information literacy
jdupuis | October 28, 2015My library is hosting a Ada Lovelace Day event tomorrow (ok, a little late...). Continuing in a tradition of having Women in Science Wikipedia Edit-a-thons, we're hosting our own Wikipedia Women in Science Edit-a-thon!
I've been doing a fair bit of reading over the last couple of years about Wikipedia culture and especially how it relates to the under-representation of women both as editors and as subjects of articles. So I thought I'd share some of my readings here with all of you.
Of course, this list is in no way comprehensive or complete. I welcome suggestions for further readings in the…
jdupuis | February 13, 2013The biennial Western Conference on Science Education will be taking place this coming July 9–July 11, 2013.
I'm thinking very seriously of going and I think science/engineering librarians in general should consider doing so as well.
Here's how they describe it:
The biennial Western Conference for Science Education creates an ongoing organizational infrastructure that invites teaching and research faculty, librarians and other educational professionals, regardless of their experience level, to collaborate on the improvement of post-secondary Science education through the exchange of…
jdupuis | September 20, 2011A project I heartily endorse on a topic near and dear to my heart, launched by the Library Society of the World, Librarianship by Walking Around:
The Library Society of the World is putting together an online and print-on-demand anthology of weblog posts, essays, articles, and other material entitled Librarianship by Walking Around, patterned after the successful Hacking the Academy project.
Librarianship doesn't just happen in the library! Librarianship happens wherever information exchange happens--that is, just about everywhere. Librarianship by Walking Around celebrates librarians who…
jdupuis | July 21, 2011Reference librarians, of course!
I'm reading Last Car to Elysian Fields by mystery writer James Lee Burke and came across this rather nice passage on pages 141-142.
So where do you go to find a researcher who is intelligent, imaginative, skilled in the use of computers, devoted to discovering the truth, and knowledgeable about science, technology, history and literature, and who usually works for dirt and gets credit for nothing?
After lunch I drove down to the city library on Main and asked the reference librarian...
And the whole scene in the novel is really very good, as Burke's…
jdupuis | July 14, 2011As usual, a wealth of interesting articles in the latest ISTL:
Faculty of 1000 and VIVO: Invisible Colleges and Team Science by John Carey, City University of New York
E-book Usage among Chemists, Biochemists and Biologists: Findings of a Survey and Interviews by Yuening Zhang and Roger Beckman, Indiana University, Bloomington
Look Beyond Textbooks: Information Literacy for First-Year Science Students by Gabrielle K.W. Wong, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
The Changing Role of Blogs in Science Information Dissemination by Laksamee Putnam, Towson University
Life Science Data…
jdupuis | June 21, 2011A couple of odd ones from last week's Inside Higher Ed, both related to the way scholarship, higher education and the intelligent design/creationism movement intersect.
First up, Blasphemy of a Different Kind, involving people possibly being fired for teaching evolution at an Adventist school. Although the university involved claims that the firings weren't related to the teaching of evolution, it's hard to imagine that there wasn't some connection.
The president of La Sierra's board of trustees on Friday asked for the resignations of Jeff Kaatz, the vice president for university…
jdupuis | June 8, 2011As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I did a short presentation on Scholarship in the Public Eye: The Case for Social Media as part of a panel for a York Faculty of Graduate Studies Scholarly Communications Series.
And yes, I was the Twitter guy, although some of the other presenters did talk about their use of Twitter. Basically, my point was that Twitter and blogs can be part and parcel of the research and research outreach life of academics. I mostly concentrated on Twitter, but I did try and make the same sorts of points about blogging as well as I spoke.
Anyways, I thought I would share…
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 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 | March 31, 2011This series of four posts by William M. Briggs is pretty interesting stuff.
The kind of thing where I'm torn: is it the most brilliant and perceptive thing I've ever read about higher education or is it a series of slightly early April 1st posts?
Dear Internet, I really need all you people out there to help me figure this one out. Which way does it go.
And by the way, you really have to read all four posts to get the complete message. The comment streams are interesting too.
University Professors Teach Too Much: Part I
Here is what everybody knows: the best researchers are often not the…
jdupuis | March 12, 2011As usual, a bunch of great new articles from the most recent ISTL!
Five Years Later: Predicting Student Use of Journals in a New Water Resources Graduate Program by Andrea A. Wirth and Margaret Mellinger, Oregon State University
Seeing the Forest of Information for the Trees of Papers: An Information Literacy Case Study in a Geography/Geology Class by Linda Blake and Tim Warner, West Virginia University
Local Citation Analysis of Graduate Biology Theses: Collection Development Implications by Laura Newton Miller, Carleton University
Career Motivations of the Scientist-Turned-Librarian: A…
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 16, 2011McMaster University colleague Andrew Colgoni (Twitter) has taken my Stealth Librarian Manifesto and tamed it a little bit and come up with his own version, which is here.
I like what Andrew has to say in a post titled, I prefer Ninja Librarianship, myself:
[T]here's much that can be learned from discovering where your faculty are reading/going and finding them there. This can be as simple as finding on-campus conferences that draw a broad faculty audience, and visit that. Here at McMaster, the Centre for Leadership in Learning annually hosts a teaching and learning conference, which draws…
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 | December 17, 2010For those that haven't heard about the NASA/arsenic bacteria story that's been exploding all over the science blogosphere over the last couple of weeks, I like the summary over at Jonathan Eisen's Tree of Life blog:
NASA announced a major press conference
at the conference they discussed a new Science paper claiming to show the discovery of a microbe that could replace much/some of its phosphate with arsenic
initial press coverage of the paper was very positive and discussed the work as having profound implications for understanding of life in the universe - though some scientists in some of…
jdupuis | November 5, 2010York University Computer Science & Engineering professor Anestis Toptsis was kind enough recently to invite me to speak to his CSE 3000 Professional Practice in Computing class.
He gave me two lecture sessions this term, one to talk about library-ish stuff. In other words, what third year students need to know about finding conference and journal articles (and other stuff too) for their assignments and projects. You can find my notes here, in the lecture 1 section.
In the second session, which I gave yesterday, he basically let me talk about anything that interested me. So, of course,…
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 | September 15, 2010From this day forward, Scott Rosenberg is an honorary librarian.
One of the things that librarians talk about a lot is how to evaluate a random web page -- what signs and signals to look for that will give the unsuspecting student a clue as to whether or not they might want to use a particular web page in an assignment.
We talk a lot about the various W's -- who, what, why, when and all the rest. Who created the page, what does it say, does their appear to be any bias, is it current. There has been tons of literature on the subject and a very large number of online tutorials.
Scott…
jdupuis | September 1, 2010The last little while has seen an amazing proliferation of science blogging communities. Scientopia, Guardian Science Blogs and PLoS Blogs are only the three most recent that I know of.
I think it's great -- the more the merrier I say. Of course, as networks take up more and more space in the science blogging ecosystem it seems to me that independent bloggers might feel isolated or under pressure or neglected some how. I don't think that will be a huge problem as independents will continue to thrive in niches large and small and will continue to draw audiences to what they have to say.…
jdupuis | July 12, 2010For now, at least.
My natural inclinations about this whole mess are probably closest in nature to either Chad Orzel's or Jason Rosenhouse's, so reading them will probably give you a pretty close idea of where I stand. Bora, not surprisingly, has collected a lot of the reaction.
I also really like what Christie Wilcox has to say:
Let me make it clear, though - I don't blame anyone for leaving. I don't hold it against them. While I may not have had the same visceral reaction they did, I also haven't been here that long. I haven't dealt with this kind of mismanagement and gotten fed up about…