faculty liaison
jdupuis | November 16, 2011It all started with this innocent little tweet from @seelix:
In going through the twitter list, I believe that half the #scio12 people are either a librarian, a marine scientist or named Emily.
To which I responded:
@seelix is there a marine science librarian named Emily? #scio12
@BoraZ had to chime in as well:
The holotype #scio12-er RT @dupuisj: @seelix is there a marine science librarian named Emily? #scio12
With @seelix getting the last word:
Found my new career path! RT @BoraZ The holotype #scio12-er RT @dupuisj: @seelix is there a marine science librarian named Emily? #scio12
Over the…
jdupuis | November 10, 2011Welcome to the latest installment in my very occasional series of interviews with people in the scitech world. This time around the subject is Michael Nielsen, author of the recently published Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science and prolific speaker on the Open Science lecture circuit. A recent example of his public speaking is his TEDxWaterloo talk on Open Science.
You can follow his blog here and read his recent Wall Street Journal article, The New Einsteins Will Be Scientists Who Share.
I'd like to thank Michael for his provocative and insightful responses. Enjoy…
jdupuis | November 9, 2011I was at The Charleston Conference last week, thanks to Mike Diaz of Proquest who invited me to be on a panel that he moderated, along with Karen Downing and Clifford Lynch. The topic of the panel was Keeping Up with the Things That Matter: Current Awareness Tools and Strategies for Academic Libraries. Karen, Cliff and I came up with different takes on the subject but overall the panel was quite well attended and I think useful and interesting for audience members.
Not surprisingly, my take was a bit on the "stealthy librarian" side of things:
I enjoyed being a bit provocative and think…
jdupuis | November 8, 2011Before heading off to the Charleston Conference last week, I blogged about the big announcement of Pierre Lassonde's big $25 million donation to York to found the Lassonde School of Engineering.
I attended the announcement and livetweeted it quite extensively: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.
I also created a Storify story of a fair bit of the quite extensive twitter traffic of the annoucement and that is here. I've embedded the Story at the end of this post. It's mostly tweeting form the day of the announcement but I have…
jdupuis | October 12, 2011Waaaaay back on September 20, I flew down to New York City to take part in one of the Science Online New York City panel discussions, this one on Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils (and here).
Ably organized and moderated by David Dobbs, the other panelists were Evan Ratliff, Amanda Moon, Carl Zimmer and Dean Johnson.
Here's a description of the panel:
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…
jdupuis | September 20, 2011A 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…
jdupuis | September 8, 2011Another 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:…
jdupuis | July 25, 2011My 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…
jdupuis | July 25, 2011As I have in the past, I'd like to point out a librarian embedded in a faculty-focused blogging network.
Brian Mathews recently moved his blog, The Ubiquitous Librarian, to the Chronicle Blog Network run by, you guessed it, The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The new URL for Brian's blog is here.
And a few recent posts:
Instructionally Adrift? Are instructors letting their students down?
A Future Space For Reference Services? An Inspiration From GALE
Why does my library use social media?
When talking about the library remember N3P3: an advocacy talking points framework for academic…
jdupuis | July 15, 2011The 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
jdupuis | July 14, 2011As usual, a wealth of interesting articles in the latest ISTL:
Faculty of 1000 and VIVO: Invisible Colleges and Team Science by John Carey, City University of New York
E-book Usage among Chemists, Biochemists and Biologists: Findings of a Survey and Interviews by Yuening Zhang and Roger Beckman, Indiana University, Bloomington
Look Beyond Textbooks: Information Literacy for First-Year Science Students by Gabrielle K.W. Wong, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
The Changing Role of Blogs in Science Information Dissemination by Laksamee Putnam, Towson University
Life Science Data…
jdupuis | July 13, 2011A 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…
jdupuis | July 8, 2011I 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…
jdupuis | July 5, 2011Yet another science blogging community. The more the merrier.
We've had another quiet period in the science blogging universe these last couple of months. It seems that the rapid evolution that kicked off with the founding of Scientopia in the wake of Pepsigate is continuing.
And this is the big one: Scientific American Blogs. This is easily the biggest and most important science blogging community launch since ScienceBlogs itself launched back in 2006.
Of course, it was engineered by the master of us all, Bora Zivkovic.
Here's what he has to say about the makeup of the network:
Diversity…
jdupuis | June 23, 2011Following 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…
jdupuis | June 21, 2011Following 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…
jdupuis | June 20, 2011The 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)…
jdupuis | June 9, 2011Yes, 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…
jdupuis | June 8, 2011As 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…
jdupuis | June 7, 2011I'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,…