June 16, 2010
Last week I was at the Canadian Engineering Education Association Inaugural Conference in Kingston. It was a great conference and a very auspicious beginning for this very new organization. I have a summary post in the works which I hope to have up fairly soon.
I presented the above titled paper…
June 13, 2010
And that's Nature as in Nature Publishing Group rather than the narrative strategy.
I missed the story when it broke earlier this week in The Chronicle -- I was attending the absolutely fantastic Canadian Engineering Education Association conference in Kingston from Monday to Wednesday. And when I…
June 11, 2010
Priceless, just priceless.
PALO ALTO, CA--All 1,472 employees of Facebook, Inc. reportedly burst out in uncontrollable laughter Wednesday following Albuquerque resident Jason Herrick's attempts to protect his personal information from exploitation on the social-networking site. "Look, he's clicking…
June 4, 2010
What can I say, The Cronk is my new Internet crush. I think I might be stalking them. But in a good way.
In any case, check this out: Students Blame Innovative Incentive Program for Tricking Them into Learning
Psychology professor Edgar Stevens is a popular topic of conversation at Farmington…
June 3, 2010
A cautionary tale from Cory Doctorow in his most recent Locus column, Persistence Pays Parasites.
My friend Katherine Myronuk once told me, "All complex ecosystems have parasites." She was talking about spam and malware (these days they're often the same thing) and other undesirable critters on the…
May 31, 2010
For your reading and collection development pleasure:
137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession by Arthur I. Miller
"The history is fascinating, as are the insights into the personalities of these great thinkers."--New Scientist Is there a number at the root of the universe? A…
May 28, 2010
I've been slowly dipping my toes into the manga universe, trying to expand my comics/graphic novel horizon. Moyasimon, for example -- the 1st volume was very good. Beyond that, I've only read a couple of titles here and there.
Of course, like any good librarian I've been looking for lists to…
May 27, 2010
As I mentioned the other day, the most recent issue of ISTL is full of very fine articles.
The one that really caught my eye is the Viewpoints article Are A & I Services in a Death Spiral? by Valerie Tucci. It echoes a lot of the themes that I first wrote about way back in December 2006 --…
May 25, 2010
Another terrific issue. I'm going to list everything but the book & database reviews & reports so as not to clutter the post too much.
Five Voices, Two Perspectives: Integrating Student Librarians into a Science and Engineering Library by Eugene Barsky, Aleteia Greenwood, Samantha Sinanan…
May 21, 2010
Funniest. Onion. Article. Ever.
New Social Networking Site Changing The Way Oh, Christ, Forget It: Let Someone Else Report On This Bullshit
Virtually every line is laugh-out-loud funny.
According to sources we feel really, really sorry for, Foursquare works by allowing users to "check in" from…
May 19, 2010
Here's a pretty exciting opportunity at my institution. Although not a science library position per se, there will be ample opportunity to work with science and engineering faculty and students.
Position Rank: Full Time Tenure Stream - Assistant Librarian
Discipline/Field: GIS and Map Librarian…
May 18, 2010
Yes, it was May 18, 2009 that I opened a new chapter in Confessions of a Science Librarian history.
One year on Scienceblogs -- it's been a fantastic experience, one that I'm looking forward to continuing for the foreseeable future.
Now, where's the cake?
May 17, 2010
Yesterday was a very sad day in the hard rock/heavy metal community as Rainbow/Black Sabbath/Dio/Heaven & Hell vocalist Ronnie James Dio died at the age of 67.
I've been a big fan of Ronnie James Dio ever since way back in 1980 I heard the song Neon Knights, the first big song he did with…
May 14, 2010
The Cronk of Higher Education is seriously my new very best friend. I work on a very large commuter campus and let's just say this very definitely resonated with me. I also take public transit to work every day through a very crowded and congested city, with my commute time varying from 60-90…
May 13, 2010
By some strange coincidence given yesterday's post, this post on Raising your internal profile as an academic liaison librarian by Emma Woods came across my Twitter feed this morning.
As part of a task and ï¬nish group on internal marketing of academic liaison librarians at the University of…
May 12, 2010
Or is that the inherent insularity of academic culture in general?
Joshua Kim has some great observations (in context of a review of This Book is Overdue) (Amazon) about the great chasm of misunderstanding between the culture of the academic library and the broader academic culture.
As academia…
May 11, 2010
I have a few conferences coming up and I thought I'd share my schedule just in case any of you out there in sciencelibrarianblogland will also be attending.
I'll list them in order, along with whatever I'll be presenting.
BookCamp Toronto, May 15, Toronto
9:30: eBooks in Education and Academia --…
May 7, 2010
Ah, The Onion. A true repository of snark and snideitude
But as the winter lingered, Spirit began producing thousands of pages of sometimes rambling and dubious data, ranging from complaints that the Martian surface was made up almost entirely of the same basalt, to long-winded rants questioning…
May 5, 2010
It's been quite a long while since I've done one of these. Here are some recently noticed books that look interesting from either a collection development or a professional development point of view.
Fans, Friends And Followers: Building An Audience And A Creative Career In The Digital Age by…
May 4, 2010
That's the title of the short article I have in our most recent York Libraries Faculty Newsletter. It's a rejigged version for faculty of the two posts I did a while back on the blog I use for IL sessions, here and here. I'll be doing a more formal report on the IL blog at an upcoming conference…
April 30, 2010
From The Cronk of Higher Education, New First Year Experience Class: How To Not Be An Asshole, this is very funny.
The six-week class is comprised of five modules:
So You're Drunk: A Guide To Quietly Stumbling Home
Street Signs Are Not Dorm Room Decorations
Streaking: A Fast-Track To Suspension…
April 28, 2010
A great two-part series on great computing museums from the last few issues of Communications of the ACM (here and here).
The museums they profile are:
The Computer History Museum
The Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum
The Science Museum in London
The Deutches Museum
U.S. National Museum of American…
April 23, 2010
This one's on Cracked.com and, unusually for them, is Safe for Work.
Now, I'm down with making education more interactive, social, customizable, multitasking, multimedia and web-enabled and all that, but for every good thing there are potential downsides. And Cracked's article nicely sums up some…
April 22, 2010
A small selection from some tables of content from a few recent journals and proceedings. These will require subscription access to the ACM Digital Library.
Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
Connecting k-16 curriculum & policy: making computer science engaging, accessible, and…
April 20, 2010
That's the topic for the most recent Schubmehl-Prein Prize for Best Essay on Social Impact of Computing.
The Schubmehl-Prein Prize for best analysis of the social impact of a particular aspect of computing technology will be awarded to a student who is a high school junior in academic year 2009-…
April 16, 2010
If you love sword & sorcery books and stories (and who doesn't!), SF Signal has one of their Mind Meld features in which they ask a bunch of writers and editors to name their favourites of the genre.
Here's a taste:
Lou Anders
"Ill met in Lankhmar" tops any list. How could it not? Fafhrd and…
April 15, 2010
A month or so ago I posted on Scholarly Societies: Why Bother?, basically on the challenges that scholarly societies face in the digital age. I got a few good comments, getting a nice discussion going.
I also posed a few questions directly to scholarly societies but unfortunately didn't get any…
April 14, 2010
From Twitter, here's the announcement:
Have you ever sent out a "tweet" on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress.
That's right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter's inception in March 2006, will be…
April 14, 2010
This is one of those books that I just seemed to argue with constantly while I was reading it. You know, "Hey, you, book, you're just plain wrong about this!"
But, as much as I argued with it, as much as I wanted all of the main points to be wrong, as much as I disagreed with many of the details,…
April 13, 2010
There's a massive libraryland industry organized around figuring out what students want from us in terms of space, collections, services, etc. We survey, observe and focus group them to death. And that's great and incredibly valuable. But sometimes I think we might have a tendency to see what we…
