jdupuis | August 16, 2011I just got an email from the administers of this award:
$10,000 Lane Anderson Award Shortlist Announced
Celebrating the Best Science Writing in Canada
The six finalists competing for the 2010 Lane Anderson Award were announced today by Hollister Doll and Sharon Fitzhenry, Directors of the Fitzhenry Family Foundation.
The annual Lane Anderson Award honours two jury-selected books, in the categories of adult and young reader, published in the field of science, and written by a Canadian. The winner in each category will receive $10,000. Winners will be announced on 14th September.
"We want to…
jdupuis | August 16, 2011
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Copy
The Children They Never Had (regrets about not having kids among mostly female science faculty)
Why We Inflate Grades
Search: How Libraries Do it Wrong
Faculty inertia and change in scholarly publishing
Blogs: face the conversation
No Offence, But Insults Have Merit in Academia
Overexposed? Baby Photos in the Age of Facebook
What People Don't Get About Working in a Library
Building Canada's Digital Law Library
Subtle Things That Hold Women Back
Facebook and Branding
The importance of language and framing, part eleventy-thousand
Fall From Grace…
jdupuis | August 15, 2011As I ease myself back into the swing of things after a couple of weeks off and start to pay attention again to what's going on in the online world, I thought I'd bring this post to the attention of as wide an audience as possible.
It's The importance of language and framing, part eleventy-thousand by Amy Csizmar Dalal on her blog, This is what a computer scientist looks like.
Dalal draws a link between the decline in female CS enrollments since they peaked in the 1980s and the way we talk about entering the field in very competitive language rather than emphasizing mentoring or collaboration…
jdupuis | August 12, 2011Sometimes The Onion is so funny it hurts: USSR Wins Space Race As U.S. Shuts Down Shuttle Program.
MOSCOW, USSR--Less than a week after the return of the Atlantis orbiter marked the end of the U.S. space shuttle program, the crowded streets and textile factories of Moscow erupted in celebration as the USSR officially declared victory over the United States in the Space Race.
"At long last, our great Soviet republic has conquered the West and achieved technological and ideological superiority over America," Kremlin representative Sergei Voronin said Wednesday, announcing the achievement to an…
jdupuis | August 5, 2011Believe me, there are days when I think I'd like to be sold for scrap.
Anyways, Student Takes Tenured Professor to Antiques Road Show.
Archeology major Wendy Markell packed Professor Mary Louise Grandy into her car last Saturday and took her to the most recent filming of the PBS program "Antiques Road Show."
"I've had Dr. Grandy's modern literature classes for three years and I was just curious what she was worth," said Markell. "Her lessons seem really old and I was hoping there might be something of value there."
*snip*
"The transparencies used on classroom overhead projectors are slightly…
jdupuis | July 30, 2011
Let's talk about Plagiarism
Who Is Punished for Plagiarism?
NYU Prof Vows Never to Probe Cheating Again--and Faces a Backlash
If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault
What Tech Do You Bring to Conferences?
Overeducated, Underemployed: How to fix humanities grad school
Know Your Value
"I graduated from a top library school." Yeah, so what?
The role of Facebook and Twitter in scientific citations and impact factors
Tweeting Science
Google Plus and The Social Media Moonshot
Does the Murdoch Hacking Scandal Signify the End of Privacy?
You Stay Classy, Ivory Tower!
Google Plus,…
jdupuis | July 29, 2011I usually don't feature too many Cracked posts here because, well, they can tend to be a little on the NSFW for a family blog like this one.
But this one is very funny and very true. Fortunately, I don't seem to qualify as any of the worst kinds of blogs, but I guess I'm not the best judge of that!
Here they are:
The "Let's Start a Blog" Blog
The Corporate Blog
The Shill Blog
The Parrot Blog. This is a blog which seems to exist solely to reprint, quote or link to other people's content. You can find these blogs everywhere, but by their very nature, they prefer cropping up in the more…
jdupuis | July 28, 2011No, the purpose of this post isn't to reveal the secrets of successful academic leadership. If I had those, believe you me I'd be writing this from my villa on the French Riviera.
However, I am heading off to the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians in Boston next week where I hope to be a least a little more enlightened and educated along that path.
Not surprisingly I've been watching the blogosphere these last few months for insightful posts and articles about academic leadership, in particular academic library leadership. I've found a few…
jdupuis | July 27, 2011As anyone who's a regular reader of my Friday Fun series will know, I'm a huge fan of The Cronk, that paragon of higher ed satire. In fact, you could call me the grand high poobah of Cronk fandom with the Cronk as the Sultan of Satire!
You can see some of my posts here, here and here and even more here.
I love the Cronk, you love the Cronk, we all love the Cronk. And now we all have a chance to put our money where our mouths are and kick a little cash towards the hard working gang that entertain and amuse us so regularly. They fine folk who produce the Cronk have published a print book…
jdupuis | July 25, 2011My previous post was about Brian Mathews moving his blog to the Chronicle, a non-librarian blog network.
So for this post I thought I'd list all the academic and research librarians I know of that are embedded in non-library blogging communities.
On the one hand, it's a pretty short list. On the other hand, it's not like there are that many relevant blogging communities out there!
Needless to say, I think it's hugely important to get the librarian point of view in front of our patrons and getting ourselves into their blogging communities and talking about issues they care about is a great…
jdupuis | July 25, 2011As I have in the past, I'd like to point out a librarian embedded in a faculty-focused blogging network.
Brian Mathews recently moved his blog, The Ubiquitous Librarian, to the Chronicle Blog Network run by, you guessed it, The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The new URL for Brian's blog is here.
And a few recent posts:
Instructionally Adrift? Are instructors letting their students down?
A Future Space For Reference Services? An Inspiration From GALE
Why does my library use social media?
When talking about the library remember N3P3: an advocacy talking points framework for academic libraries…
jdupuis | July 23, 2011
The Cornucopia of the Commons
Discouraging EDU Lessons from Netflix Streaming
A gentle introduction to Twitter for the apprehensive academic
Setting the Agenda: Key Issues for Scholarly Publishing
Of Hybrarians, Scholar-Librarians, Academic Refugees, & Feral Professionals
An ex-Googler's inside view on Google+ vs. Facebook
Six Reasons Tablet Devices Will be Owned by 20% of Incoming Freshmen in U.S. Higher Education by Fall 2012
Tips for being a great blogger (and good person)
Is It Cold in Here?
Rock Stars and Superheroes
If this is the future, count me out
Warning! Social Networks Are…
jdupuis | July 22, 2011Or is that Auto Cucumber?
For those of you who own iphones and text a lot, you'll know what I'm talking about here.
As you type the phone tries to guess what you really mean to say and often you can inadvertently say the wrong thing if you acknowledge the phone's suggestions too soon.
And there's a blog that's just full of them: Damn You Auto Correct!
It's pretty well the funniest thing on the entire Internet. And pretty NSFW too, as a fair number of them are, well, you really just have to see for yourself.
There's a summary post of some of the best, a taste of one of the more printable ones…
jdupuis | July 21, 2011Reference librarians, of course!
I'm reading Last Car to Elysian Fields by mystery writer James Lee Burke and came across this rather nice passage on pages 141-142.
So where do you go to find a researcher who is intelligent, imaginative, skilled in the use of computers, devoted to discovering the truth, and knowledgeable about science, technology, history and literature, and who usually works for dirt and gets credit for nothing?
After lunch I drove down to the city library on Main and asked the reference librarian...
And the whole scene in the novel is really very good, as Burke's…
jdupuis | July 20, 2011Come work for me!
We have an 11 month opening here at my library for a reference assistant. The position doesn't require the library degree but a science background will be necessary.
The posting is here.
Posting Number: YUSA-7393
Position Title: Reference Assistant
Department: Steacie Science Library
Affiliation: YUSA
Band: 10
Salary: Annual salary of $51,439 will be prorated based on the number of weeks worked.
Duration: Temporary Full-Time
Hours: Fall/Winter (Sept to April): Mon. to Fri.; 9:00 am - 5:00 pm. Require to work a 12:00 noon to 8:00 p.m. shift one day per week. May be required…
jdupuis | July 19, 2011Trust me, I really tried to come up with a cool, funny title for this post.
Anyways...
We have a new reference assistant starting here next week. As somewhat typical for such a position, the new staff member has a science subject background rather than a library background. In this case, Maps/GIS.
So I thought it might be a good idea to gather together some resources for helping our new hire get acclimatised to reference work in an academic science & engineering library. After all, we're not born with the ability to do good reference interviews!
With the help of the fine folk in…
jdupuis | July 15, 2011The world of fantasy genre fiction is finally happy this week. An incredibly long-awaited event has finally taken place.
George R.R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons, fifth book in the epic A Song of Ice and Fire series has finally been published.
With over five years since the last one, with much grumbling from the fans, the wait is over.
And people seem...underwhelmed.
The first three were amazing classics of the fantasy genre. I loved them, the way they combined fantasy tropes with a strong dose of reality. They were violent and brutal, just the way the world of political machinations…
jdupuis | July 15, 2011The latest D-Lib has a bunch of really interesting articles:
Services for Academic Libraries in the New Era by Michalis Gerolimos and Rania Konsta
Digital Librarianship & Social Media: the Digital Library as Conversation Facilitator
Article by Robert A. Schrier
Building a Sustainable Institutional Repository by Chenying Li, Mingjie Han, Chongyang Hong, Yan Wang, Yanqing Xu and Chunning Cheng
Music to My Ears: The New York Philharmonic Digital Archives by Cynthia Tobar
jdupuis | July 14, 2011As usual, a wealth of interesting articles in the latest ISTL:
Faculty of 1000 and VIVO: Invisible Colleges and Team Science by John Carey, City University of New York
E-book Usage among Chemists, Biochemists and Biologists: Findings of a Survey and Interviews by Yuening Zhang and Roger Beckman, Indiana University, Bloomington
Look Beyond Textbooks: Information Literacy for First-Year Science Students by Gabrielle K.W. Wong, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
The Changing Role of Blogs in Science Information Dissemination by Laksamee Putnam, Towson University
Life Science…
jdupuis | July 13, 2011A few weeks ago I answered the daily thought leadership countdown questions that were posed by the TEDxLibrariansTO conference. I enjoyed the process, forcing myself to respond to thoughtful and interesting questions every day, even on busy challenging days where I wouldn't normally make an effort to find the time for blogging.
However, since they were all branded with "TEDxLibrarians" name in the title, I don't think people who weren't attending the conference bothered to read them. As such, several of the posts had unusually low readership.
So I;m gathering them all here in the hopes…