acad lib future

Silicon Valley goes to school – notes on Californian capitalism and the ‘disruption’ of public education The End of Higher Education’s Golden Age The Death Of Expertise Closing Time for the Open Internet Tech Workers, Political Speech and Economic Threat Does Ikea Hold The Secret To The Future Of College? Let’s Be Real: Online Harassment Isn’t ‘Virtual’ For Women Can Pearson Solve the Rubric’s Cube? Who Takes MOOCs? For online higher education, the devil is in the data Making It: Pick up a spot welder and join the revolution Higher Education Is Now Ground Zero For Disruption Stupid Simple…
This is a tale of two companies and a bunch of not-so-innocent bystanders. Both Elsevier and Academia.edu are for-profit companies in the scholarly communications industry. Elsevier is a publisher while Academia.edu is a platform for scholars that, among other things, allows them to post copies of their articles online for all the world to see. Both are trying to make money by adding value within the scholarly communications ecosystem. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There is plenty of room within that ecosystem for all kinds of players, both for-profit and non-profit. It's all…
Some capsule reviews of books I've finished over the last little while, in the spirit of catching up. van Grouw, Katrina. The Unfeathered Bird. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. 304pp. ISBN-13: 978-0691151342 This is a seriously beautiful coffee table-sized scientific illustrations book on birds. Basically the idea of the book is to explore birds through drawings mostly of whole or partial skeletons but also some of musculature and "plucked" bodies. A bit odd, a bit creepy but breath-taking. The book opens with a very general section on what birds have in common and then goes into…
Do Librarians Need Tenure? Depends on Which Ones You Ask. The Hunt Library, Innovation, and Tenure Academic Freedom! Huh! What is It Good For? My Thoughts on Faculty Status for Academic Librarians How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang An Academic Cartel? Women and the Internet in Four Parts: Online and Offline Violence Towards Women; Context Collapse, Architecture, and Plows; Sexytime, Gender Roles, and Credit Where Due; Feminism's Twist Ending The Gendering of Technology Work Academic scattering We Are Not Hypnotized (rejecting the extremes wrt online ed) Libraries in the Time of MOOCs The…
The College Boom Has Peaked The Emergent Academic Proletariat and its Shortchanged Students Why I’m quitting the academy On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs Our great, global cities are turning into vast gated citadels where the elite reproduces itself Dear corporations, we’ll trade you a few cents for a better life MOOCs and Economic Reality When MOOCs profit, who pays? Miami-Dade County Will No Longer Close Any Public Libraries But 169 Librarians Would Lose Jobs, Hours Reduced Rebuilding the world technology destroyed College for Free Blood Money, or How Academia is like The Sopranos A…
Admitting Our Agendas A queer, feminist agenda for libraries: Significance, relevance and power Agendas: Everyone has one I dreamed of a book … Why I'm not waiting for tenure to change the world... Value of Libraries Megapost Librarians, Gender, and Tech: Moving the Conversation Forward Silencing, librarianship, and gender: award hate and the silencing of recognition Public Libraries as Social Innovation Catalysts The private-data-for-services trade fallacy Business Model of the Internet Has Been Surveillance Science and Its Skeptics Why We Are Allowed to Hate Silicon Valley You Can't Get…
It's been kind of a crazy week for me, so I haven't really had much of a chance to contribute to or even read a lot of the Open Access Week calls to arms out there right now. So I thought I would kind of commandeer my Friday Fun silly lists habit and redirect that energy to open access. So here it is, from Peter Suber: Open access: six myths to put to rest The only way to provide open access to peer-reviewed journal articles is to publish in open access journals All or most open access journals charge publication fees Most author-side fees are paid by the authors themselves Publishing in a…
Sarah Boon (Twitter, blog) has organized a series of posts on science policy in Canada over the next month or so to be published in the iPolitics online magazine. The first four are out with another eight (two approximately every Monday) between now and November 18th. Which is just in time for the upcoming Canadian Science Policy Conference in Toronto starting November 20th. The articles are available open access. I'll list the first bunch here, including my own contribution comparing what's going on at Library and Archives Canada with similar assaults on science. I will update this post as…
With Open Access Week next week, there could be no greater open access-related news here in Canada than that the three granting councils are coming together to draft a common Open Access Policy. Of those agencies (Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council and Canadian Institute of Health Research), the CIHR already has a OA policy in effect. The process will be to first release a draft policy based on the CIHR one and then consult widely in the various communities that are involved and come to an agreement for a new common policy…
It took me a long time to get through The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out, something like eighteen months to finally wade through it. And it's not that it was even that bad. It a lot of ways, it was better than I expected. Part of it is the fact that it came out just before the MOOC craze hit and it seemed odd for a "future of higher education" book to sort of miss that boat. Part of it is the fact that Christensen and Eyring's book is very deeply rooted in the US experience so maybe parts of it weren't so relevant to my experience in Canada.…
Choosing Real-World Impact Over Impact Factor Practicing Freedom in the Digital Library Dandelions, Prestige, and the Measure of Scholars Programmers insist: “Everybody” does not need to learn to code Digital Decay by Bruce Sterling New York Public Library Rethinks Design CIOs Wear Second Hat (ie. head of small colleges libraries too) Can't Buy Us Love: The Declining Importance of Library Books and the Rising Importance of Special Collections A New Polemic: Libraries, MOOCs, and the Pedagogical Landscape Ethical reflections on MOOC-making (Rebecca Kukla) Why Teach English? Learning Styles:…
I'm Not Your Sweetheart (& interesting counterpoint) Library and Repository Communities Join Together to Identify New Competencies for Academic Librarians How to Scuttle a Scholarly Communication Initiative Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? Anonymous asked: Have you personally received crap for being a Mover and Shaker, or are you taking statements against the award as being directed at its recipients? 30 Years of Change and Hype ITHAKA 2012: A BELATED ANALYSIS Why We Need Radical Change for Media Ethics, Not a Return to Basics The Great Lakes Ecosystem: Uses, Abuses and the…
Wanted: Nonlibrarian Librarians Image, Public Perception, and Lego Librarians I'm Not Your Sweetheart Why your librarian is a superhero Are the Boomers Ruining Libraries? Hurtling Towards Relevance The Long Suffering Librarian Self-Censorship in Libraryland How to Answer “So You Need a Degree to Do That?” Yes, Virginia, it matters which library school you go to Silencing, librarianship, and gender: it is worse to speak ill than to do wrong I Do Not Want My Daughter to Be ‘Nice’ To Move Ahead You Have to Know What to Leave Behind Making Open the Default Position Restoring Trust in Government…
Sometimes The Onion just nails it. I don't have to say how funny/happy/sad/conflicted/overjoyed/suicidal/smug/ your average librarian is going to find this one.Print Dead At 1,803 Reaction to print’s tragic demise was overwhelming, with countless individuals within the publishing sector left reeling at its death. “I’m in absolute shock right now,” said Charles Townsend, CEO of Condé Nast Publications, who reportedly worked closely with the beloved medium throughout his career. “I knew that it had been struggling recently, but, still, I thought it had many more happy, healthy years in it. I…
Change Rhetoric: Good and Bad Three challenges: Engaging, rightscaling and innovating Time for a little dissent To Be Or Not To Be A Library Director How to Answer “So You Need a Degree to Do That?” Putting Things in Perspective Here’s how Amazon self-destructs Amazon vs. your public library Small Pieces Loosely Kludged: Peer Review and Publication in Math Scholarly Communication The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life If We Share Data, Will Anyone Use Them? Data Sharing and Reuse in the Long Tail of Science and Technology…
How Technology Is Destroying Jobs The Fall of the American Worker The Internet’s destroying work — and turning the old middle-class into the new proletariat Giving Away Our Lunch Reminders about the Economics of Becoming an Academic Econ 101 is killing America: Forget the dumbed-down garbage most economists spew. Their myths are causing tragic results for everyday Americans What Is College For? The Great Dereliction The Stakes for All of Us (higher education reform must be approached very carefully) Cash-Strapped Universities Turn to Corporate-Style Consolidation Information Consumerism: The…
Silencing, librarianship, and gender: a preface Silencing, librarianship, and gender: what is silencing? Gender and Digital Identity Does the library world squash public dissent? Library Schism: How Do Librarians Define Their Profession?The Librarian Shortage Myth & Blaming Library School Waiting for Batgirl The MLS quasar, and Lists for the Perplexed New Services, New Skills, and Renewing Staff Breaking Up with Libraries Hey Libraries: It’s Not Me, It’s You and Part 2: Who Gets to Keep the Couch? SUL supports conference anti-harassment policies and My library supports anti-harassment…
On May 20th, 2013 I published my most popular post ever. It was The Canadian War on Science: A long, unexaggerated, devastating chronological indictment. In it, I chronicled at some considerable length the various anti-science measures by the current Canadian Conservative government. The chronological aspect was particularly interesting as you could see the ramping up since the 2011 election where the Conservatives won a majority government after two consecutive minority Conservative governments. As an exercise in alt-metrics (and here), I thought I would share some of the reactions and…
Harvard’s First University-wide Library Mission Statement Approved by Library Board Declaration for the Right to Libraries Open Review: A Study of Contexts and Practices The Cooler: PLoS ONE and the Panic Over Impact NIH sees surge in open-access manuscripts Academics don't let themselves be free Guide to Creative Commons Surge in 'digital dementia' Library DIY: Unmediated point-of-need support Ten trends shaping the future of publishing Risk, responsibility, and public academics ‘Is the BA a ticket to nowhere?’ No. Employers want independent, critical thinking workers Be employable, study…
For various reasons, I've been collecting some resources around open access, open data and scientific and technological innovation in Canada. Since they might be more broadly useful that to just me, I thought I'd share them. Of course, this list is incomplete. I've most likely left out whole swaths of stuff out there, both in terms of organizations and relevant posts and articles as well as institutional OA mandates and author funds I may have missed. Please feel free to suggest items in the comments. One thing in particular I would like to add in a future iteration is a list of library/…