jdupuis | July 17, 2009Those of you with long memories may recall that I gave a presentation at the Ontario Library Association conference in 2008 based on the My Job in 10 years blog posts.
Shortly after that presentation, I was approached by Cecile Farnum, the OCULA divisional editor for the OLA magazine Access about writing the presentation as an article. To make a long story short, it's just been published in the Summer 2009 issue!
Of course, I've deposited a scanned version of the article in our IR here, with the scanned version here and my slightly longer original here. I came in a little longer than the…
jdupuis | July 16, 2009This is a great looking afternoon here in Toronto on Wednesday July 29th, organized by Greg Wilson and taking place at the MaRS Centre: Science 2.0: What every scientist needs to know about how the web is changing the way they work.
The event is free, but registration is required. Here's an outline of the presentations:
Titus Brown: Choosing Infrastructure and Testing Tools for Scientific Software Projects
Cameron Neylon: A Web Native Research Record: Applying the Best of the Web to the Lab Notebook
Michael Nielsen: Doing Science in the Open: How Online Tools are Changing Scientific…
jdupuis | July 13, 2009Between the fact that I'm still not completely recovered from my epically awful day last Friday and the blogging lethargy that always comes as my summer blogging break approaches, all the blogging-related brain cells I have left are completely fried.
Fortunately, Chad comes to the rescue with a great idea!
I'll run this more or less the same way he's doing it:
Ask me any relatively straight forward question here in the comments and I'll answer it either in the comments or in it's own post.
Think questions that I could answer in a paragraph or so.
No topic restrictions -- library stuff, pop…
jdupuis | July 10, 2009Bookgasm is one of my favourite book blogs, if not THE favourite. They have a regular feature by Bruce Grossman called, rather luridly, Bullets, Broads, Blackmail & Bombs which gives brief reviews and descriptions of tons of cheesy old paperback originals: mostly adventure, noir, hardboiled, detective. A lot of the stuff he talks about is pretty bad, but Grossman also reviews a lot of classic pulp by Donald Westlake, John D. Macdonald, Donald Hamilton, Eric Ambler and tons of others. Even when the reading is grim, Grossman keeps his commentary lively and entertaining.
Some recent…
jdupuis | July 7, 2009Yes, as promised I'm going to start workshopping the book I'm working on: My Job in 10 Years: The Future of Academic Librarianship. (Note title tweak.)
First of all, this is all just provisional; I'm at a point where I need to stop tinkering if I just going to get something out the door. Some parts are over-developed for an outline, others are under-developed.
I'm still thinking bout the book structurally. I'm also still thinking about what kinds of topic areas belong in or out. I've been picking nits with the TOC for a while now, moving bits here and there, and that probably won't stop,…
jdupuis | July 3, 2009Via BoingBoing, BBG and Make, Paul Fryer makes some pretty cool chess sets.
Links to the pics on the Gallery site are here, here, here, here.
jdupuis | July 2, 2009Via Lance Fortnow's Twitter post, it's interesting to see Communications of the ACM editor Moshe Y. Vardi on Open Access:
First, a point of precision. Open-access experts distinguish between "Gold OA," described earlier, and "Green OA," which allows for open access self-archiving of material (deposit by authors) that may have been published as non-open access. ACM Copyright Policy allows for self-archiving, so ACM is a Green-OA publisher. Still, why doesn't ACM become a Gold-OA publisher?
*snip*
As for ACM's stand on the open-access issue, I'd describe it as "clopen," somewhere between open…
jdupuis | June 29, 2009One fall to the finish, no count-outs, no disqualifications, for the World Heavyweight Guru Championship of the World. Two gurus locked inside a steel cage.
Malcolm "Outlier" Gladwell reviews Chris "Long Tail" Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, in the New Yorker.
There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological…
jdupuis | June 29, 2009Simon Owens interviews Scott Rosenberg over at Bloggasm.
Lately, there has been no shortage of journalists that have announced- usually as a form of link bait -- the "death of blogging" as social news and microblogging continue to grow in market share, but Rosenberg's book is a tribute to the medium's still-immense power as we approach the end of the decade. He noted that long before Twitter existed there were bloggers that were writing Twitter-like posts, so the launch of the microblogging site merely carved out a niche for those kinds of bloggers, leaving the traditional blogging platform…
jdupuis | June 26, 2009Digital Natives will move markets and transform industries, education, and global politics. the changes they bring about as they move into the workforce could have an immendsely positive effect on the world we live in. By and large, the digital revolution has already made this world a better place. And Digital Natives have every chance of propelling society further forward in myriad ways -- if we let them. (p. 7)
Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser is a fine and useful book. Every page is brimming with facts and analysis…
jdupuis | June 26, 2009Rush on over to Feminist SF -- The Blog and read this very funny -- and thought-provoking, to boot -- post: How to know if you're reading a bad book.
Here's a couple of the short ones:
5. Does anyone lurk? If someone's lurking, you might be reading a Bad Book.
11. Does the book begin with some sort of random sex scene meant to show you how desirable / virile one of the protags is because if you don't know about his / her addictive sexuality you won't understand why they're supposed to be attractive given their lack of any other character traits of note? If so, you might be reading a Bad Book…
jdupuis | June 24, 2009A thought experiment.
It all started with this Ray Bradbury quote in the New York Times:
"Libraries raised me," Mr. Bradbury said. "I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."
I've bolded the chunk that has resonated most strongly around the Internet, especially Twitter where it was widely tweeted and retweeted.
The tweeter that most piqued my interest was…
jdupuis | June 22, 2009Although I didn't blog about it at all (I did Twitter and Friendfeed about it a bit), many of you are probably aware that my work place, York University (Wikipedia) in Toronto, had a very difficulty time this past academic year with a strike, student protests and unrest as well as some disturbing on-campus violence. While trying, we did all get through it pretty well and things seem to be getting back on track. Enrollment will be down a bit in many departments come September, but the longer term prospects are very good.
York is still a very good place to work and go to school.
For those…
jdupuis | June 22, 2009Yesterday was Father's Day, of course, always a fun occasion for us dads. I'm generally not a huge fan of fake holidays but I usually find a way to make peace with them if they're all about presents for me.
In any case, I thought I'd share my take for this year as I think at least some of the items I received have a broader interest. It's also worth noting that in my family we usually take an attitude of enlightened self-interest for fake holiday gift giving -- in other words, the giver is allowed to give something they themselves would be interested in. We've come to calling that practice…
jdupuis | June 19, 2009This is the third in my informal trilogy on engaging in social media. The first two are here and here.
I left off last time with this sentiment:
It seems to me that one possibility if we want to engage these groups, is that we have to figure out where they already are and how we can fit into and improve that rather than try and build something completely new that we'll then try and entice everyone to join.
Where do we go from here? Maybe if the communities we build were more accepting, civil and inclusive, that would be a start.
Well, I like what Clay Shirky said recently about how our…
jdupuis | June 19, 2009From McSweeny's, this is both very funny and very poignant. A working day's worth of tweets from a public librarian.
Boy wants book on how to make paper airplanes. I challenge him to a paper airplane contest.
about 3 hours ago from web
*snip*
Ask patron not to talk on their cell phone. They explain that the cell phone designated area is too loud.
about 8 hours ago from web
These are an actual day's worth or tweets from public librarian Scott Douglas, author of Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian. I've just subscribed to the Twitter feed.
(Via Rachel Walden.)
jdupuis | June 18, 2009Some highlights from the IEEE's very fine Annals of the History of Computing, v31i2. You'll need a subscription to the magazine to access it on the IEEE's site.
Anecdotes: Prototype Fragments from Babbage's First Difference Engine by Roegel, Denis
Biographies: Tom Kilburn: A Pioneer of Computer Design by Anderson, David P.
Think Piece: Preserving Records of the Past, Today by Cortada, James W
IBM France La Gaude Laboratory Contributions to Telecommunications: Part 1 and Part 2 by Bastian, Michel; Boisseau, Marc; Cohendet, et al.
jdupuis | June 17, 2009Ok, that's a slight exaggeration. It isn't built yet.
But if York space scientists and engineers have anything to say about it, it sure will be.
Check it out from our internal newsletter, Space elevator designed at York University would reach 20 km above Earth:
"For decades, scientists have been grappling to find a more efficient means of getting payloads into space," says Brendan Quine (right), professor of space physics and engineering in York's Faculty of Science & Engineering, who is heading the project. A paper detailing the design was recently published in the journal Acta…
jdupuis | June 16, 2009Some highlights from the IEEE's very fine Technology and Society Magazine, v29i2. You'll need a subscription to the magazine to access it on the IEEE's site.
Those in academic settings might want to especially take a look at Communication technology, emergency alerts, and campus safety.
Innovation as energy policy for the world [Policy Perspective] by Andrews, C.J.
Wireless nomad: Pioneer in an urban residential environment by Wong, M.A.
K-Net and Canadian Aboriginal communities by Fiser, A.; Clement, A.
Communication technology, emergency alerts, and campus safety by Gow, G.A.; Mcgee, T.;…
jdupuis | June 13, 2009It's been quite a long time since I did one of these posts, but as the summer reading season approaches I thought I'd highlight a few interesting items that are coming out soon.
Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Amazon.ca)
In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far…