Social Media
hrynyshyn | February 4, 2012Two examples of why blogs are better than mainstream news coverage, when it comes to confronting reality and doing something about it, one from the climate wars, one from the front lines of women's health.
First, Andy Revkin, a former New York Times journalist who still blogs there. He calls out a coal-industry-backed attempt to silence one of the world's leading climatologists as the "Shameful Attack on Free Speech" that it is. By launching a Facebook campaign to convince Pennsylvania State University to cancel a scheduled talk by Michael Mann, the coal interests have indeed shamed…
jdupuis | January 18, 2012The Stop Online Piracy Act is a piece of legislation in the US whose aims are:
The originally proposed bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who makes the request, the court order could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill…
jdupuis | January 13, 2012With the final countdown underway and the conference less than a week away, this post follows my post on library people in attendance at Science Online 2012 from a few weeks ago.
And I'd like to start off with another best-tweet-ever, this time Marieclaire Shanahan retweeting Colin Schutze:
+ they'll be fascinating! RT @_ColinS_: #Scio12 Newbie Tips: You will meet more librarians in one day than you thought existed in the world.
And that's long been one of my goals, to promote the integration of librarians into faculty and researcher conferences and social networks. And Science Online has…
jdupuis | December 27, 2011Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure.
Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year.
All the previous 2011 lists are here.
This post includes the following: Five Social Media Books you Should Read.
Yeah, I know this really isn't science -- and I'm not even labelling it as such -- but this is an pretty good list of books from a marketing blog for non-profits so I do see it as being for…
jdupuis | December 6, 2011I'm doing a short presentation tomorrow on blogging for researchers as part of a day-long communications workshop for faculty here at York. And since a few months back I created a reading list for a social media presentation for grad students, I thought I'd expand that list in this post and add some more specifically blogging-related resources.
Enjoy!
Our Blogs, Ourselves (Paul Krugman)
The Power of Blogs in Forming New Fields of International Study
Should you enter the academic blogosphere? A discussion on whether scholars should take the time to write a blog about their work
Social media…
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…
tsmith | November 4, 2011I've written a few times about chickenpox parties. The first link refers to a magazine article describing the practice; the second, a few years later, about a Craigslist ad looking to hold such a party "at McDonald [sic] or some place with toys to play on."
Clearly, as chickenpox cases have become more rare in recent decades due to the success of the chickenpox vaccine, moving toward social media to find infections is the way to go. It allows people to find such cases and expose their immunologically naive children to a serious virus, just as easily as googling Jenny McCarthy Body Count."…
jdupuis | October 24, 2011For your reading and collection development pleasure!Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Academic institutions are facing a crisis in scholarly publishing at multiple levels: presses are stressed as never before, library budgets are squeezed, faculty are having difficulty publishing their work, and promotion and tenure committees are facing a range of new ways of working without a clear sense of how to understand and evaluate them. Planned Obsolescence is both a provocation to think more broadly about the academy's future and an…
jdupuis | October 19, 2011I've long been a believer in the power of blogs to drive and aggregate conversations at every level. Frivolous, for sure. But also serious and scholarly.
The rise of science blogs over the last few years has certainly demonstrated that. In librarianship as well, blogs are a powerful source of comment, theory and practical advice. I've always thought that the practical side of the library world was ripe to be the first field to truly leave journals behind and embrace blogging as a kind of replacement. It would be messy, sure, but it would be democratizing and re-invigorating.
The kinds of…
jdupuis | September 27, 2011Computer science and computer science education are a couple of my evergreen topics here on this blog, as you can see by perusing the computer science tag.
And of course, my trip to Harvard for LIAL this past summer perhaps has that institution on my radar a bit more than usual.
So how wonderful is it to find a way to connect those two things?
Along comes Hacking Stereotypes by Steve Kolowich.
It's about a program called HackHarvard which is part of a series of efforts at Harvard to encourage technology entrepreneurship: and increase enrollments in their basic computing course,
HackHarvard,…
jdupuis | August 29, 2011The 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…
jdupuis | August 26, 2011What with the latest round of departures seemingly immanent with the new "no pseudonymous bloggers" policy, I thought I'd revisit the list I did last year at about this time.
With a few exceptions, I'll call blogs dormant if there hasn't been a post in 2011.
2010 World Science Festival Blog (Dormant, 1 post in 2011)
A Few Things Ill Considered
Aardvarchaeology
A Vote for Science (dormant)
Aetiology
Art of Science Learning
bioephemera
Brazillion Thoughts (1 post in 2011)
Built on Facts
Brookhaven Bits & Bytes
Casaubon's Book
Class M
Common Knowledge (1 post in 2011)
Confessions of a…
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 19, 2011Trust me, I really tried to come up with a cool, funny title for this post.
Anyways...
We have a new reference assistant starting here next week. As somewhat typical for such a position, the new staff member has a science subject background rather than a library background. In this case, Maps/GIS.
So I thought it might be a good idea to gather together some resources for helping our new hire get acclimatised to reference work in an academic science & engineering library. After all, we're not born with the ability to do good reference interviews!
With the help of the fine folk in…
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 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 | July 2, 2011Libraryland is sometimes plagued with a civility problem.
We disagree but we want to be nice about it. But sometimes, being nice isn't a great way to express disagreement. Life and the world is messy and unkind and difficult. And sometimes our commitment to our ideas and passionate disagreements need to reflect that.
But the temptation for those in power -- those at whom the anger is often directed -- need to keep a lid on the very human anger and resentments that often boil over in what might seem like minor disagreements. It's hard to control those kinds of deep feelings and the best…