jdupuis | September 20, 2011A project I heartily endorse on a topic near and dear to my heart, launched by the Library Society of the World, Librarianship by Walking Around:
The Library Society of the World is putting together an online and print-on-demand anthology of weblog posts, essays, articles, and other material entitled Librarianship by Walking Around, patterned after the successful Hacking the Academy project.
Librarianship doesn't just happen in the library! Librarianship happens wherever information exchange happens--that is, just about everywhere. Librarianship by Walking Around celebrates librarians who…
jdupuis | September 17, 2011I announced the short list for the Lane Anderson Award a little while back and now the winners were announced here in Toronto a few nights ago:
Adult Titles Winner
The Ptarmigan's Dilemma: An Ecological Exploration into the Mysteries of Life by John Theberge and Mary Theberge. (McCelland & Stewart)
Young Readers Winner
Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be by Daniel Loxton. (Kids Can Press)
The complete list of nominees:
Adult Titles Shortlist
Einstein Wrote Back: My Life in Physics by John W. Moffat. (Thomas Allen Publishers)
Keeping the Bees: Why All Bees Are at…
jdupuis | September 16, 2011How do no one every tell of this NewsBiscuit before? It's fantastic, kind of a UK version of The Onion, but dryer and more polite. Or something.
Anyways, here's a recent one, my introduction to this fantastic site: Homeopathic leak threatens catastrophe.
An accidental release of highly dilute homeopathic waste from a research institute in Swindon has led to calls for the centre to be shut down. Plant operators have admitted responsibility for massive safety blunders after a spilled drop of an enormously dilute test product was cleaned by a caretaker, and in complete disregard of all safety…
jdupuis | September 15, 2011As a former IT person and a current librarian, I've got to say that this article,Want Good IT Customer Service? Visit Your Library, has a lot of truth in it -- I definitely see the differences between my former profession and my current one. And as the article points out, many of those differences are on the plus side for librarians. Not all, of course, but that's a different post.
Let's take a look:
I believe IT professionals truly want to help others. However, we tend to focus on the technology, not the client. We believe our job is to fix problems, and we expend considerable time and…
jdupuis | September 13, 2011
Academically on Course
Journal Submissions
Asking the right questions
Inger Mewburn - Is There a New Digital Divide Brewing?
The case for libraries' use of social media: a how-to
Social Media - Oversold and Undervalued
15 Case Studies to Get Your Library Director On Board With Social Media
(Moral) Hazards of Scanning for Plagiarists: Evidence from Shoplifting
Eleven Deadly Sins Of Online Promotion For Writers
Why IT pros should be more like librarians
Hacking the Academy
Some Thoughts on the Hacking the Academy Process and Model
How to Leverage your workforce: librarians and the art of the…
jdupuis | September 12, 2011I'm a huge Eric Clapton fan, particularly of his blues output, always have been, always will be. There's only one artist I've seen in concert more time that EC, but more on that later.
One of the things I've always found interesting and admirable about him is his desire to collaborate with other artists, to try and stretch himself a little bit farther. It's also evident in the vast array of wonderful blues guitarists he's recorded with or gone on tour with over the years, either as sidemen or as opening acts. Mark Knopfler, Derek Trucks, Jimmy Vaughn, Bonnie Raitt, Doyle Bramhall II,…
Friday Fun: We Need To Do More When It Comes To Having Brief, Panicked Thoughts About Climate Change
jdupuis | September 9, 2011The Onion nails it on this one: We Need To Do More When It Comes To Having Brief, Panicked Thoughts About Climate Change.
The problem with solving all our climate change-related problems is basically that all the people on the planet are human.
Indeed, if there was ever a time when a desperate call to take action against global warming should race through our heads as we lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, that time is now.
Many well-intentioned people will take 20 seconds out of their week to consider the consequences of the lifestyle they've chosen, perhaps contemplating how their reliance…
jdupuis | September 8, 2011Another issue full of interesting articles:
E-Science Librarianship: Field Undefined by Elsa Alvaro, Heather Brooks, Monica Ham, Stephanie Poegel, and Sarah Rosencrans, Indiana University
Comparison of the Contributions of CAPLUS and MEDLINE to the Performance of SciFinder in Retrieving the Drug Literature by Svetla Baykoucheva, University of Maryland
Reference Management Software: a Comparative Analysis of Four Products by Ron Gilmour and Laura Cobus-Kuo, Ithaca College
American Woods: Conservation of a Unique Item by Tierney Lyons, Penn State Worthington Scranton
Local Food Systems:…
jdupuis | September 7, 2011
Seniors, Women Embracing Tablets, E-Readers
Open access to scientific knowledge and feudalism knowledge: Is there a connection?
I Got the Wrong Request from the Wrong Journal to Review the Wrong Piece. The Wrong kind of Open Access Apparently, Something Wrong with this Inherently...
Do More, Own Less: A Grand Theory of the Sharing Economy
Now Can We All Agree That The "High Quality Web Content" Experiment Has Failed?
A way forward on reformatting conferences
Five Hard Truths About Blogging
Social Media - Oversold and Undervalued
Collections are library assets
The Internet of things will…
jdupuis | September 2, 2011I have fond memories of reading the Asterix graphic novels as a kid, both in the original French and especially in the absolutely brilliant English translations -- I'm told quite reliably by my wife, who's a translator, that they are the best she's ever seen. My own kids also really loved them and they were among their favourites for bedtime reading.
Basically, the books are about a bunch of crazy ancient Gaul's who are resisting the Roman occupation, with the help of a bit of magic potion. Let's just say there's a lot of shenanigans and Roman-bashing.
I like this take on the series, from…
jdupuis | August 31, 2011
The Patent System Is The World's Biggest Threat To Innovation Today
How Google Dominates Us
The Status of Science: We Have No-one to Blame but Ourselves
Resilience vs. Sustainability: The Future of Libraries
Getting first sale wrong
College Students: The Gadget Generation
Our kids' glorious new age of distraction
Study this: E-Textbook readers compared
Academic E-books and their Role in the Emerging Scholarly Communications Landscape
"Librarians" -- An Endangered Species?
What Students Don't Know
The Library, it's academic
Why it matters how faculty view librarians
Three Reasons We Struggle…
jdupuis | August 29, 2011The theme at the upcoming Science Online NYC panel is Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils and I guess I'm the perils guy. The purpose of this post is helping me to get some of my thoughts down on pixels and, as a by-product, I guess it's tipping my hand a little bit for the other participants on the panel.
This session and my role as skeptic comes out of the Science Online session on ebooks in North Carolina this past January. I believe I may have refereed to the emerging ebooks app ecosystem as "The Dark Side."
My point was not to explicitly demonize app developers or…
jdupuis | August 26, 2011this is all kinds of funny: Beloit College Faces Accusations that "Mindset List" Really the Drunken Ravings of Old Man.
I tend to find the Beloit College list on the one hand kind of lame and the other kind of irrelevant.
And The Cronk knocks it out of the park:
Beloit, Wis. In a statement that surprised many higher education professionals across the country, Beloit College admitted that their popular "Mindset List," which documents the changing worldviews of entering college freshman each year, may actually be based on the drunken ravings of Marty McCommons, a well-known regular at Suds O'…
jdupuis | August 26, 2011What with the latest round of departures seemingly immanent with the new "no pseudonymous bloggers" policy, I thought I'd revisit the list I did last year at about this time.
With a few exceptions, I'll call blogs dormant if there hasn't been a post in 2011.
2010 World Science Festival Blog (Dormant, 1 post in 2011)
A Few Things Ill Considered
Aardvarchaeology
A Vote for Science (dormant)
Aetiology
Art of Science Learning
bioephemera
Brazillion Thoughts (1 post in 2011)
Built on Facts
Brookhaven Bits & Bytes
Casaubon's Book
Class M
Common Knowledge (1 post in 2011)
Confessions of a…
jdupuis | August 24, 2011Whoa. Now that was a intellectual reset button hitting if there ever was one.
From July 31 to August 5 I attended the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians (LIAL) in Boston. It was a one-week, intensive, immersive course not so much on how to be a leader but how to think like a leader and how to understand a little more about the leadership process.
Not solely aimed academic library leadership per se, but more broadly about leadership situated in an academic environment. In other words, it was about people who happen to be librarians leading…
jdupuis | August 22, 2011It's a very sad day today all across Canada as Jack Layton, leader of the Federal NDP and Leader of the Official Opposition, has died of cancer.
A widely respected career politician -- a rarity these days -- his passion for social justice and commitment to the people of Canada will be greatly missed.
His family released A letter to Canadians which, while very focused on Canada and Canadian politics, is also very relevant beyond our borders.
To young Canadians:...As my time in political life draws to a close I want to share with you my belief in your power to change this country and this world…
jdupuis | August 19, 2011All week I've been planning to feature Tor.com's Noir Week series here today. Somehow it's fitting that my slightly dark mood right now is matched by the subject matter of the Friday Fun.
From the introductory post:
Welcome to Noir Week at Tor.com! Join us as we escape from the sweltering dog days of summer into the cool, shadowy underworld of back alleys, jazz joints, hardboiled hooligans and tough-talking femme fatales; a world filled with violence, glamour, and intrigue, where the color scheme is black and white and the rules are anything but....
This week, we're making the most of our…
jdupuis | August 19, 2011According to DrugMonkey's recent post, ScienceBlogs' new overlords The National Geogrpaphic Society will no longer allow pseudonymous to continue blogging here.
I have just been informed that ScienceBlogs will no longer be hosting anonymous or pseudonymous bloggers. In case you are interested, despite extensive communication from many of us as to why we blog under pseudonyms, I have not been given any rationale or reason for this move. Particularly, no rationale or reason that responds to the many valid points raised by the pseudonymous folks.
This is, as they say, not unexpected. It is…
jdupuis | August 18, 2011The New York Review of Books has a great group review of some recentish books on everyone's favourite Internet behemoth: Google.
And they all look pretty interesting! (And I may have featured a couple of these before.)
In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy (ISBN-13: 978-1416596585)
In barely a decade Google has made itself a global brand bigger than Coca-Cola or GE; it has created more wealth faster than any company in history; it dominates the information economy. How did that happen? It happened more or less in plain sight. Google has many secrets but…
jdupuis | August 17, 2011I'll be speaking at the upcoming Science Online NYC event on September 20th.
Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils
Tuesday, September 20, 2011 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM (ET)
New York, NY
Weiss 305
Rockefeller University
E66th and York Ave.
New York, NY
Enhanced ebooks and tablet apps clearly offer new ways to present material and engage readers. Yet some of the software restrictions and rights deals that these ebooks, apps and their platforms use can make them unfriendly to librarians, archivists, and future users. How can authors, designers, and publishers best exploit these…