Recently, all about me.

A bit of self-promotion. Forgive me. I'll be brief.

  • My TAIGA fisking post from a while back is featured prominently in Walt Crawford's most recent Cites & Insights (March 2010) (pdf, html) with quite a bit of value-added comment from Walt on TAIGA, the Darien Statements and other topics. Thanks, Walt.
  • I'm flattered to be mentioned in Graham Lavender's presentation at the recent Web2.You conference in Montreal. His very fine presentation was on Blogs and Twitter for Individuals and Institutions. No doubt referring to my 2008 presentation at Web2.You, on slide 3 he mentions that "Everything I know about blogging I learned from John Dupuis." An exaggeration to be sure, but I appreciate the thought. Thanks!
  • For those of you attending the Ontario Library Association Super Conference 2010 next week, Janice Mutz and I will be partially reprising my 2008 OLA presentation on My Job in 10 Years. Janice and I met after that presentation and started a dialogue about redoing and re-imagining the session as something less of a presentation and more of a unconference-y conversation. And that's what we're aiming for this time around and we've tried to reflect that in the title of the session -- Our Job in 10 Years.

    We're up on Thursday, February 25th at 9:05 am.

    Our Job in 10 Years: The future of academic libraries

    John Dupuis, Science Librarian, York University Libraries;
    Janice Mutz, Information Literacy Librarian, Chancellor Paterson Library, Lakehead University

    Time to look into those crystal balls! The world is changing, libraries are changing, students are changing. This volatile environment is challenging academic librarians to evolve our practice in unexpected ways. The best way to prepare for change is to think about it, discuss it, and maybe (this is a big maybe!), anticipate the way things might change. This presentation is just such an exercise. Join this panel of front-line academic librarians as we explore these issues and come prepared to give us your two cents worth!

    Convenor: Sarah Forbes, University of Toronto Scarborough

    (BTW, thanks, Bruce, for the kind words!)

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You're welcome. Your fisking made a great backbone for a piece I'm reasonably proud of. (Hmm. As much as I generally dislike neologisms, I took to "fisking" right away. Probably a deep personality defect.)

The C&I piece on TAIGA is very good and much appreciated. It was nice to see so plainly that I wasn't the only one to react negatively to it.

What I find interesting nearly a year later is re-reading my own post. I almost never do angry posts like that -- probably only a small handful in 7+ years -- so it takes a lot to get me going.

Thanks for mentioning me in this post. :-)

I do have a follow up question from today's OLA session. You suggested that librarians should seek out non-library conferences. I can certainly see some reasons for this. Would you suggest any in particular? Two ideas suggest themselves to me; either attend something purely for inspiration and ideas (e.g. TED) or something related to a discipline you support (e.g. if you are a history librarian, then attend a history conference).

Bruce, you're welcome.

As to which non-library conferences to go to, I would mostly suggest discipline-related ones for subject librarians. I think it's really important to keep in touch with the people we support and to understand how they do their work. Aside from that, tech conferences, education, social media...whatever seems to make sense in your context.