acad lib future
jdupuis | January 17, 2017The STM Publishing News Group is a professional news site for the publishing industry which bring together a range of science, technology and medicine publishing stakeholders with the idea that they'll be able to share news amongst themselves as well as beyond the publishing world to the broader constituency of academics and librarians and others.
You can imagine how thrilled I was to see a post with the words, "How can publishers help librarians?" in the title? I was a little disappointed to find the entire title of the post is "How can publishers help librarians? Cambridge University Press…
jdupuis | May 24, 2016
The record exec, his massive record collection and a future where records won’t matter
What an opera review spiked by the National Post really tells us
Open Letter to YouTube, “Pushers” of Piracy
I’ve sold all my CDs. Can I live without those cracked plastic cases of magic and memories?
Apple Terminating Music Downloads ‘Within 2 Years’
Apple Stole My Music. No, Seriously.
I Remember: The Music of the Holocaust
Revolutionary Eruption: The Violent Sound of Magma and Musical Fusion in 1970s France
MAGMA’S CHEERFULLY INSANE BRAND OF SCI-FI AVANT GARDE MAKE THEM PROG ROCK’S WEIRDEST OUTLIERS
Why…
jdupuis | July 21, 2015One of the central tensions of modern librarianship is how to allocate limited resources to both make the whole world a better place and to serve our local communities by providing them with the services and collections they need to support their teaching, learning and research.
The particular way we try and change the world that I'm talking about here is working to create a fairer and more equitable scholarly communications ecosystem. We do this by both advocating for increased openness in the publishing system and working to actually create that fairer system via our own local open access…
jdupuis | May 26, 2015I am not trying to deny the transformative nature of the Internet, but rather that we've lived with it long enough to ask tough questions.
...
I've tried to avoid the Manichean view of technology, which assumes either that the Internet will save us or that it is leading us astray, that it is making us stupid or making us smart, that things are black or white. The truth is subtler: technology alone cannot deliver the cultural transformation we have been waiting for; instead, we need to first understand and then address the underlying social and economic forces that shape it. Only then can we…
jdupuis | May 21, 2015Elsevier has released a new scholarly article sharing policy which is definitely more disappointing than really any cause for cheer.
Basically the crux is that the only place that authors are allowed to have the final publication version of an article in a non-open access Elsevier publication is on the Elsevier website itself. Of course, after any embargo period has elapse or if the author has paid an author processing charge and published in a hybrid or gold open access journal, they are allowed to post the article on their own webpage or institutional repository.
During the time that the…
jdupuis | May 15, 2015What is digital governance in the first place?
Digital governance is a discipline that focuses on establishing clear accountability for digital strategy, policy, and standards. A digital governance framework, when effectively designed and implemented, helps to streamline digital development and dampen debates around digital channel “ownership.”
-- From the Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design website.
Universities
Intellectual autonomy and stubbornness of staff
-- From the index, Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design, p. 229
Time to take a little medicine! All those…
jdupuis | April 2, 2015
Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous
Science Is Essentially Human; Or Why Better STEM Education Isn't A Threat
Why thinkpieces on STEM education are dangerous
STEM and the "Liberal Education"
STEM Education Promotes Critical Thinking and Creativity: A Response to Fareed Zakaria
Pearson admits to monitoring students' social media use during its online tests
The church of TED
Learning My Lesson: Marina Warner on the disfiguring of higher education
The College Amenities Arms Race
The customer isn't right when it comes to higher education
Marketing Lessons From Sweet Briar…
jdupuis | March 30, 2015Predatory open access journals seem to be a hot topic these days. In fact, there seems to be kind of a moral panic surrounding them. I would like to counter the admittedly shocking and scary stories around that moral panic by pointing out that perhaps we shouldn't be worrying so much about a fairly small number of admittedly bad actors and that we should be more concerned with the larger issues around the limitations of peer review and how scientific error and fraud leak through that system.
I'm hoping my methodology here will be helpful. I hope to counter the predatory open access (OA)…
jdupuis | March 17, 2015While I was reading Cory Doctorow's Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age, I was reminded of a quote of his that I blogged about a few years ago:
The people in Makers experience a world in which technology giveth and taketh away. They live through the fallacy of the record and movie industries: the idea that technology will go just far enough to help them and then stop. That’s totally not what happens. technology joes that far and them keeps on going. It’s a cycle of booms and busts. There are some lovely things about when you’re riding the wave and some scary things…
jdupuis | March 11, 2015
Love in in the time of austerity: Library advocacy in tough times
Never trust a corporation to do a library’s job
Google’s slow fade with librarians
The Library is Not for Studying
Libraries don’t need more advocacy, they need better advocacy
Check this out: Halifax councillor proposes finding a new name for libraries
MLS Required
Talk to your librarian
The near and far future of libraries
Ryerson Learning Centre lets users reshape the space
The Sixth Estate
Time to consolidate law school law libraries?
Learning Commons as Symbol: the new heart of our communities?
Seven things I’ll miss…
jdupuis | March 10, 2015I'm always interested in the present and future of libraries and higher education. There's a steady stream of reports from various organizations that are broadly relevant to the (mostly academic) library biz but they can be tough to keep track of. I thought I'd aggregate some of those here.
Of course I've very likely missed a few, so suggestions are welcome in the comments.
I've done a few similar posts recently here, here and here.
What Is the Internet of Things?
Innovation Study: Challenges and Opportunities for Australia's Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums
Project Information…
jdupuis | February 3, 2015As I mentioned last week, I did a presentation at the recent Ontario Library Association Super Conference using my work on Canadian science policy as a case study in altmetrics.
Here's the session description:
802F Altmetrics in Action: Documenting Cuts to Federal Government Science: An Altmetrics Case Study
The gold standard for measuring scholarly impact is journal article citations. In the online environment we can expand both the conception of scholarly output and how we measure their impact. Blog posts, downloads, page views, comments on blogs, Twitter or Reddit or Stumpleupon mentions…
jdupuis | January 26, 2015I'm doing a presentation at this week's Ontario Library Association Super Conference on a case study of my Canadian War on Science work from an altmetrics perspective. In other words, looking at non-traditional ways of evaluating the scholarly and "real world" impact of a piece of research. Of course, in this case, the research output under examination is itself kind of non-traditional, but that just makes it more fun.
The Canadian War on Science post I'm using as the case study is here.
Here's the session description:
802F Altmetrics in Action: Documenting Cuts to Federal Government…
jdupuis | November 20, 2014
Science Journals Have Passed Their Expiration Date -- It's Time for the Publishing Platform
An interview with Anurag Acharya, Google Scholar lead engineer (2006)
Google Scholar pioneer on search engine’s future
Google Scholar Is Doing Just Fine, Says Google
What if Google killed Scholar?
Making the world’s problem solvers 10% more efficient: Ten years after a Google engineer empowered researchers with Scholar, he can’t bear to leave it
A Decade of Google Scholar
On the Shoulders of Giants: The Growing Impact of Older Articles
Rise of the Rest: The Growing Impact of Non-Elite Journals
The…
jdupuis | November 14, 2014
Against Productivity
How to Escape The Age of Mediocrity
Re-imagining the McGill University Library and Archives - Feasibility Study (scope report here, planning page here)
Surprising Gadgets, Not Just Books, Are Ready for Checkout at College Libraries
Commodification of the information profession: A critique of Higher Education under neoliberalism
Understanding Facebook's lost generation of teens
What's the Academic's Role?
Get Cracking
Culture of cruelty: why bullying thrives in higher education
Being Irrelevant: How Library Data Interchange Standards Have Kept Us Off the Internet
On "…
jdupuis | October 22, 2014I find the whole idea of a "sharing economy" where people barter and exchange and free up excess capacity in their own lives and situations to make others' lives a little easier and cheaper an interesting notion. And worthwhile. After all broadly speaking the open access and open source movements do partake of this same spirit. Libraries too, in that we pool the resources of a community to acquire stuff for the benefit of all the members, so that everyone can share the wealth.
But is there a dark side to sharing?
With the advent of companies like AirBnB and it's ilk not to mention the whole…
jdupuis | October 9, 2014So what do I mean by Big Deals.
In the world of academic libraries, a Big Deal is when we subscribe to the electronic versions of all (or almost all) of a journal publisher's offerings. Usually for it to qualify as a Big Deal, the publisher in question is going to be one of the larger ones out there, like Elsevier or Springer or even a big society publisher like IEEE or the American Chemical Society. The whole idea of the Big Deal is that we should theoretically get a better price for a large volume commitment than for paying on an individual basis for just the ones we think we really want.…
jdupuis | October 1, 2014I'm always interested in the present and future of libraries and higher education. There's a steady stream of reports from various organizations that are broadly relevant to the (mostly academic) library biz but they can be tough to keep track of. I thought I'd aggregate some of those here.
Of course I've very likely missed a few, so suggestions are welcome in the comments.
I've done a few similar posts recently here and here.
NMC Horizon Report 2014 Library Edition
SPARC Article-Level Metrics Primer
Reed Elsevier: Goodbye to Berlin - The Fading Threat of Open Access
Ithaka S+R: Does…
jdupuis | September 26, 2014
Science Advice: Cultivating the necessary functions in Canada
A rough guide to science advice
Principles and politics of scientific advice
What do policymakers want from academics?
Tips for Academics Who Want to Engage Policymakers
Top 20 things scientists need to know about policy-making
Top 20 things politicians need to know about science
12 things policy-makers and scientists should know about the public
Science in an Age of Scrutiny: How Scientists Can Respond to Criticism and Personal Attacks
The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate…
jdupuis | September 16, 2014It's been quite a long while since I've done a "books I'd like to read" post, that's for sure. This fall seems to be have a particularly exciting list of books so I thought I'd pull some of them together (as well as some older books) here for all our enjoyment. These are all books I don't own yet, so they are not part of my towering to-read list. Yet.
I'm on sabbatical this academic year so I am trying to read and review books more diligently, aiming for about one per week. Maybe some of these will appear reviewed on the blog in the not too distant future.
Enjoy!
WTF, Evolution?!: A…