jdupuis | November 3, 2010For your reading and collection development pleasure. It's been so long since I last did one of these listings, I actually have another one coming up in a day or so.
Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia by Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. (ISBN-13: 978-0262014472)
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is built by a community--a community of Wikipedians who are expected to "assume good faith" when interacting with one another. In Good Faith Collaboration, Joseph Reagle examines this unique collaborative culture.
Wikipedia, says Reagle, is not the first effort to create a freely shared,…
jdupuis | October 31, 2010Canadian horror/dark fantasy writer Kelley Armstrong has a nice list of 10 favourite horror novels in a recent issue of the Globe and Mail.
Here it is:
The Shining by Stephen King
The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
The Turn of The Screw by Henry James
The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The Hellbound Heart: A Novel by Clive Barker
Let Me In by John Ajvide Lindqvist
Relic by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child
The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson
Misery by Stephen King
Armstrong talks about the entries in the original article.
I've read…
jdupuis | October 29, 2010A second Halloween-related post, with the happy day coming up this weekend. My "give a scary book" post came on Monday.
Anyways, a recent post on Horrornews.net really resonated with me: Growing up as a horror fan. Mostly because I too grew up a huge horror fan, mostly watching cheesy old Hammer films on tv, the Dracula and Frankenstein ones having particularly strong memories for me. To this day, I'm a huge fan of some of their main actors such as Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Island of Terror is non-Hammer film that I have vivid memories of watching when I was a kid -- as is…
jdupuis | October 27, 2010A week or two ago, in a comment on the Blogging Groups and Ethics post, I lamented that I always seem to be reading the same librarianish blogs, not mixing it up too much. I wished that we might have a blogging community to assemble around, or at least a good aggregator.
Well, Bora Zivkovic challenged me in the comments to at very least aggregate scitech librarian blogs for the ScienceBlogging.org site.
It's taken me a while, but I've done it.
Using the list I previously created for the List of Science & Technology Librarian Blogs I created a Friendfeed group which Bora has since…
jdupuis | October 26, 2010
Slice and Scan
After Launching Search and Discovery, Who Is Mission Control?
The smart scholar's publication-venue heuristics; or, how to use open access to advance your career
Piracy trumps obscurity again
Open to All: Preserving Library Values in a Digital World
Proposing a Taxonomy of Social Reading
How Should Peer Review Evolve?
Why Peer Review Matters
Mutations of citations: Just like genetic information, citations can accumulate heritable mutations
Bookstores: dead or alive?
Over It Yet? Privacy, That Is
An Amazon Digital Book Rental Plan?
In a Digital Age, Students Still Cling to…
jdupuis | October 25, 2010You know, there just aren't enough useless holiday excuses to give books to people.
Giving books as presents has to be one of my all-time favourite things to do in life -- especially the opportunity to give books to my family!
So, it seems that Neil Gaiman has a really, really good idea.
I propose that, on Hallowe'en or during the week of Hallowe'en, we give each other scary books. Give children scary books they'll like and can handle. Give adults scary books they'll enjoy.
I propose that stories by authors like John Bellairs and Stephen King and Arthur Machen and Ramsey Campbell and M R…
jdupuis | October 22, 2010As I mentioned a few days ago, the kind librarians of Brock University in St. Catherines, ON invited me to give a talk as part of their Open Access Week suite of events.
I've included my slides for the presentation below. There was a small but engaged group of mostly librarians that turned up.
Please don't let the high number of slides deter you from zipping through the presentation. A good chunk of the slides only have a couple of words on them and another good chunk are screen shots of xkcd strips.
The slides are in our IR here and on Google Docs here.
I'd like to thank Barbara…
jdupuis | October 22, 2010Ah, The Cronk News. Always good for a laugh at academia's expense!
I like this one from a few weeks ago, an amusing take on the whole town vs. gown issue: Townies Make Preemptive Strike On College
Town/Gown relations in Norwich, CT deteriorated in record time this year when students returned to campus. For over fifty years, tensions between "townies" and college students have centered around student vandalism of locals' mailboxes, cars and homes. But this year, the townies took matters into their own hands.
"I was sound asleep and heard screaming and yelling," said Patrick Minchoff, a…
jdupuis | October 21, 2010Ok, not a bar, more like an information literacy class.
I thought I'd bring to everyone's attention a presentation by two of my York University Libraries colleaques, web librarian William Denton and instruction librarian Adam Taves.
It was at Access in Winnipeg a week or so ago:
After Launching Search and Discovery, Who Is Mission Control?
Reference librarians are whiny and demanding.
Systems librarians are arrogant and rude.
Users are clueless and uninformed.
A new discovery layer means that they need to collaborate to build it and then -- the next step -- integrate it into teaching and…
jdupuis | October 20, 2010
The False Security of Technology? What Might We Be Missing?
Reading Instrumentally
Why blogging still matters
Outsourcing Plus (Partnering to provide more online ed choices)
Long Road to Open Access
The Down-side of Technology? On Class Time
Wikimedia: Power, Leadership, and Movement Roles
Gaming as Teaching Tool
Blogs in higher education - some ideas about their benefits and downsides
Portrait of the Scholar as Blogger
7 Essential Skills You Didn't Learn in College
Principles for Open Bibliographic Data
The Web Parenthesis: Is the "open Web" closing?
Rebuilding an Academic Law Library Part…
jdupuis | October 18, 2010The kind librarians at Brock University in St. Catherines, Ontario have invited me to help them celebrate Open Access Week!
Their rather impressive lineup of OA Week events (and I'm not just saying this because I'm involved, believe me) is here.
My part is a talk I'm giving on Wednesday:
Wednesday, October 20 2-3:30
Exploring Open Science
Join John Dupuis, Head of the Steacie Science & Engineering Library, York University, for a discussion of how Science and Technology academics and publishers are responding to the growing open access movement and the changing nature of research in…
jdupuis | October 18, 2010It's Open Access Week this week and as part of the celebrations I thought I highlight a recent declaration by the Open Bibliographic Working Group on the Principles for Open Bibliographic Data. It's an incredible idea, one that I support completely -- the aim is to make bibliographic data open, reusable and remixable. Creating a bibliographic data commons would lead to many opportunities to create search and discovery tools that would be of great benefit to scholarship, education, research and development.
I won't try and explain the details of the declaration since it's released under a CC…
jdupuis | October 15, 2010A really interesting article on Tor.com from this past August by Ryan Britt, A Fondness for Antiques: The Future of Books According to Science Fiction.
In the past few years, media pundits and tech experts have been abuzz with variations on the question: "what is the future of the book?" Luckily, science fiction has been around a whole lot longer than Amazon, Apple, and Google, and as such, might be able to teach us a thing or two about the future of the printed word.
It's a really terrific look at some futurism from the past -- the old "Where's my rocket pack and flying car!" but this time…
jdupuis | October 15, 2010The latest Cites & Insights (v10i11) is out and in it Walt Crawford explores some of the recent developments in the blogging landscape in a section called The Zeitgeist: Blogging Groups and Ethics. It's a very good overview and analysis of what's going on both in the science and librarian blogospheres.
It's well worth checking out. Some highlights:
Blogging Groups and Ethics
Do you blame Roy Tennant when the Annoyed Librarian writes posts that undermine librarianship and libraries?
I'm guessing you don't. Whoever the Library Journal incarnation of the Annoyed Librarian might or might…
jdupuis | October 12, 2010
STEM Education Has Little to Do With Flowers
When an imploring librarian is not enough
Investments in the Term Economy
Reference Management with the iPad
Reference Management meets Web 2.0
Library mobile apps vs web apps - Some analysis
Conversing in a Cyberspace Community: The Growth of HPS (History and Philosophy of Science) Blogging
Oxford University: A Look at the Bodleian Library's New Book Storage Facility
"Blogging, empowerment, and the "adjacent possible"
End of bookstores? That's fine by me.
The Librarian IS the Rockstar (Go ahead, the post isn't as cringe-worthy as the title would…
jdupuis | October 8, 2010Ah, The Onion. I haven't used them in a while for my Friday Fun and it was feeling like it was way overdue.
As usual, classic stuff: Historians Admit To Inventing Ancient Greeks:
A group of leading historians held a press conference Monday at the National Geographic Society to announce they had "entirely fabricated" ancient Greece, a culture long thought to be the intellectual basis of Western civilization.
The group acknowledged that the idea of a sophisticated, flourishing society existing in Greece more than two millennia ago was a complete fiction created by a team of some two dozen…
jdupuis | October 6, 2010This graphic novel series is simply amazing. It's some of the best graphic pure storytelling I've come across in a very long time -- I just can't recommend it enough. The story is perfectly paced: slow when it needs to be but mostly taut and exciting, pulling you from episode to episode like a freight train. The art is short on comics rockstar fireworks but is serviceable and supports the story completely.
So, what's it about?
Zombie apocalypse.
The series follows one man, a cop, who wakes up from a coma and finds himself in a world full of zombies. A world with very few survivors. He…
jdupuis | October 6, 2010
The Genius of the Tinkerer: The secret to innovation is combining odds and ends
A Call for Open Textbooks
Self-archiving diary by Peter Suber
So what does a science librarian DO?
Book Futures: A Crowdsourced Thought Experiment
Frontiers, F1000, PLoS One, Mendeley et al., brace yourselves
Social Media & Library Advocacy
The 9 Worst Ways to Use Twitter for Business
Resource Sharing and the Republic of Letters
The Mission of Research Libraries
The Future of Social-Media Archiving
The Age of Big Access
The real cost of free
From e-books to no books
Places of Learning
jdupuis | October 5, 2010This year's Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing took place this past week in Atlanta, GA.
I thought I'd gather together some small part of the blog posts I've been seeing floating around the Internets on this wonderful event.
Opening Session of Grace Hopper Conference - 2010
Dancing with Hundreds of Technical Women at Grace Hopper
The Impact of the Grace Hopper Celebration
It's the most wonderful time of the year
Back from GHC10@tlanta, now time to retrospect
Together, We Are Big Fish!
Grace Hopper Celebration 2010 : Day 2 (29 September)
Open Source Codeathon for Humanity (a…
jdupuis | October 4, 2010
Ebooks Don't Cannibalize Print, People Do
The Why, When, Where, How of publishing data
Libraries Make it Personal
Make The Revolution (Anil Dash on social media & social movements)
Searching For Better Research Habits
Digitizing the Personal Library
Good Freely Available Textbooks on Machine Learning
Faculty, librarians and student research skills: are we on parallel paths?
The blog-broadcast barrier and the reach-responsibility ratio: How our media system crashes, and what to do about it
Dramatic Growth of Open Access: September 30, 2010
The Great Disconnect: Scholars Without Libraries…