jdupuis | March 18, 2011Yeah, we've all had this kind of week.
Thanks to The Cronk for humourously saving my soul this week: University Performs Fastest Soulectomy on Record.
Doctors have finally verified claims that the College of Madison performed the fastest soulectomy in higher education history.
"We couldn't believe the soulectomy could be completed in less than two days," said Dr. Rachel O'Quinn. "But all evidence points to verification."
*snip*
"The department was far more dysfunctional than Dr. Mecum anticipated and she had to act fast," explained the medical examiners. "The women professors in her…
jdupuis | March 17, 2011In all of our organizations fostering innovation is an important goal. But how do you turn the innovation fawcett on? Somehow it seems so much easier to turn it off.
Of course, it's all about institutional culture. The way problems and solutions are framed. The way management/leadership/peer culture frames, encourages and rewards ideas.
Sometimes it just the way we ask questions about new ideas.
A nice articles from Tony Golsby-Smith at the Harvard Business Review blog site: Three Questions that Will Kill Innovation.
They're mostly aimed at commercial organizations but can easily be re-…
jdupuis | March 17, 2011For my own purposes I've been collecting various ebook-related posts for a while now and in particular the whole HarperCollins/library/ebook/Overdrive thing is a valuable source of lots of speculation and information. What I have below no doubt only represents a fairly small percentage of the total number of posts and articles about the issue.
My attention over the last few weeks has been a bit inconsistent too say the least so I'm sure I've missed a bunch of important posts. Please let me know in the comments about ones I should include. And I encourage people not to be modest and to let…
jdupuis | March 16, 2011David Weinberger of Everything Is Miscellaneous">Everything is Miscellaneous (review) fame is working on a new book.
It's going to be called Too Big to Know and over the last year or two he's blogged quite a bit of the thought processes that have gone into the writing of the book.
Here's a brief sort-of description of what the book's going to be about from way back in December 2009:
The opening looks at the history of information overload, going back to the book Future Shock, and pointing to the coining of "sensory overload" in 1950. I look at how pathetically small was the amount of info…
jdupuis | March 14, 2011Here's a hint. Never, ever, ever put the following sentence in any non-fiction book you are writing:
This is dull stuff. (p. 165)
Testify!
An object lesson on non-success for popular science books to compare and contrast with an object lesson for success in popular science books.
But, to be fair, the book under consideration isn't really a popular science book. J.L. Heilbron's new Galileo is a scholarly scientific biography of Galileo and as such shouldn't really be compared to popular science books.
On the other hand, it was a topic I expected to really enjoy but I did end up struggling…
jdupuis | March 13, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet, is from July 10, 2008.
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Another cautionary book about the effect of the Internet on our lives, this one concentrating on the effect that…
jdupuis | March 12, 2011As usual, a bunch of great new articles from the most recent ISTL!
Five Years Later: Predicting Student Use of Journals in a New Water Resources Graduate Program by Andrea A. Wirth and Margaret Mellinger, Oregon State University
Seeing the Forest of Information for the Trees of Papers: An Information Literacy Case Study in a Geography/Geology Class by Linda Blake and Tim Warner, West Virginia University
Local Citation Analysis of Graduate Biology Theses: Collection Development Implications by Laura Newton Miller, Carleton University
Career Motivations of the Scientist-Turned-Librarian: A…
jdupuis | March 11, 2011Please, can we just move on.
From The Onion, Responsible, Thoughtful Nation Decides To Ignore Ch**lie Sh**n Situation.
Calling the situation "none of our business" and "not worth a second of our time, quite frankly," a responsible and thoughtful U.S. populace uniformly decided this week to ignore Ch**lie Sh**n's recent outbursts, saying they had far more important things to focus on than a sitcom actor's personal troubles..."Not only have I chosen to ignore Mr. Sheen, but thankfully so has the American media, which has once again shown journalistic decency by only reporting the news that…
jdupuis | March 10, 2011If you're in the Greater Toronto Area next Tuesday, please drop by and see Michael talk. I'm thrilled that my library is co-sponsoring such a fantastic event!
Presented by:
Janusz A. Kozinski - Dean, Faculty of Science and Engineering
The Division of Natural Science
The Steacie Science and Engineering Library
Location: Paul A. Delaney Gallery, 320 Bethune College
Date: Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Time: 12:30 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
Refreshments will be served courtesy of Steacie Science and Engineering Library
Prof. Nielsen will describe an evolution in how scientific discoveries are made driven by…
jdupuis | March 10, 2011A terrific new opportunity at my institution. I'm not in the reporting department or on the search committee, but I can answer general questions about York and the environment. My email is jdupuis at yorku dot ca.
Position Rank: Full Time Tenure Stream - Assistant Librarian
Discipline/Field: Digital Humanities Librarian
Home Faculty: Libraries
Home Department/Area/Division: Scott Library
Affiliation/Union: YUFA
Position Start Date: August 1, 2011
Digital Humanities Librarian (Continuing Appointment)
Scott Reference Department
York University Libraries seeks a creative, motivated, innovative…
jdupuis | March 9, 2011This is about the symposium upcoming at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, The Future of the Academic Library. The symposium is co-presented by Library Journal and McMaster.
It was announced on Twitter this past Sunday and there was a bit of a Twitter-storm about the conference as quite a few people (myself included) thought the program participants a bit problematic, to say the least.
But I'll let my University of Windsor colleague Mita Willliams take it from here. With her permission, I'm reposting the letter she wrote yesterday to President Deane.
I am writing this letter to you…
jdupuis | March 7, 2011And I mean zombie vampire in the best way, as a comment on how hard it seems to be to kill my Stealth Librarianship Manifesto. It's even been translated into French! (Merci, Marléne!)
For a post I mostly wrote in an hour of white hot typing from midnight to 1 a.m. some weeknight when I should have been sleeping it sure has some legs.
There have been three posts about the manifesto fairly recently, mostly more critical than complimentary but with a lot of input that I really value.
Let's take a look.
Identity crisis? No. Or why I think we need to move beyond "stealth librarianship." by…
jdupuis | March 4, 2011Over on the Tor.com blog, mysterious librarian blogger RuthX tells us the story of how she created a free ebook (downloaded!) with all the public domain stories that were published by noted horror author H.P. Lovecraft.
In the course of compiling the book, she was able to analyze the word usage patterns of the famously overwrought and verbose Lovecraft. And it's hysterically predictable what she came up with.
The post on the Tor blog is here: H.P. Lovecraft's 10 Favorite Words and a Free Lovecraft eBook.
A more complete analysis is here: Free Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft for Nook and…
jdupuis | March 3, 2011I saw this just after I published my previous post and think it really encompasses what I'd like to say to HarperCollins and its fellow travelers.
This is from The Capitalist's Paradox by Umair Haque.
So here's my question: Does what you're doing have a point -- one that matters to people, society, nature, and the future?
Beancounters, listen up. To paraphrase Shakespeare, I come not to praise you, but to bury you. I don't care about your "strategy," "business model," "campaign," "product," or "deliverables" (sorry). All that stuff is focused on outputs. What matters to people, in contrast,…
jdupuis | March 3, 2011Over the last week or so a huge issue has sprung up in the library and publishing world, which I touch on in my eBook Users' Bill of Rights post.
The publisher HarperCollins has restricting the number of checkouts an ebook version of one of their books can have before the library needs to pay for it again. The number of checkouts is 26 per year. Bobbi Newman collects a lot of relevant posts here if you're interested.
There was a comment on my post by William Dix:
Publishers are shooting themselves in the foot on this issue. As well as alienating a lot of the potential market with idiotic…
jdupuis | March 1, 2011The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (TILoHL) by Rebecca Skloot was far and away the top science book of the year in my Best Science Books 2010: The top books of the year post from last month. In that post I took all the Best Science Books 2010 posts and tallied up the books with the most mentions. TILoHL was mentioned in 41 out of the 60 lists I found. The next highest was 17 mentions for The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee.
So, a pretty decisive victory. TILoHL was by far the best reviewed science book of the year.
What was interesting to me was…
jdupuis | February 28, 2011This one is via Christina Pikas, Bobbi Newman and Sarah-Houghton-Jan, who originated it.
It's released under a CC0 license, so please feel free to repost, remix and whatever else strikes your fancy.
This arises from the current controversy in the library world (and beyond) about a particular publisher restricting the number of checkouts a library ebook can have before the library needs to pay for it again. Bobbi Newman collects a lot of relevant posts here if you're interested. I may post about the situation in more detail later this week.
The eBook Users Bill of Rights:
Every eBook user…
jdupuis | February 27, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one is from August 22, 2008 and reviews the following books:
Wrinkles in Time: Witness to the Birth of the Universe
Pursuit of Genius: Flexner, Einstein, and the Early Faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study
Archimedes…
jdupuis | February 26, 2011
The Tablet Wars Are On, With Big Stakes for Publishers
5 Reasons Why Your Online Presence Will Replace Your Resume in 10 years
How will undergraduates navigate a post peer-review scholarly landscape?
Social Network Mapping Fun with NodeXL and Science Online 2011
Authors, Readers and Discoverability in the new age of publishing
Tell us something we don't know: Gladwell on the U.S. News college rankings (non-academics as public intellectuals)
The digital pioneers: New forms of scholarship are transforming areas of the humanities
Do Record Stores Point the Way of the Future for Bookstores?
The…
jdupuis | February 25, 2011I have to admit, opening a used bookstore has always been one of my romantic, "what if I won the lottery" idle musings. Communing with books and book people has always been one of my favourite pastimes.
Of course, I've always known that the reality of owning and operating a used bookstore is a far cry from my idle fantasy, especially in the Internet age.
This post more-or-less hits the nail on the head: This Is Why Your Used Bookstore Clerk Hates You.
You Stole All Our Bukowski
It's hard to keep Bukowski on the shelf when he keeps getting stuffed in the pants of street punks when no one is…