faculty liaison
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 Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one.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 | 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 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 Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one.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 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 | April 16, 2011Yeah, and I'm touchy and upset and discomfited by this whole thing as much as anyone. This is about my touchiness, not yours. Although please feel free to add your own feelings in the comments.
Thinking about it over the last few days I've come to glimpse the sources of my own unease.
And I've come to think that they are related to the various threads that are becoming tangled up in this controversy. It's almost like there's a Cartesian diagram with four or more quadrants of issues and all the various responses are each focusing on one drawn through one or two or three of those quadrants…
jdupuis | April 11, 2011Welcome to the latest instalment in my occasional series of interviews with people in the world of higher education and scholarly publishing.
This time around it's a bit different with the circumstances being a little unusual. Last week I did a back-of-the-envelope tweet about the Twitter habits of senior academic administrators and my experiences creating a list of those administrators. The uses of social networks in education is an area that really interests me and the habits of those senior administrators was something I'd been wondering about.
Well, my old blogging buddy Stephanie…
jdupuis | April 8, 2011Hey, it wasn't me that said that. It wasn't even another academic librarian.
It was Joshua Kim in his post from today's Inside Higher Ed, 5 Reasons Librarians Are the Future of Ed Tech.
It's a great post, talking from an outsider's perspective about what librarians bring to the educational process. Kim concentrates on the role that libraries and librarians can play in moving into campus educational technology roles but really, the list he gives applies to the roles that we can play all across the various functions on average campus. Especially those we play as librarians.
Not as…
jdupuis | April 6, 2011...Or not?
Not surprisingly, one of my professional interests is the use of Twitter and other social networks/media in higher education. And not just for educational/classroom purposes but also for outreach.
In other words, people who work at a college or university using Twitter in an official capacity to reach out to other people outside their organization. Of course, this applies to using Twitter to recruit students, to reach out to parents, to connect to similar external departments or organizations.
It also applies to outreach within an organization. For example, we use twitter at my…
jdupuis | March 23, 2011My Stealth Librarianship Manifesto post from last month continues to gather comments and page views, albeit at a slower rate than before. Of course, that's very gratifiying to see. If you haven't checked in on the post in a while, there are probably a couple of new comments with librarians' stories that you might want to check out.
To keep the idea going, I've decided to have occasional posts highlighting "stealthy librarian" posts and articles I see around the web. These are posts that highlight facutly/librarian collaboration in teaching or research, librarians integrated with business…
jdupuis | March 10, 2011A terrific new opportunity at my institution. I'm not in the reporting department or on the search committee, but I can answer general questions about York and the environment. My email is jdupuis at yorku dot ca.
Position Rank: Full Time Tenure Stream - Assistant Librarian
Discipline/Field: Digital Humanities Librarian
Home Faculty: Libraries
Home Department/Area/Division: Scott Library
Affiliation/Union: YUFA
Position Start Date: August 1, 2011
Digital Humanities Librarian (Continuing Appointment)
Scott Reference Department
York University Libraries seeks a creative, motivated, innovative…
jdupuis | March 7, 2011And I mean zombie vampire in the best way, as a comment on how hard it seems to be to kill my Stealth Librarianship Manifesto. It's even been translated into French! (Merci, Marléne!)
For a post I mostly wrote in an hour of white hot typing from midnight to 1 a.m. some weeknight when I should have been sleeping it sure has some legs.
There have been three posts about the manifesto fairly recently, mostly more critical than complimentary but with a lot of input that I really value.
Let's take a look.
Identity crisis? No. Or why I think we need to move beyond "stealth librarianship." by…
jdupuis | February 23, 2011The authors over at In the Library with the Lead Pipe have posted about my recent manifesto on Stealth Librarianship.
There's some pretty healthy debate, agreement, disagreement, qualification, additions and subtractions going on there, so please do check it out: Lead Pipe Debates the Stealth Librarianship Manifesto.
Some excerpts:
What Dupuis fails to mention here is that many academic librarians MUST publish in traditional, peer-reviewed library publications while striving to attain tenure. I am not personally in a tenure-track position, so I have the liberty of not fretting over where I…
jdupuis | February 14, 2011Welcome to the long-awaited latest instalment in my occasional series of interviews with people in the library, publishing and scitech worlds. This time around the subjects of my first group interview are the gang at EngineerBlogs.org.
From my welcome-to-the-blogosphere post, here's a condensed bit about them:
Cherish The Scientist (EB)
I am an electrical engineer with an interest in various areas of electromagnetics, including antennas and numerical simulation techniques, as well as IC packaging. I have completed a master's degree in electrical engineering and am currently pursuing a…
jdupuis | February 10, 2011Stealth librarianship is a way of being.
This particular edition of the manifesto applies to academic libraries. The principles of stealth librarianship apply to all branches of the profession, each in particular ways. Other manifestos could exist for, say, public or corporate librarians.
However the core is the same: to thrive and survive in a challenging environment, we must subtly and not-so-subtly insinuate ourselves into the lives of our patrons. We must concentrate on becoming part of their world, part of their landscape.
Our two core patron communities as academic librarians are…
jdupuis | February 5, 2011I got an email the other day announcing the 2011 Canadian Engineering Education Association Annual Conference. It'll be held from June 6 to 8, 2011, at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland & Labrador.
The conference page is here and the call for papers is here.
The call for papers:
The Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA) is an organization whose mission is to "enhance the competence and relevance of graduates from Canadian engineering schools through continuous improvement in engineering education and design education." This second annual CEEA conference…
jdupuis | January 31, 2011The women science bloggers conversation is getting so long and elongated, I thought it would be interesting and, I hope, useful to put all the posts in rough chronological order. By rough I mean that I haven't attempted to order the posts within each day of publication. Perhaps I'll take another pass at the list later on for that.
The original list of posts is here.
2011.01.18. Woman science bloggers discuss pros and cons of online exposure
2011.01.22.Science Online 2011: Even when we want something, we need to hide it.
2011.01.22. Women science bloggers: Some thoughts (er, sorry, felt I…
jdupuis | January 30, 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 Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, is from January 23, 2009.
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The first wave of social media books, like Wikinomics or even Here Comes Everybody, were of the "what the heck is…
jdupuis | January 25, 2011I'm always very happy to see a librarian blogger embedded in a science blogging network. It's very important to get the library message out beyond just the library echo chamber and to the faculty, students and researchers who are out patron community.
So I was very pleased to see Elizabeth Brown's new blog, Social Disruption, on the Science 3.0 blog network.
From her inauguaral post:
I've been able to found contacts and establish connections to quite a few people through Twitter, friendfeed, Linkedin, and Mendeley. This is/was an important resource as I'm the only person in the library with…
jdupuis | January 24, 2011A few days ago I posted some thoughts on the programming of the recent ScienceOnline 2011 conference and yesterday I posted some thoughts about the more social and fun aspects of the event.
In this post I like to look forward to next year's conference and start thinking about some of the sessions I might like to organize. My very early thoughts are coalescing around undergraduate education around. I have a couple of ideas which I think might be interesting to pursue.
First of all, I'm interested in collaborations around teaching undergrads about the scholarly information landscape. On…