librarianship
jdupuis | December 24, 2010The Librarian's Guide to Etiquette is one of my favourite blogs -- always whimsical and cruel at the same time. Gentle and yet going for the jugular.
Basically, taking the piss out of the library profession since 2005.
Here's some favourite posts, recent and non-so-recent:
Sweaters, Holiday
A good librarian should have enough appliqued holiday sweaters so that he or she can wear a different one each day from Thanksgiving to Christmas. If you wear the same Rudolph sweater over and over, you may inadvertently subject your library coworkers to the condition known as festive fleece fatigue.…
jdupuis | December 17, 2010For those that haven't heard about the NASA/arsenic bacteria story that's been exploding all over the science blogosphere over the last couple of weeks, I like the summary over at Jonathan Eisen's Tree of Life blog:
NASA announced a major press conference
at the conference they discussed a new Science paper claiming to show the discovery of a microbe that could replace much/some of its phosphate with arsenic
initial press coverage of the paper was very positive and discussed the work as having profound implications for understanding of life in the universe - though some scientists in some of…
jdupuis | December 16, 2010Two recent announcements that are worth noting here.
The first is for Digital Science, a Macmillan / Nature Publishing Group project involving some of the usual science online suspects like Timo Hannay and Kaitlin Thaney and some others in a really dynamic-looking multi-disciplinary team.
The press release is here and the about page here.
Digital Science provides software and information to support researchers and research administrators in their everyday work, with the ultimate aim of making science more productive through the use of technology. As well as developing our own solutions, we…
jdupuis | November 24, 2010A portentous-sounding title for a not-so-portentous post, full of half-baked thoughts and idle musings.
I was just thinking about the recent Jounal of Electronic Publishing issue on Reimagining the University Press and without actually reading very much of the issue in question (ignorance is so liberating sometimes...) the most pressing question in my mind was:
So what exactly do we need university presses for anyways?And I got to thinking some more and figured that there are probably tons of people in university presses thinking to themselves,
So what exactly do we need academic libraries…
jdupuis | November 23, 2010A terrific new edition of The Journal of Electronic Publishing (v13i2), focusing on the future of university presses and, by extension, of scholarly publishing as a whole.
A lot of terrific-looking articles:
Editor's Note for Reimagining the University Press by Phil Pochoda
Reimagining the University Press: A Checklist for Scholarly Publishers by Peter J. Doughtery
Reimagining the University Press by Kate Wittenberg
Stage Five Book Publishing by Joseph J. Esposito
Next-Generation University Publishing: A Perspective from California by Daniel Greenstein
What Might Be in Store for Universities…
jdupuis | November 18, 2010Via my York University Computer Science & Engineering colleague Andrew Eckford, two contrasting blog posts by two different Harvard computer science profs. One has decided to leave academia for greener pastures at Google and the other has decided to stay.
First, Matt Welsh on leaving.
There is one simple reason that I'm leaving academia: I simply love work I'm doing at Google. I get to hack all day, working on problems that are orders of magnitude larger and more interesting than I can work on at any university. That is really hard to beat, and is worth more to me than having "Prof." in…
jdupuis | October 27, 2010A week or two ago, in a comment on the Blogging Groups and Ethics post, I lamented that I always seem to be reading the same librarianish blogs, not mixing it up too much. I wished that we might have a blogging community to assemble around, or at least a good aggregator.
Well, Bora Zivkovic challenged me in the comments to at very least aggregate scitech librarian blogs for the ScienceBlogging.org site.
It's taken me a while, but I've done it.
Using the list I previously created for the List of Science & Technology Librarian Blogs I created a Friendfeed group which Bora has since…
jdupuis | October 21, 2010Ok, not a bar, more like an information literacy class.
I thought I'd bring to everyone's attention a presentation by two of my York University Libraries colleaques, web librarian William Denton and instruction librarian Adam Taves.
It was at Access in Winnipeg a week or so ago:
After Launching Search and Discovery, Who Is Mission Control?
Reference librarians are whiny and demanding.
Systems librarians are arrogant and rude.
Users are clueless and uninformed.
A new discovery layer means that they need to collaborate to build it and then -- the next step -- integrate it into teaching and…
jdupuis | October 18, 2010It's Open Access Week this week and as part of the celebrations I thought I highlight a recent declaration by the Open Bibliographic Working Group on the Principles for Open Bibliographic Data. It's an incredible idea, one that I support completely -- the aim is to make bibliographic data open, reusable and remixable. Creating a bibliographic data commons would lead to many opportunities to create search and discovery tools that would be of great benefit to scholarship, education, research and development.
I won't try and explain the details of the declaration since it's released under a CC…
jdupuis | September 15, 2010From this day forward, Scott Rosenberg is an honorary librarian.
One of the things that librarians talk about a lot is how to evaluate a random web page -- what signs and signals to look for that will give the unsuspecting student a clue as to whether or not they might want to use a particular web page in an assignment.
We talk a lot about the various W's -- who, what, why, when and all the rest. Who created the page, what does it say, does their appear to be any bias, is it current. There has been tons of literature on the subject and a very large number of online tutorials.
Scott…
jdupuis | September 2, 2010Peter Brantley has a provocative post up on his blog Shimenawa: Get in the goddamn wagon. It's basically a call to arms -- specifically for younger librarians to seize a greater role in discussing and shaping the future of libraries.
The problem is that a lot of the public, official discussion about the future is restricted to senior administrators -- a huge problem in the insanely hierarchical world of libraries:
I was intrigued when I saw an announcement for an ARL-CNI meeting, "Achieving Strategic Change in Research Libraries", to be held in mid October, because Lord knows this is a good…
jdupuis | September 1, 2010The last little while has seen an amazing proliferation of science blogging communities. Scientopia, Guardian Science Blogs and PLoS Blogs are only the three most recent that I know of.
I think it's great -- the more the merrier I say. Of course, as networks take up more and more space in the science blogging ecosystem it seems to me that independent bloggers might feel isolated or under pressure or neglected some how. I don't think that will be a huge problem as independents will continue to thrive in niches large and small and will continue to draw audiences to what they have to say.…
jdupuis | August 26, 2010Here's a list of the reasonably active Science & Technology library blogs I know about. I've not included medical library blogs in this post because it's not a field I'm all that knowledgeable about. That list would make a great post in it's own right, but it's not this one.
My definition of "scitech librarian blog" is pretty loose (even on the librarian part of it), but in this case I think casting a fairly wide net is probably the best plan of action.
In no particular order:
Science Intelligence and InfoPros by Herve Basset
Christina's LIS Rant by Christina Pikas
Book of Trogool by…
jdupuis | August 25, 2010The latest issue of ISTL has just been released and, as usual, it's filled with very interesting-looking articles.
The table of contents is below:
Metrics and Science Monograph Collections at the Marston Science Library, University of Florida by Michelle F. Leonard, Stephanie C. Haas, and Vernon N. Kisling, Ph.D, University of Florida
Zoo and Wildlife Libraries: An International Survey by Linda L. Coates and Kaitlyn Rose Tierney, San Diego Zoo
How Much Space Does a Library Need? Justifying Collections Space in an Electronic Age by Nancy J. Butkovich, The Pennsylvania State Universitty…
jdupuis | August 12, 2010I recently had an interesting online exchange with Andrew Colgoni, Science Fluencies Libraries at McMaster University in Hamilton, ON. (blog).
He's interested in how I somehow seem up-to-date on all the various cool conferences and happenings in the Science 2.0 space. While I'm not sure I have all the answers on this issue -- and that we all really need to find our own way in our professional development activities -- it is interesting to be able to provide some mid-career advice to an early-career librarian.
Here it is, a slightly edited version of our FriendFeed DM conversation:
Andrew:…
jdupuis | August 11, 2010Consider this a bonus Friday Fun entry for the summer silly season...
Anyways, the Cronk of Higher Ed finally sees fit to subject librarians to the mockery we deserve: Librarians Abandon Dewey Decimal System in Favor of Netflix Categories!
"We found that we were spending an extraordinary amount of time explaining the Dewey Decimal classification system to our students, and they simply weren't retaining the information," explained Janet Poleman, director of the college's library. "Our students will return this fall to find an exciting new system categorizing our literature."
All books in the…
jdupuis | August 5, 2010Dorothea Salo asks the question over on The Book of Trogool.
What do you, scientists, want librarians to know about how you communicate with other scientists? Where do you feel uncertain about the process? Where do you think it's coming up short? Do you think the process should change, and if so, how and how not?
I'm aware that librarians get stuck in our own thought-bubbles just like everybody else--I myself am certainly no exception. Here's a stab at bursting the bubble.
Head on over and let her know!
jdupuis | August 5, 2010Thanks to Mike the Mad Biologist for tagging me with this meme. Like Mike, I'm not much of a memer, but this one looks interesting (and simple) enough to give a try.
The idea is to "Sum up your blogging motivation, philosophy and experience in exactly 10 words" and then to tag 10 further blogs.
So, here goes:
Bring the world of scientists to librarians and vice versa.
That was strangely easy to formulate and I'm not sure if that's a good thing. Similarly, I think it's an overall mission statement rather than something that needs to be implemented with each post I make. Over the long view,…
jdupuis | August 4, 2010This past Monday morning a new science blogging community came online: Scientopia! From their Vision:
Scientopia is a collective of people who write about science because they love to do so. It is a community, held together by mutual respect and operated by consensus, in which people can write, educate, discuss, and learn about science and the process of doing science. In this we explore the interplay between scientific issues and other parts of our lives with the shared goal of making science more accessible.
As a community, we strive to be welcoming of anyone with an interest in science…
jdupuis | July 26, 2010Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I pay quite close attention to the InsideHigherEd web magazine. They cover lots of library issues and issues that are relevant to libraries, their blog network is pretty good with solid coverage of higher education issues and Joshua Kim's instructional technology blog covers a lot of ground, much of which is of interest for the library community.
Unfortunately, they've never had a very good blog by a librarian. Until now. (They did make an attempt at a library blog about a year ago. We will not speak of it anymore.)
Go check out the brand…