! Later this month on Saturday, June 25th, TEDxLibrariansTO is coming to Toronto. About TEDxLibrariansTO Who inspires you? We live in a time that is in need of inspiration. The aspirations of both individuals and society have always had a home within libraries and have traditionally found a voice through librarians. The theme for TEDx LibrariansTO is Librarians as Thought Leaders. Come to the event and experience this incredible opportunity to hear librarians speak to the differences we make in the world and how we have, can and do lead and…
As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I did a short presentation on Scholarship in the Public Eye: The Case for Social Media as part of a panel for a York Faculty of Graduate Studies Scholarly Communications Series. And yes, I was the Twitter guy, although some of the other presenters did talk about their use of Twitter. Basically, my point was that Twitter and blogs can be part and parcel of the research and research outreach life of academics. I mostly concentrated on Twitter, but I did try and make the same sorts of points about blogging as well as I spoke. Anyways, I thought I would share…
I'm doing a short presentation later today on using social media as a researcher. It's part of the York University Faculty of Graduate Studies' Scholarly Communications Series. This one is titled Scholarship in the Public Eye: The Faculties of Graduate Studies and Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, along with the York University Libraries, are collaboratively facilitating a series of information sessions focused on scholarly communications intended for all graduate students and faculty members. The series will address issues related to research skills and research dissemination,…