Category: ebooks • friday fun • science books
Well, not me, exactly, but...
Anyways, some ideas and experiences from someone out there in blogland who used to be a lawyer and somehow managed to think opening a bookstore was a good idea.
25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore
Here's a chunk from the middle:
19. If you're thinking of giving someone a religious book for their graduation, rethink. It will end up unread and in pristine condition at a used book store, sometimes with the fifty dollar bill still tucked inside. (And you're off and leafing once again).
20. If you don't have an AARP card, you're apparently too young to read westerns.
21. A surprising number of people will think you've read every book in the store and will keep pulling out volumes and asking you what this one is about. These are the people who leave without buying a book, so it's time to have some fun. Make up plots.
22. Even if you're a used bookstore, people will get huffy when you don't have the new release by James Patterson. They are the same people who will ask for a discount because a book looks like it's been read.
Yeah, I've always vaguely dreamed of opening a used bookstore someday. Sadly, I've grown rather fond of eating so I've never gotten around to it.
Posted by John Dupuis at 11:00 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: acad lib future • around the web • librarianship
Ever since I attended the Harvard Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians last summer, I've been watching for interesting posts on academic library leadership, or just academic leadership in general. This is some of what I've found.
Let me know in the comments what else I should be reading.
I may do a post at some point gathering together information on the Harvard Library reorganization, which is certainly related, so please feel free to add posts about that in the comments.
Posted by John Dupuis at 8:59 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: librarianship • personal • scio12 • scio13
A repost from February 9, 2006 from the old blog. it tells the story of how I became a science librarian. It's my small contribution to the #IAmScience meme on Twitter right now.
Basically it's about unconventional career paths in science. And this is mine.
===========================
Inspired by Adventures in Ethics and Science and Stranger Fruit...
So, how does a person go from being a software developer to being a science librarian?
- From a very young age, always read a lot of books, magazines, comic books and whatever else is lying around, mostly science fiction and fantasy but a lot of other stuff too.
- Also from a young age, related to an interest in science fiction, also read a lot and exhibit a lot of interest in science and math. Math is always the best subject at school, by far.
- Source of much pocket money during college and university -- tutoring math (especially geometry, always loved geometry) and other subjects at former high school.
- At middle of college career (college in Quebec where I grew up is a two year pre-university institution, equivalent to grades 12 and 13) in 1982 get a tour of a computing centre where a cousin worked and think, "hey, this is kinda cool."
- Take Fortran course in second year. Life is changed. Even do bonus extra assignment on matrix multiplications. Using computers to solve mathematical problems is a revelation (although this thread is sorta never followed up on).
- Apply to Computer Science at Concordia University. Pursue General Business Option and end up taking a lot of accounting, finance, marketing, etc, along with Fortran, Pascal, data structures, operating systems and all the rest. Do really well in stats and numerical analysis courses. Except for this one stats course we won't really talk about.
- Along with tutoring, get a job as Programmer on Duty at Concordia Computer Centre. Involves sitting at desk or roving around helping students debug their programs or get the systems to work. Challenging but lots of fun. Remarkably like reference desk, but never make the connection.
- After graduation (1986), get job at multinational insurance broker doing database development in FoxPro, later in Wang Pace and Powerbuilder. Work there for 12+ years. Best part about the job? Working mostly with the finance and accounting functions, helping people find the information they need to get their job done. Remarkably like research consultations, never make the connection. Like working with people and crunching premium and commission numbers.
- Eventually tire of the constant retraining to new technologies, fed up of unstable mergers/acquisitions situation at company for several years, contemplate leaving job and getting a new one. However, since in the middle of a large, multi-year project, don't want to leave until that is mostly put to bed.
- Have lots of time to think, "Do I want a new job or a new career?" Examples of librarians among friends and family. Research indicates that libraries seem to be rather computer-oriented these days. This is about 1996-97. Start to make some of those connections. Start to make plans.
- Quit job and go to Library School full time at McGill. This is fall 1998.
- Figure I'll end up working at a library vendor until, at the end of the first year, a student in the second year (Thanks, Larry!) recruits me to do a practicum placement at the Physical Sciences and Engineering Library. End up doing some volunteer reference work in the fall of the second year, 144 hour practicum in the winter and 3 week contract in the spring.
- Get acquainted with serving a scitech clientele as a science librarian and think, "Hey, this is great! I wouldn't mind doing this!" (Thanks, Darlene, Marika and Liz).
- Coincidentally, while looking for a job during the spring of second year, see a posting on notice board for a science librarian job at York University. Even though it's in Toronto and I'm in Montreal and we don't really want to move, apply anyway.
- Get job. Start in August 2000. Rest is history.
- Much sadness about old place of work.
- Really like buying books on numerical analysis and scientific computing.
You wouldn't believe how often I get asked why I switched from a techie career to librarianship. Now we all know. I encourage more stories.
Posted by John Dupuis at 2:59 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: acad lib future • friday fun
Ah, The Cronk News always turns a dull, freezing rainy, slushy, oh-my-god-climate-change-is-going-to-kill-us-all day into a warm fluffy puppy day.
University Library Enlists Collaborative Cheerleaders
When Sam Spivender, CEO of Temporarium University Library, noticed that no students collaborated in the new ten million dollar Collaborative Learning Center, he did what any rational library CEO would do: hired twenty collaborative cheerleaders, one for each collaborative pod, at a rate of fifteen hundred dollars per cheerleader per day.
*snip*
A few students caught in the cheer circle giggled, encouraging even the crying Dante student to crack a smile. The cheerleaders took the students by the hand, walked them back into the reading room, and sat them down at their pods, where handheld devices and laptops lay blinking. The cheer team monitored the students for the rest of the morning, tapping them with pompoms if they stopped talking or opened a book.
Who knew there was a dark side to the learning commons movement?
(And yes, we have a learning commons here in our Scott Library.)
Posted by John Dupuis at 10:19 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: culture of science • scholarly publishing • scio12 • scio13
Well, I survived.
Science Online 2012 took place this past weekend and it was a blast. There's already been quite a bit of discussion in blogs and on Twitter about how it went.
A very small selection of the them bits are:
But there's way more that I've missed, I'm sure.
One of the things the stellar organizing committee of Bora Zivkovic, Anton Zuiker and Karyn Traphagen are very good at is learning and evolving.
Hence, the feedback form goes out only a couple of days after the event!
So, I've listed below my answers to some of the questions on the form along with some other musings about the #scio12 experience.
- The decision to allow only two moderators per session worked out very well. It definitely reduced the amount of sageing on the stage and promoted a lot more discussion and dialogue.
- The session I co-moderated with my York colleague Tanya Noel went very well. It was on Undergraduate Education: Collaborating to Create the Next Generation of Open Scientists. We had a small but engaged crowd who were really interested in how to turn all the cool stuff we talk about at Science Online into action in the undergrad classroom.
- It's hard to pick one session as the most memorable, but I'll go with What to do when you're the go-to online outreach person at your institution, moderated by Miriam Goldstein and Jai Ranganathan. I'm choosing it mostly because it's what I find myself more and more involved in -- outreach for my institution, both to students but increasingly to internal stakeholders. This session had a lot of nuts and bolts talk about using online tools to raise your profile and your institutions. And there were a lot of people at the session in the same situation as I am, where they are some sort of accidental expert.
- There was one session I very consciously avoided, Making Book on e-Books, by Tabitha Powledge & Carl Zimmer. I avoided it mostly because I don't want to become some sort of professional ebook wet blanket guy, the role I sort of performed last year and at Science Online NYC this past September. This year, the panel was aimed at practical strategies, so I figured that should be the focus. Ironically, when I spoke to Carl about the panel later on he said he'd actually ended up being the voice of caution, raising the kinds of concerns that I've raised in the past. Life is strange sometimes.
- How could the conference get better? One idea that's traveled around Twitter is to have a hackathon, probably at the end of the conference. I think that would be a great idea.
Another thing that I really think is needed is to have some "pure unconference" slots in the programming, sessions that are proposed and organized at the conference itself. Perhaps a slot or two on Friday could be pitched & voted on Thursday. With the conference program wiki starting to take shape so far in advance every year, there's a danger that we'll just rehash the same few topics every year. This year an obvious topic that should have obsessed us on the program but somehow didn't was the whole Research Works Act/SOPA/PIPA controversy. The conference started the day after Wikipedia went black for day, after all. We should have had a chance to pitch a session on The Politics of Open Access or something like that. This also allows first-timers a chance to get in on the fun.
- What sessions, topics or activities would you like to propose for next year's conference? Yes, the #scio13 program wiki is already up.
I'm not sure if I have concrete ideas yet, but there are a few things that continue to interest me and that I might want to develop a bit more fully in collaboration with the Science Online community.
- Institutional & personal social media outreach are topics that are certainly obsessing me -- how to get more faculty and others blogging, on Twitter and engaged with telling their stories to the world. The Goldstein/Ranganathan session above could certainly be expanded in different directions and I think that would be a lot of fun.
- How to translate all the cool stuff we talk about at scio12, 13, etc, into the undergrad classroom is another topic that obsesses me. Obviously Tanya and I already touched on this but I think there's a lot more room to develop these ideas.
- The new media landscape as it affects core values of sharing, openness and preservation. This is somewhat about ebooks but is also about data, lab info, journals and other stuff. It's hard to know now what will make sense for a session in 2013 but I can certainly see wanting to do something on ebooks & the cultural commons again. This is the session that I didn't want Carl Zimmer's ebook session to become because I kept butting in as the ebook bad cop. This may be my uber-obsession and possibly the most worthwhile to develop into a session.
- The politics of openness is another idea, exploring where politics, publishing and money crash together. It's not pretty, but it needs to be explored. It makes me wish that there were more commercial and society publishers that sent people to Science Online.
As for what maybe we could talk a little bit less about? Maybe we can move beyond having so many sessions about blogging. And the blogger vs. journalist strain of that is getting particularly old.
- Random thoughts? I think it's really important to get people from the broader higher education world to Science Online. It would be great if reporters from places like The Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed added a conference like Science Online to their beat. Science Online is an amazing model for conferences in higher ed and beyond and I think the broader community could learn a lot from what we're doing. I think it would be valuable and useful for both sides Digital humanities THATCamps get a lot of press, but not Science Online? I think it's time.
Once again, a huge thanks to Bora Zivkovic, Anton Zuiker, Karyn Traphagen and all the other volunteers for yet another stellar conference.
Posted by John Dupuis at 9:25 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: friday fun
This seems a little too close to reality if you read a lot of what passes for higher ed reporting these days.
College Prez Scores with "No Huddle" Academics
So Clavell and other businessmen-turned-educational experts are looking at the records of college administrators across the country to see if they can inject a little competition into the sleepy business of handing out credentials to post-adolescent slackers. And one up-and-comer who has caught their eye is Norbert Duncan, President of Vermilion County Junior College here, who has successfully installed a "no-huddle" approach to academic life.
"What Duncan has done at Vermilion has revolutionized the educational game," says Bob Gamulski, national reporter for CollegePrezProspects.com. "He's able to score almost at will against other schools because he doesn't let his faculty get balled up in woolgathering."
Duncan's transformation came after a two-hour faculty senate session that got off track with a dispute over whether faculty senate by-laws took precedence over procedural rules for the meeting itself. "That's it," Duncan said, after Theodora Mangel-Wurzel, an adjunct writing instructor, raised a point of correct usage to a previously-raised point of order. "Everybody back to your classrooms--no more meetings!"
Posted by John Dupuis at 10:42 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Politics • acad lib future • culture of science • open access • social media
The 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 would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for ten such infringements within six months. The bill also gives immunity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement, while making liable for damages any copyright holder who knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement.
Proponents of the bill say it protects the intellectual property market and corresponding industry, jobs and revenue, and is necessary to bolster enforcement of copyright laws, especially against foreign websites. They cite examples such as Google's $500 million settlement with the Department of Justice for its role in a scheme to target U.S. consumers with ads to illegally import prescription drugs from Canadian pharmacies.
Opponents say that it violates the First Amendment, is Internet censorship, will cripple the Internet, and will threaten whistle-blowing and other free speech actions. Opponents have initiated a number of protest actions, including petition drives, boycotts of companies that support the legislation, and planned service blackouts by English Wikipedia and major Internet companies scheduled to coincide with the next Congressional hearing on the matter.
The protest movement against this bill is international in scope but, of course, centred on the US. Many websites have decided to go black today, January 18, in protest. These include sites such as BoingBoing and even Wikipedia, so you may not be able to verify what I've quoted both above and in the following paragraphs.
I'm firmly on the side of the opponents. This bill sends the wrong message about the future of the Internet -- that it should be closed and restrictive rather than open and free. And not free in the sense that nothing should cost anything or that Internet content companies should not be able to survive. Free as in a platform for sharing and creativity of all stripes.
Pretending that the last twenty years of fruitlessly fighting piracy in the courts was in any way effective is not useful for anyone. In fact it is counterproductive. Content organizations should instead be looking for ways to innovate and survive in the challenging new environment. That, of course, is easier said than done. It's not fair that these industries have been so thoroughly disrupted.
But, as Cory Doctorow said: The Information Revolution is not bloodless.
The disruption changes things in ways we love but it also changes things in ways we may hate.
I like what Barry Graubart says, Innovate don't legislate.
It's an oft-repeated tale. An industry gets disrupted by upstarts with new technologies and business models. The incumbents act quickly - turning to their legal team for advice. Litigate and legislate and the typical responses that come back.
The approach to SOPA and PIPA is hardly new. We've seen this play out many times in many industries, most notably in the music recording industry. But in each case, the approach ultimately fails. Sure, it may slow the erosion of your business, but in the end a broken business model is still broken. And all of those efforts to solve the problem through legislative and legal efforts simply distract companies from focusing on what they really need to do, and often alienate your customers.
*snip*
Now, let's look at what media companies have failed to do, while they've been fighting the legislation & litigation battles:
- They've failed to identify ways to leverage the changes in technology and media consumption to create new products for their core customers.
- They've failed (for the most part) to introduce compelling new mobile or tablet-based applications.
- They've largely failed to experiment with new business models, instead focusing on keeping the status quo.
- They've largely failed to embrace the technologies, tools and approaches (cloud, agile development) which the upstarts have used to displace them.
All in all, they've failed to create significant value-add that will give their customers no reason to ever consider the lesser, free alternatives and to reinforce the overall value of their brand.
Perhaps Graubart goes a bit too far and indulges in a bit of guru over statement, but overall he's on the right track.
It's not the job of the government to protect the profit margins of media companies as their businesses change and evolve. Businesses and business models have always changed and evolved. It's the job of the media companies to figure out how to make money in the new environment.
Now, why do I care? I'm a Canadian after all and this proposed legislation doesn't directly affect me.
Here's what Michael Geist has to say: Why Canadians Should Participate in the SOPA/PIPA Protest.
First, the SOPA provisions are designed to have an extra-territorial effect that manifests itself particularly strongly in Canada...
Second, Canadian businesses and websites could easily find themselves targeted by SOPA...
Third, millions of Canadians rely on the legitimate sites that are affected by the legislation...
Fourth, the U.S. intellectual property strategy has long been premised on exporting its rules to other countries, including Canada....
SOPA virtually guarantees that this will continue. Not only is it likely that the U.S. will begin to incorporate SOPA-like provisions into its IP demands, but SOPA makes it a matter of U.S. law to ensure that intellectual property protection is a significant component of U.S. foreign policy and grants more resources to U.S. embassies around the world to increase their involvement in foreign legal reform.
Posted by John Dupuis at 8:00 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: acad lib future • culture of science • open access • scholarly publishing • scio12
Sometimes good things happen to good people and this is certainly the case.
Michael Nielsen has been named a SPARC Innovator for 2012.
I don't usually do awards announcements here but I've made exceptions in the past for friends and I'm doing that again today.
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition has a program called the SPARC Innovators that twice a year recognizes innovations in the field.
The SPARC Innovator program is a new initiative that recognizes an individual, institution, or group that exemplifies SPARC principles by working to challenge the status quo in scholarly communication for the benefit of researchers, libraries, universities, and the public. SPARC Innovators are featured on the SPARC Web site semi-annually.
SPARC Innovators are named by the SPARC staff in consultation with the SPARC Steering Committee. Individuals can nominate their colleagues as potential SPARC Innovators at http://www.arl.org/sparc/innovator/nominate.shtml. Criteria include but are not limited to a commitment to:
- Reducing barriers to access, sharing, and use of scholarship, particularly in the scientific research field;
- Advancing the understanding and implementation of open access to research results;
- Working to create a balanced scholarly communication system;
- Use of technology to develop alternative publishing and communication solutions;
- Refusing to be constrained by the status quo and implementing new and creative ideas that are backed by research;
- Vision of the library as a focus for and/or supporter of change;
- The belief that individual actions can have a profound and positive impact in the scholarly communication field.
A SPARC Innovator can be an individual, a group of people, an institution, or another group that has been active in the areas listed above. Their actions may be broadly defined and may include online activity (i.e., postings on listservs and Web sites); on-campus programs and conferences; writing and editing (i.e., articles and books); promoting awareness and activism among others; and creating technologies and/or programs. There is no monetary award for SPARC Innovators.
For further information, please see the SPARC Web site at http://www.arl.org/sparc/.
I can't imagine a more fitting exemplar for the open science movement from the second half of 2011 and the beginning of 2012 that Michael Nielsen. With the publication of his book Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
and his long and arduous Open Science World Tour/Book Promotional Tour, it's a great way to recognize his contributions.
The SPARC site has a great profile, which I was delighted to contribute to. It's well worth checking out the whole thing.
Michael Nielsen tours like a rock star.
But the 37-year-old, Australian quantum physicist rejects the notion that he is a rock star of Open Science. "There are many, many people who are doing this, as it should be," says Nielsen, listing other thinkers in the field. "It's not a concept that anybody owns. It goes back to the 17th century." For real change to happen in the culture of science, he says, it will take more than one or a few people; it will take thousands working together.
While Nielsen is not alone in promoting the open sharing of data and research to advance science, he has been in the spotlight this fall as an advocate for the cause. The Open Society Foundations supported sending him on an awareness-raising tour on Open Science. In three months, Nielsen did 33 talks in 17 cities - from small gatherings of high school students in Lithuania to a 1,000-plus audience in Canada. (The recording on ted.com of his presentation at TEDxWaterloo has received more than 150,000 hits.)
*snip*
"What Michael has done is taken the time to think deeply and really sort out what the major issues are that need to be considered - and what are the sidetracks," says Cameron Neylon, a biochemist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, England, whose path has crossed with Nielsen in open-access advocacy. "He's very much a synthesizer and integrator of ideas and concepts. He can identify trends and understand the larger context that they fit into."
Nielsen is able to describe and articulate complex issues through stories in a way that opens people's minds and leads important discussions, says Neylon. "He's provided a level of intellectual rigor and framework that has allowed the community to move rapidly from a disparate group of individuals and institutions through to where there is a clear understanding of what the position are," he says. "He's really sharpened the message."
I interviewed Michael about his new book a little while back.
Posted by John Dupuis at 3:45 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
