librarianship
jdupuis | June 13, 2017As a kind of quick follow up to my long ago post on Some perspective on “predatory” open access journals (presentation version, more or less, here and very short video version here) and in partial response to the recent What I learned from predatory publishers, I thought I would gather a bunch of worthwhile items here today.
Want to prepare yourself to counter panic around predatory open access journals? Here's some great places to start.
How to talk about “Predatory” Publishing: Reclaiming the Narrative
Beyond Beall’s List: Better understanding predatory publishers
Blacklists are…
jdupuis | May 30, 2016I'll be attending upcoming Canadian Library Association National Forum, a kind of sunset conference as CLA reimagines and recreates itself. The idea is to take the pulse of Canadian librarians on the important issues in the library-related landscape. I'll be curating the session on Canada's National Digital Strategy, including presentations by me and two others, Emily Landriault and Bobby Glushko.
The details are below.
Digital Strategy and the Government of Canada
Presentation speakers
Emily Landriault: Open Government and Open Data
Bobby Glushko: Cyberbullying and Doxing
John Dupuis:…
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 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 | 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 | 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 | September 22, 2014Melissa K. Aho and Erika Bennet's anthology The Machiavellian Librarian: Winning Allies, Combating Budget Cuts, and influencing Stakeholders is pretty good for what it is, in some ways better than I expected. It's a guide for maneuvering office politics and advancing your agenda, big and small, with the stakeholders and influencers that matters in your environment. Sadly, this book fails for what it isn't: a book that tackles the issues and trends where librarians really need to advance our agendas and make ourselves key "thought leaders" and "influencers."
The book is a collection of 25…
jdupuis | February 25, 2014I'll be at Science Online Together for the next few days. I missed last year so I'm really looking forward to getting back into the Science Online swing of things.
As is occasionally my habit, I'll be listing here some attendees that are either Canadian, librarians or, in a few select cases, both. I'm adding websites and Twitter handles in the lists, but only if they're included in the directory listing.
Librarians
KT Vaughn
Karen Ciccone
Michael Habib (Twitter)
Stephanie Brown (Twitter)
Barrie Hayes (Twitter)
Laksamee Putnam (Twitter)
Zoe Pettway Unno (Twitter)
John Dupuis
Canadians…
jdupuis | May 16, 2013
Yes, We Should Talk About the MLS
On Big Name Librarians
The Loon’s job
Why am I getting my MLIS? Because I have to.
So You Think You Want to Be a Librarian?
The Adjunctification of Academic Librarianship
Your candidate pools
Fork the Academy (github as a model for scholarly communcation)
Massive (But Not Open) (new online cs degree program)
[Expletive Deleted] Ed-Tech #Edinnovation (relates ed tech history as it is often told to how Argo treats the Canadian contribution to that story)
Making the peer review process public
Why is Science Behind a Paywall?
The Delete Squad Google, Twitter,…
jdupuis | April 13, 2013
Librarians as faculty? It's a red herring.
Why I think faculty status for librarians is (generally) a bad idea
Library employees protest changed title
As Role of Librarians Evolves, Some Colleges End Their Faculty Status
Stratification and losing faculty status
Gender, “thought leaders”, ego, and subversion
Unpacking “faculty status”
Postscript: faculty status and “administrative bloat”
What Is the Business of Literature?
Facebook Leans In
Digital Research, Not Teaching and Ithaka report here.
Free to Profit (Coursera makes some profit)
Systematic Errors of Judgement (bias against women in…
jdupuis | March 30, 2013
Considering the librarian tech skills gap
Ten Easy Pieces on the Profession of Librarianship
Nation's first bookless library on university campus is thriving at UTSA
Conference Report: Beyond PDF 2
Opinions, Morals and What Science Could but Shouldn’t Tell Us
Degrees of Certainty
The Ethics of MOOCs
The Brave New World of College Branding
Journal’s Editorial Board Resigns in Protest of Publisher’s Policy Toward Authors
On PyCon
I Have a Few Things to Say About Adria
If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, why are scientists from Earth?
For Libraries, MOOCs Bring Uncertainty and…
jdupuis | March 24, 2013The Journal of Library Administration is published by Taylor & Francis, a big publishing conglomerate. According to Brian Mathews, while he was in the middle of putting together a special issue on the future of libraries he received notice that the editorial board was resigning due to conflicts with the publisher around what kind of author rights regime the journal should use. Here is the note he received from the board:
The Board believes that the licensing terms in the Taylor & Francis author agreement are too restrictive and out-of-step with the expectations of authors in the LIS…
jdupuis | March 23, 2013
What makes one a librarian?
Goodbye, Faculty Status
Library employees protest changed title: New designation for incoming employee provokes heated debate
why should librarians learn python? (a better answer)
Why Not Grow Coders from the inside of Libraries?
Alt-Ac: Breathing Life into Libraries or Eroding the Profession?
Of Hybrarians, Scholar-Librarians, Academic Refugees, & Feral Professionals
Fending off university-attacking zombies
Defining the library ... reflexively
The Powerful Art Of Resilience
Pages of History (end of the scholarly journal article?)
Topic Pages: PLoS…
jdupuis | March 18, 2013
Hacking at Education: TED, Technology Entrepreneurship, Uncollege, and the Hole in the Wall
Why MOOCs May Drive Up Higher Ed Costs
California Bill Seeks Campus Credit for Online Study
The great librarian identity crisis of 2013
Q&A: Dan Cohen on His Role as the Founding Executive Director of DPLA
The Basic Skills of All Librarians
Poaching jobs
Is coding an essential library skill?
Beyond the Bullet Points: Rock Stars
Why I Ignore Gurus, Sherpas, Ninjas, Mavens, and Other Sages
Cracking the Code: Librarians Acquiring Essential Coding Skills
Research Librarians Discuss New Ways to Support…
jdupuis | March 8, 2013Just like the author of this piece, I too attended a recent talk by Cory Doctorow -- a brilliant talk relating the life and death of Aaron Swartz with the theme of his latest novel Homeland -- and similarly I often marvel at how lucky we are that the web is free and open.
Enjoy this wonderful little satire and shudder at the possibilities.
The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL!
The World Wide Web has been great, but to be honest, it's also been a lot harder than it needs to be. I know some of you love creating new web pages and participating in online discussions, but the last thing most…
jdupuis | March 2, 2013(This post supersedes the previous post listing items related to the Aaron Swartz story. That post was from January 20, 2013.)
A few comments.
Aaron Swartz's story has had a huge impact, it has reverberated far and wide not just through the interlinking worlds of technology and online activism but far into the mainstream. The library world has been no exception, with quite a few of the items below being from our world.
How has the library world reacted? If anything, I would hope that we have been challenged to examine our core values very carefully, to reflect deeply about how we make…
jdupuis | February 8, 2013Librarians seem to be under siege these days, both from within and without.
But at our core, librarians no matter where they work just want to make the world a better place.
io9 has a wonderful older post with a list of fictional librarians who've perhaps put that motto into action a little more directly than most: 20 heroic librarians who save the world.
Here's a couple, but definitely go on over to the post and check the rest out:
Rex Libris in the Rex Libris comics
Rex Libris is the "tough-as-nails Head Librarian at Middleton Public Library," who strikes fear into recalcitrant borrowers —…