jdupuis | June 9, 2011Yes, the TEDx whirlwind is coming to libraryland!
Later this month on Saturday, June 25th, TEDxLibrariansTO is coming to Toronto.
About TEDxLibrariansTO
Who inspires you?
We live in a time that is in need of inspiration. The aspirations of both individuals and society have always had a home within libraries and have traditionally found a voice through librarians.
The theme for TEDx LibrariansTO is Librarians as Thought Leaders. Come to the event and experience this incredible opportunity to hear librarians speak to the differences we make in the world and how we have, can and do lead and…
jdupuis | June 9, 2011
The death of death?
Print on the Margins: Circulation Trends in Major Research Libraries
Tinkering with the IEEE and ACM copyright policies
How can a university best use social media for internal communications?
Being a More Efficient, Productive Academic II: Thinking About References
Taiga by the Tail
When talking about the library remember N3P3: an advocacy talking points framework for academic libraries
PDA and the Research Library
A Pilot Survey of the Numbers of Full-Text Items in Institutional Repositories
where credit is due
Boycotting the Plaintiffs?
PDA and the Research Library…
jdupuis | June 8, 2011As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I did a short presentation on Scholarship in the Public Eye: The Case for Social Media as part of a panel for a York Faculty of Graduate Studies Scholarly Communications Series.
And yes, I was the Twitter guy, although some of the other presenters did talk about their use of Twitter. Basically, my point was that Twitter and blogs can be part and parcel of the research and research outreach life of academics. I mostly concentrated on Twitter, but I did try and make the same sorts of points about blogging as well as I spoke.
Anyways, I thought I would share…
jdupuis | June 7, 2011I'm doing a short presentation later today on using social media as a researcher. It's part of the York University Faculty of Graduate Studies' Scholarly Communications Series. This one is titled Scholarship in the Public Eye:
The Faculties of Graduate Studies and Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, along with the York University Libraries, are collaboratively facilitating a series of information sessions focused on scholarly communications intended for all graduate students and faculty members. The series will address issues related to research skills and research dissemination,…
jdupuis | June 6, 2011Sometimes we Open Access advocates tend to assume everybody is already on our side. You know, all our librarian and scientist colleagues out there. Surely by now they've seen the light. They understand the main issues and flavours of OA, can ably summarize the major arguments for OA and refute the major complaints against.
Of course, reality is a lot more complicated than my dreamy, unrealistic wishes.
Convincing librarians to support Open Access, either directly or indirectly, is usually fairly easy but even we have a number of misconceptions and misunderstandings about what OA really…
jdupuis | June 5, 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 Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, is from August 14, 2007. (Weinberger left a detailed comment at the original post, for those that are interested.)
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David Weinberger's…
jdupuis | June 3, 2011I contacted Twitter earlier this week but unfortunately they have been unable to activate the Academic Big Deal "Elitist" Verification Status on my Twitter account.
Something about me being a "delusional status seeking famewhore megalomaniac." They also mentioned something about Klout, but I'm not sure what they meant by that.
Anyways, The Cronk News details this great new service from the fine folks at Twitter: Twitter To Add "Elitist" Verification for Higher Ed Big Deals.
Similar to its current "Verified" function, the Highed Elite feature will allow users to quickly identify whether they…
jdupuis | June 2, 2011Yesterday York University Libraries was visited by a delegation of 39 academic librarians, mostly from The Netherlands but also a couple from Belgium. They are on a tour of many of the academic libraries of Southern Ontario, hoping to learn and share a bit about how libraries in different countries are handling the challenges of the future.
You can follow their progress on Twitter using the hashtag #nvbcan.
As I said, they were here yesterday. During the morning they got some presentations about the York Libraries in general and a tour of the Scott Library and its new Learning Commons. In…
jdupuis | June 1, 2011
A Library for Human Capital
How I Talk About Searching, Discovery and Research in Courses
Why libraries still matter
The State of Higher Ed Social Media 2011
How To Blog a Conference
The secret is to bang the rocks together: Arduino is a building block for the world to come
Google's Blogger outage makes the case against a cloud-only strategy
Recorded lectures take on new risk as blogger 'goes after teachers'
Finding Sources with The Full Wiki
Welcome to the Information Supercollider
Let Them Surf
Confusing Excess With Access
Pressure to publish papers blamed for reluctance to share digital…
jdupuis | May 31, 2011Twitterers of the world.
We've all heard the questions. The murmurs. The doubts and whispers.
"Twitter is a waste of time," they say.
"People are just talking about what they ate for breakfast, or what their dog is doing."
"No good can come of it, no way to spend work time, turning us all into ADHD cases."
The mother of all social media doubter articles came out a little while back, The New York Time's Bill Keller on The Twitter Trap:
I don't mean to be a spoilsport, and I don't think I'm a Luddite. I edit a newspaper that has embraced new media with creative, prizewinning gusto. I get that…
jdupuis | May 30, 2011A very, very long time since I've done one of these...
For your reading and collection development pleasure:
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
In a sense, The Information is a book about everything, from words themselves to talking drums, writing and lexicography, early attempts at an analytical engine, the telegraph and telephone, ENIAC, and the ubiquitous computers that followed. But that's just the "History." The "Theory" focuses on such 20th-century notables as Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, and others who worked on coding, decoding, and re-…
jdupuis | May 29, 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 Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, is from August 14, 2007.
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This one of those very rare books, books that make you truly smarter and more…
jdupuis | May 27, 2011Yep, the promised Rapture from this past weekend didn't materialize. Or more precisely, I didn't de-materialize and ascend into heaven this past weekend.
I don't know about you, but I was pretty pissed. Disappointed that I wasn't able to join all my childhood pets at the left hand of god. Or whatever.
Anyways, I totally agree with the sentiments from A Letter to God Following the Cancellation of the Rapture from that noted religious publication, my favourite source of divine wisdom, Cracked.com.
Here's what the author of the letter, Soren Bowie, has to say:
Dear God,
You screwed me. Not in…
jdupuis | May 23, 2011A very nice article by Ian Brown in this past Saturday's Globe and Mail, Don't discard the librarians.
He very nicely summarizes the recent library/librarian angst that's been free-flowing around the media and blogosphere over the last little while.
The world of librarians was thrown into a tizzy this week - it doesn't take much these days - when the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board announced it will shut its school libraries and dump all but four of its library technicians.
*snip*
That was the tip of the iceberg. While Windsor defended its slash, top-level librarians attended a…
jdupuis | May 22, 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 Sharing, Privacy and Trust in a Networked World, is from November 19, 2011.
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OCLC's newest state of the library world/environmental scan report was published a few months ago: Sharing, Privacy and Trust in a…
jdupuis | May 20, 2011One of the reason I love the Cronk News so much is that sometimes I don't know whether to laugh or cry at one of their stories.
This is definitely one of those cases.
Oh, higher ed, you poor, poor deluded little dear.
Take a gander and read the whole article: SUNC Appoints Twelve Efficiency Czars to Streamline Bureaucracy.
"Our organizational chart is currently 70 layers deep, which is why I'm recommending we trim down to something the legislature will view as more reasonable, like 65 or 66," Brescia offered. "Unless the legislature continues to provide 40 percent of our funding SUNC won't…
jdupuis | May 17, 2011So, here's the story. A week or so ago, McMaster University Librarian Jeff Trzeciak gave an invited presentation at Penn State, tasked by the organizers to be controversial.
To say the least, he succeeded. Perhaps the most controversial idea in the presentation was that he would basically no longer hire librarians for his organization, only subject PhDs and IT specialists.
As you can imagine, the library blogosphere and Friendfeedosphere has had a field day with this one.
You can see the slide in question here and get a bit of a background on the situation of librarians at McMaster here.…
jdupuis | May 16, 2011From the University of Toronto Academic Librarians' blog:
In response to McMaster University and their Library's recent treatment of their academic librarians and the notable gender imbalance at the May 17 conference at McMaster University (given that 80% of librarians are women), entitled "The Future of Academic Libraries" and which does not include McMaster University librarians, CAUT has produced a button which the UTFA Librarians Committee is urging all who support the role of academic librarianship to wear when attending the May 17th conference. For those from other universities who…
jdupuis | May 15, 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 Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts, is from February 24, 2008.
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This is one of those books that I picked up at a the train station cheap remaindered books kiosk. I do…
jdupuis | May 13, 2011This past Saturday I spent the afternoon at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival at the Toronto Reference Library. It was a blast, I met a ton of great comics people, spent way too much money and supported a lot of great artists and writers.
The highlight was discovering the new collection We Are the Engineers by former University of British Columbia engineering student Angela Melick. The book is an expanded collection of strips from her webcomic Wasted Talent.
Here's a bit from the Info page:
Welcome to the site! Basically, this is all you need to know: JamJAM, or Angela, is a mechanical…