November 3, 2010
For your reading and collection development pleasure. It's been so long since I last did one of these listings, I actually have another one coming up in a day or so.
Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia by Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. (ISBN-13: 978-0262014472)
Wikipedia, the online…
October 31, 2010
Canadian horror/dark fantasy writer Kelley Armstrong has a nice list of 10 favourite horror novels in a recent issue of the Globe and Mail.
Here it is:
The Shining by Stephen King
The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
The Turn of The Screw by Henry James
The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty…
October 29, 2010
A second Halloween-related post, with the happy day coming up this weekend. My "give a scary book" post came on Monday.
Anyways, a recent post on Horrornews.net really resonated with me: Growing up as a horror fan. Mostly because I too grew up a huge horror fan, mostly watching cheesy old Hammer…
October 27, 2010
A 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…
October 26, 2010
Slice and Scan
After Launching Search and Discovery, Who Is Mission Control?
The smart scholar's publication-venue heuristics; or, how to use open access to advance your career
Piracy trumps obscurity again
Open to All: Preserving Library Values in a Digital World
Proposing a Taxonomy of Social…
October 25, 2010
You know, there just aren't enough useless holiday excuses to give books to people.
Giving books as presents has to be one of my all-time favourite things to do in life -- especially the opportunity to give books to my family!
So, it seems that Neil Gaiman has a really, really good idea.
I…
October 22, 2010
As I mentioned a few days ago, the kind librarians of Brock University in St. Catherines, ON invited me to give a talk as part of their Open Access Week suite of events.
I've included my slides for the presentation below. There was a small but engaged group of mostly librarians that turned up.…
October 22, 2010
Ah, The Cronk News. Always good for a laugh at academia's expense!
I like this one from a few weeks ago, an amusing take on the whole town vs. gown issue: Townies Make Preemptive Strike On College
Town/Gown relations in Norwich, CT deteriorated in record time this year when students returned to…
October 21, 2010
Ok, 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…
October 20, 2010
The False Security of Technology? What Might We Be Missing?
Reading Instrumentally
Why blogging still matters
Outsourcing Plus (Partnering to provide more online ed choices)
Long Road to Open Access
The Down-side of Technology? On Class Time
Wikimedia: Power, Leadership, and Movement Roles
Gaming…
October 18, 2010
The kind librarians at Brock University in St. Catherines, Ontario have invited me to help them celebrate Open Access Week!
Their rather impressive lineup of OA Week events (and I'm not just saying this because I'm involved, believe me) is here.
My part is a talk I'm giving on Wednesday:
Wednesday…
October 18, 2010
It'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,…
October 15, 2010
A really interesting article on Tor.com from this past August by Ryan Britt, A Fondness for Antiques: The Future of Books According to Science Fiction.
In the past few years, media pundits and tech experts have been abuzz with variations on the question: "what is the future of the book?" Luckily,…
October 15, 2010
The latest Cites & Insights (v10i11) is out and in it Walt Crawford explores some of the recent developments in the blogging landscape in a section called The Zeitgeist: Blogging Groups and Ethics. It's a very good overview and analysis of what's going on both in the science and librarian…
October 12, 2010
STEM Education Has Little to Do With Flowers
When an imploring librarian is not enough
Investments in the Term Economy
Reference Management with the iPad
Reference Management meets Web 2.0
Library mobile apps vs web apps - Some analysis
Conversing in a Cyberspace Community: The Growth of HPS (…
October 8, 2010
Ah, The Onion. I haven't used them in a while for my Friday Fun and it was feeling like it was way overdue.
As usual, classic stuff: Historians Admit To Inventing Ancient Greeks:
A group of leading historians held a press conference Monday at the National Geographic Society to announce they had "…
October 6, 2010
This graphic novel series is simply amazing. It's some of the best graphic pure storytelling I've come across in a very long time -- I just can't recommend it enough. The story is perfectly paced: slow when it needs to be but mostly taut and exciting, pulling you from episode to episode like a…
October 6, 2010
The Genius of the Tinkerer: The secret to innovation is combining odds and ends
A Call for Open Textbooks
Self-archiving diary by Peter Suber
So what does a science librarian DO?
Book Futures: A Crowdsourced Thought Experiment
Frontiers, F1000, PLoS One, Mendeley et al., brace yourselves
Social…
October 5, 2010
This year's Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing took place this past week in Atlanta, GA.
I thought I'd gather together some small part of the blog posts I've been seeing floating around the Internets on this wonderful event.
Opening Session of Grace Hopper Conference - 2010
Dancing…
October 4, 2010
Ebooks Don't Cannibalize Print, People Do
The Why, When, Where, How of publishing data
Libraries Make it Personal
Make The Revolution (Anil Dash on social media & social movements)
Searching For Better Research Habits
Digitizing the Personal Library
Good Freely Available Textbooks on Machine…
October 1, 2010
You can always tell it's Nobel season -- because that's when the Ig Nobel prizes are announced!
The 2010 laureates have been announced. Here are some "highlights:"
ENGINEERING PRIZE: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of…
September 28, 2010
Your Hate Mail Will be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008 is a collection of John Scalzi's favourite posts from the first decade of his blog's existence. And it's quite a collection too -- of course one that is best taken in short doses, one or two posts per day over a longish period of time…
September 27, 2010
A photo tour of the Large Hadron Collider
Does Every Question Matter?
An American In Paris Says Au Revoir To His Laptop
U of Calgary Library Video Game Collection rocks Twitter! and Video game centre installed on campus
Accessibility isn't a "feature": Responding to a drive-by comment
A…
September 24, 2010
I'm a life-long fan of science fiction, mostly as a reader but occasionally as a book reviewer. Way back, when dinosaurs walked the earth, I even took a couple of science fiction literature classes.
And, as readers of this blog well know, I love nothing better than a good list of books.
So…
September 24, 2010
It's time for the annual Mocking of the Thomson Reuters session.
They're at it again.
Can the winners of the Nobel Prize be correctly predicted? Since 1989, Thomson Reuters has developed a list of likely winners in medicine, chemistry, physics, and economics. Those chosen are named Thomson…
September 22, 2010
Almost Halfway There: an Analysis of the Open Access Behaviors of Academic Librarians
The eReaders Bill of Rights (the Kobo Perspective)
Plagiarism and essay mills
Do Students Listen to Others' Views?
Bad at Math?
Visualizing the Science Blogosphere (and Open-Sourcing It)
Writing: Find the Time or…
September 17, 2010
Having started my working life as a software developer, I know a bit about epic bugs. Let's just say I've had my share and leave it at that. At very least, I can say I never caused any vehicles to crash or any companies to fail.
So, from ComputerWorld, Epic failures: 11 infamous software bugs.…
September 16, 2010
12 Rules for New (Academic) Administrators
The Facebook Reckoning
Kickin' it old-school: The rise of the mature student
In the context of web context: How to check out any Web page
Value of Academic Libraries Report
SIMCITY by Neil Gaiman
On open data and disruptive innovation
Data mash-ups and the…
September 15, 2010
I know I'm sure as hell having a hard time keeping up with all the comings and goings. If anything, the impression is probably that the lights are practically out and we're all singing Old Lang Syne. This, of course, is far from the case. The lights are still on, we're most of us blogging away.…
September 15, 2010
From 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…
