jdupuis | May 19, 2010Here's a pretty exciting opportunity at my institution. Although not a science library position per se, there will be ample opportunity to work with science and engineering faculty and students.
Position Rank: Full Time Tenure Stream - Assistant Librarian
Discipline/Field: GIS and Map Librarian
Home Faculty: Libraries
Home Department/Area/Division: Map Library
Affiliation/Union: YUFA
Position Start Date: December 1, 2010
GIS and Map Librarian, York University Libraries
York University Libraries seeks an enthusiastic and service-oriented librarian with excellent communication skills to fill…
jdupuis | May 18, 2010Yes, it was May 18, 2009 that I opened a new chapter in Confessions of a Science Librarian history.
One year on Scienceblogs -- it's been a fantastic experience, one that I'm looking forward to continuing for the foreseeable future.
Now, where's the cake?
jdupuis | May 17, 2010Yesterday was a very sad day in the hard rock/heavy metal community as Rainbow/Black Sabbath/Dio/Heaven & Hell vocalist Ronnie James Dio died at the age of 67.
I've been a big fan of Ronnie James Dio ever since way back in 1980 I heard the song Neon Knights, the first big song he did with Sabbath.
Five (ok, six) songs to remember him by.
Neon Knights by Black Sabbath
I by Black Sabbath (performed here by Heaven & Hell)
The Last in Line by Dio
Man on the Silver Mountain by Rainbow
Bible Black by Heaven & Hell
Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple. Ronnie guests on this concert version…
jdupuis | May 14, 2010The Cronk of Higher Education is seriously my new very best friend. I work on a very large commuter campus and let's just say this very definitely resonated with me. I also take public transit to work every day through a very crowded and congested city, with my commute time varying from 60-90 minutes each way, sometimes worse if you include time waiting for the bus to arrive.
Take a look:
Bates explained that within the next eight months, all academic buildings at the university would be destroyed to create more available parking.
"Where the buildings once stood, we'll install JumboTron…
jdupuis | May 13, 2010By some strange coincidence given yesterday's post, this post on Raising your internal profile as an academic liaison librarian by Emma Woods came across my Twitter feed this morning.
As part of a task and ï¬nish group on internal marketing of academic liaison librarians at the University of Westminster, I posted a message to a couple of JISCmail lists to see what other librarians do in this respect. As ever, I was delighted by the number of responses I received and the amount of interest there is on this topic.
In the current ï¬nancial climate where every penny counts, raising our internal…
jdupuis | May 12, 2010Or is that the inherent insularity of academic culture in general?
Joshua Kim has some great observations (in context of a review of This Book is Overdue) (Amazon) about the great chasm of misunderstanding between the culture of the academic library and the broader academic culture.
As academia shifts and changes, as budgets squeeze, as millenials millenialize, it's a constant struggle to make the case for the library's role in academic life. It's hard to know both who our best champion's are and who our most determined opponents are. Sitting in the library talking to ourselves is probably…
jdupuis | May 11, 2010I have a few conferences coming up and I thought I'd share my schedule just in case any of you out there in sciencelibrarianblogland will also be attending.
I'll list them in order, along with whatever I'll be presenting.
BookCamp Toronto, May 15, Toronto
9:30: eBooks in Education and Academia -- the glacial revolution
John Dupuis (York University)
Evan Leibovitch (York University)
Description: Despite growing public acceptance of eBooks, two areas in which they could offer the most benefit -- education and academia -- are far behind the eBook mainstream. This session will discuss issues…
jdupuis | May 7, 2010Ah, The Onion. A true repository of snark and snideitude
But as the winter lingered, Spirit began producing thousands of pages of sometimes rambling and dubious data, ranging from complaints that the Martian surface was made up almost entirely of the same basalt, to long-winded rants questioning the exorbitant cost and scientific relevance of the mission.
Project leaders receive data from the Mars rover Spirit.
"Granted, Spirit has been extraordinarily useful to our work," Callas said. "Last week, however, we received three straight days of images of the same rock with the message 'HAPPY NOW…
jdupuis | May 5, 2010It's been quite a long while since I've done one of these. Here are some recently noticed books that look interesting from either a collection development or a professional development point of view.
Fans, Friends And Followers: Building An Audience And A Creative Career In The Digital Age by Scott Kirsner
An essential guide for filmmakers, musicians, writers, artists, and other creative types. "Fans, Friends & Followers" explores the strategies for cultivating an online fan base that can support your creative career, enabling you to do the work you want to do and make a living at it.…
jdupuis | May 4, 2010That's the title of the short article I have in our most recent York Libraries Faculty Newsletter. It's a rejigged version for faculty of the two posts I did a while back on the blog I use for IL sessions, here and here. I'll be doing a more formal report on the IL blog at an upcoming conference, but that's for another post.
A lot of the newsletter is of local interest only, but there are a couple of articles that will have a broader appeal:
Information Literacy and Peer Tutors in the Classroom
Research Study on Perceptions of ILIt's also worth pointing out the short profile of Toni Olshen…
jdupuis | April 30, 2010From The Cronk of Higher Education, New First Year Experience Class: How To Not Be An Asshole, this is very funny.
The six-week class is comprised of five modules:
So You're Drunk: A Guide To Quietly Stumbling Home
Street Signs Are Not Dorm Room Decorations
Streaking: A Fast-Track To Suspension
Noises Neighbors Hate To Hear After 10 pm
Nine Reasons the Police Will Handcuff YouCurrent students expressed skepticism about the offering.
"I think it's retarded," remarked Marco Miller, a current first year student. "Sometimes, when I'm mad, I just want to pee on a statue or throw bottles at parked…
jdupuis | April 28, 2010A great two-part series on great computing museums from the last few issues of Communications of the ACM (here and here).
The museums they profile are:
The Computer History Museum
The Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum
The Science Museum in London
The Deutches Museum
U.S. National Museum of American HistoryI'll include an extra bit from the first CACM article on the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. I'm choosing that one because as it happens I'll almost certainly be visiting it this coming July. I'm fortunate to have been invited to the annual Science Foo Camp, which happens to be at…
jdupuis | April 23, 2010This one's on Cracked.com and, unusually for them, is Safe for Work.
Now, I'm down with making education more interactive, social, customizable, multitasking, multimedia and web-enabled and all that, but for every good thing there are potential downsides. And Cracked's article nicely sums up some of the more, shall we say, absurd and ridiculous implications of Web-enabled education.
Let's just say the words pwned, First!, mentos, TL;DR and Nigerian princes all make cameo appearances.
Take a look, the Top 20 Ways the Internet is Taking Over Schools.
jdupuis | April 22, 2010A small selection from some tables of content from a few recent journals and proceedings. These will require subscription access to the ACM Digital Library.
Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
Connecting k-16 curriculum & policy: making computer science engaging, accessible, and hospitable for underrepresented students by Joanna Goode
Computational thinking for the sciences: a three day workshop for high school science teachers by Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed, Dennis Brylow, et al.
Connecting across campus by Mark D. LeBlanc, Tom Armstrong, Michael B. Gousie
Teaching communication…
jdupuis | April 20, 2010That's the topic for the most recent Schubmehl-Prein Prize for Best Essay on Social Impact of Computing.
The Schubmehl-Prein Prize for best analysis of the social impact of a particular aspect of computing technology will be awarded to a student who is a high school junior in academic year 2009-2010. The first-place award is $1,000, the second-place award is $500, and the third-place award is $250. Winning entries are traditionally published in the Association for Computing Machinery's Computers and Society online magazine.
The winners of the 2009 contest are published in the most recent…
jdupuis | April 16, 2010If you love sword & sorcery books and stories (and who doesn't!), SF Signal has one of their Mind Meld features in which they ask a bunch of writers and editors to name their favourites of the genre.
Here's a taste:
Lou Anders
"Ill met in Lankhmar" tops any list. How could it not? Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser defined sword & sorcery for me as a child, and I'm thrilled that, having just started rereading their adventures they are thus far holding up. Michael Moorcock's "Stormbringer" is tied or a close second. I haven't read that since I was 15 but the Moorcock I have read hasn't dated.…
jdupuis | April 15, 2010A month or so ago I posted on Scholarly Societies: Why Bother?, basically on the challenges that scholarly societies face in the digital age. I got a few good comments, getting a nice discussion going.
I also posed a few questions directly to scholarly societies but unfortunately didn't get any comments from any of the various societies themselves. I did find that a bit disappointing in that the public conversation seemed to be happening without them. Never a good thing in the digital age.
Today, however, Kevin Marvel of the American Astronomical Society added a comment to my original…
jdupuis | April 14, 2010From Twitter, here's the announcement:
Have you ever sent out a "tweet" on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress.
That's right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter's inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That's a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.
We thought it fitting to give the initial heads-up to the Twitter community itself via our own feed @librarycongress. (…
jdupuis | April 14, 2010This is one of those books that I just seemed to argue with constantly while I was reading it. You know, "Hey, you, book, you're just plain wrong about this!"
But, as much as I argued with it, as much as I wanted all of the main points to be wrong, as much as I disagreed with many of the details, by the end I grudgingly accepted that Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price might just have a few very valid things to say about the way the economics of online content is evolving.
This is the Google generation, and they're grown up online simply assuming that everythng digital is…
jdupuis | April 13, 2010There's a massive libraryland industry organized around figuring out what students want from us in terms of space, collections, services, etc. We survey, observe and focus group them to death. And that's great and incredibly valuable. But sometimes I think we might have a tendency to see what we want when we're observing and they might have a tendency to tell us what they think we want to hear when we survey or focus group.
Personally, I like to do Twitter searches. It's an interesting way to find out what they're saying and thinking about us when they're being candid and brutal and don't…