jdupuis | October 12, 2012Longtime readers will know that I'm a big fan of the works of HP Lovecraft. And every once in a while it's nice to do an eldritch, namelessly horrific take on your typical Friday Fun.
I don't know about you, but I've read all of Lovecraft's original fiction (though not all the collaboration and ghost-written works) and even a fair bit of Lovecraftian or Cthulhuvian themed works by other writers.
But there's always more Mythos works being written and older works I've not tracked down yet. Blastr has been kind enough to recommend a bunch, many of which I've not seen or heard of and maybe you…
jdupuis | October 11, 2012Well, I've done it. I've signed up for a MOOC. MOOC, of course, being Massively Open Online Courses, are all the rage in higher-ed-more-disruptingly-than-thou circles, what with their potential is greatly expand the reach of higher education beyond a campus-bound constituency. But not without criticism, of course. Coursera is a popular example of a company that's offering MOOCs but there are a bunch of them out there now.
Having read so much about them over the last year or so, I thought I'd give one a try.
And as a bonus, this one is about the changes happening in the higher education…
jdupuis | October 10, 2012
The PC is Over
The Last PC Laptop
What if Libraries were the Problem?
Annealing the Library
Librarians Talk of Abandoning E-Books
Re-Inventing Public Libraries For The Digital Age
5 Ways That edX Could Change Education
The State of the Internet (ie. mobilemobilemobile)
Does Open Access Tackle, Perpetuate, or Exacerbate the Matthew Effect?
PeerJ: Could it Transform Open Access Publishing?
Best Practices for Scientific Computing
Publishers And Google Reach Agreement
Preventing the Second Big Deal (etextbooks rather than ejounals)
Failure, crisis, disruption: The (perpetual) end of higher ed…
jdupuis | October 4, 2012
Finding Fame, and Sometimes Fortune, in Social Media
Why Some Academics Publish More
Why book bloggers are critical to literary criticism
On Becoming a Phoenix: Encounters With the Digital Revolution (trying an online course at UPhoenix)
A Pioneer in Online Education Tries a MOOC
FriendFeed Turns 5. The One-Time Pioneer Is Still Here.
The Financial Burdens of the CC-BY License for Scholarly Literature
Will Public Libraries Become Extinct?
It will be hard to find a public library 15 years from now
2012 Digital Music Sales on Pace to Break Record
MLA to Launch Scholarly Communications Platform…
jdupuis | October 3, 2012Ten years ago today, three days shy of my 40th birthday, I started a blog more or less on a whim. I have to admit, I only had a pretty vague idea of what blogging was all about or what its potential was. After all, my main inspiration for getting started wasn't even a blog at all, but a zine.
Sitting here, all these years later, three days shy of my 50th birthday, I can only say that it's been a wonderful, exciting and sometimes strange trip. The trip has meandered through the broad crossroads of librarianship and science at the beginning of the 21st century and I'm sure will continue to…
jdupuis | October 2, 2012
Another World is Possible: Particle Physics Goes Open Access
Open-access deal for particle physics
20/09/2012, SCOAP3 Article Processing Charges announced
SCOAP3 Open Access Initiative launched at CERN
The Cost of Not Reading "The Price of Inequality"
Our Obsession with Scale Is Failing Us
The Virginia Effect (UVa controversy from the summer has broad impact across higher ed...)
ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2012
Want to Change Academic Publishing? Just Say No
The Cost of Not Reading "The Price of Inequality" (economic inequality is important for higher ed…
jdupuis | October 1, 2012The most recent controversy to whip up the library and science blogospheres revolves around SUNY Potsdam cancelling their American Chemical Society journal package because the subscription packages on offer sucked up too high a percentage of their total budget. SUNY Potsdam Library Director Jenica Rogers wrote about the decision on her blog, garnering quite a bit of attention, including a feature in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The feature included some rather rude and derailing comments from a representative of the ACS, who later threw some gasoline on the PR fire on a chemistry…
jdupuis | September 29, 2012This past Thursday evening I was honoured to attend the awards ceremony for the 2011 Lane Anderson Award which celebrates the best science writing in Canada.
The winners were announced at the end of the evening. This is from the press release, which doesn't seem to be online yet:
Toronto. 2thth September, 2012: The two winners of the 2011 Lane Anderson Award were announced today by Hollister Doll and Sharon Fitzhenry, Directors of the Fitzhenry Family Foundation, at an intimate dinner in Toronto. The annual Lane Anderson Award honours two jury-selected books, in the categories of adult and…
jdupuis | September 27, 2012Why do people go into science? Why do people go to work at scholarly societies? Why do people choose scholarly publishing as a career? Why do people choose a career at the intersection of those three vocations?
There are cynical answers to those questions, for sure, and even the non-cynical need to put food on the table. But I truly don't believe people start out their path in life based on cynicism. Rather I believe most people start their careers based on hope.
I can only hope that for a person to pursue a career in scholarly publishing at a scientific society, their goal in life is to try…
jdupuis | September 27, 2012The current Conservative government of Canada isn't too fond of Canadians having access to information. It's inconvenient for them because I guess a well-informed citizenry would be more likely to call them on the various shenanigans they've been indulging in.
A good general take on the situation is Allan Gregg's recent speech, 1984 in 2012 – The Assault on Reason:
I have spent my entire professional life as a researcher, dedicated to understanding the relationship between cause and effect. And I have to tell you, I’ve begun to see some troubling trends. It seems as though our government’s…
jdupuis | September 26, 2012Scholars who grew up with the internet are steadily replacing those that grew up without it. Scholars who expect to put everything they write online, who expect to find everything they need online, and who expect unlocked content that they may read, search, link, copy, cut/paste, crawl, print, and redistribute, are replacing those who never expected these boons and got used to them, if at all, looking over their shoulder for the copyright police. Scholars who expect to find the very best literature online, harmlessly cohabitating with crap are, inexorably replacing scholars who, despite…
jdupuis | September 25, 2012
Competing with “Free,” Part One and Part Two
(Re)Defining the Library, Part 1: Why?, Part 2: How?
Smoking Gun on Sexism? (scientists are biased against women)
What Libraries Should Be: A Values Proposition
The matter of credit
Report on the International Workshop on Contribution and Scholarly Attribution
Please Stop The Social
An Introvert's Thoughts on Being A Professional Speaker and Consultant
Introverts and the ‘new groupthink’
Not So Fast on 'Open Access' (Historians having second thoughts?)
Rethinking What “Academic” Means
The disappearing web: Information decay is eating away our…
jdupuis | September 21, 2012One of my favourite events in the science calendar is always the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, which was held last night in Cambridge, MA. For those that don't know, the Ig Nobels celebrate the odd and unusual in scientific research, both genuine and not-quite.
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology
And last night's awards (archived video!) were no different than previous years' in their ability to make us…
jdupuis | September 20, 2012
So you got a job with your prof: advice for undergrads
Undergrad Herding
The Great Geek Sexism Debate
New York Public Library Shifts Plan for 5th Ave. Building
New York Public Library Dials Back Plan to Move Books
New York Public Library Board of Trustees Approves Construction of Additional Book Storage at Landmark 42nd Street Building
Lions in Winter, Part One and Part Two
Amanda Palmer’s Million-Dollar Music Project and Kickstarter’s Accountability Problem
Why Reducing Faculty Stress Should Be An Explicit Goal of Academic IT
Mature Market for Online Education
MOOC Host Expands (Coursera…
jdupuis | September 13, 2012Jenica Rogers is Director of Libraries at the State University of New York at Potsdam. Like so many institutions SUNY Potsdam subscribes to the suite of journals published by the American Chemical Society. Now, that's always a challenge since the ACS prices their products very aggressively as well as pushing the envelope with annual price increases.
Well, push finally came to show and SUNY Potsdam is Walking away from the American Chemical Society.
The problem:
In May 2012, after much internal discussion and debate, three SUNY library directors from the comprehensive colleges (myself…
jdupuis | September 12, 2012
Before You Jump on the Bandwagon ... (MOOCs)
It’s not about skills (hiring the right people and letting them do their job)
All is revealed: the real crisis on campus
Crafting an Engaging Lecture
MOOCs' Missing Pieces
MOOCs' Contradictions
Publishers Double Down (GSU copyright case)
Doing DH versus Doing Digital
Digital Textbooks Still Not Catching On With College Students
Time to go it alone on Open Access
As Students Scatter Online, Colleges Try to Keep Up (email is so 2011)
Hats off to Amazon (for cornering a whole bunch of ebook markets)
The Plagiarism Perplex
MOOCing On Site (site-based…
jdupuis | September 10, 2012You know the old saying about the weather -- everybody complains but nobody does anything about it! Well, the same can be said about climate change -- everybody complains but nobody does anything about it. And that's partly because of political gridlock, denial and inaction at the highest levels across numerous jurisdictions around the world. But it's also because most of us really don't have a clear idea what we can do about it.
In other words, what actions can we as individuals take to fight climate change?
I think we all have a sense that if we could aggregate millions and billions…
jdupuis | September 7, 2012One of my all-time most popular posts in the search engine keyword logs is Friday Fun: Historians Admit To Inventing Ancient Greeks. And a good chunk of the commenters seem to think it's true and not devilishly clever satire. A common occurrence with The Onion, apparently.
Well, this one is in the same category, from the UK's News Biscuit this time. Brilliant!
Particle physics ‘all made up’ admit boffins
For years, billions of pounds have been pumped into state of the art labs to fund so called ‘particle accelerators’ in the hope that the secrets of the big bang are revealed. ‘It’s all…
jdupuis | September 6, 2012
When did addiction become a good thing?
Getting scientists to take ethics seriously: strategies that are probably doomed to failure.
Why I Pay for Content (And Why That Makes Me Feel Like a Sucker)
On the importance of networking in academic settings
Two things prompted by a new website: space as a service and full library discovery
Still Here: A funny thing happened on the way to its predicted obsolescence.
The library became more popular than ever (NYPL renovation)
Understanding Digital Civics
Should we learn from the Masters or from the Pupils? (should students read the original papers on…
jdupuis | September 5, 2012About a month ago The Scientist published an interesting set of interviews with a set of scientists, publishers and LIS faculty on the future of scholarly publishing.
They called it Whither Science Publishing? with the subtitle "As we stand on the brink of a new scientific age, how researchers should best communicate their findings and innovations is hotly debated in the publishing trenches."
It's a pretty good set of questions and answers, provocative and thought provoking, with a few good shots especially from the scientist side of things. Unfortunately, I think it lacks a bit in terms of…