librarianship
jdupuis | January 29, 2010I couldn't agree more with Bonnie Swoger's sentiment that academic librarians need to stop going to library conferences, although I perhaps might not go that far.
In any case, the last couple of weeks have been pretty fallow blogging weeks for me and I just can't seem to come up with any original commentary on the topic. Fortunately, I have an post from way back in June 2008 expressing many of the same sentiments, though probably neither as well nor as succinctly as Bonnie has.
I'll also not that the post was excerpted in The Library Leadership Network.
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I saw…
jdupuis | January 14, 2010Following along in the tradition of Bora's introductions of the various attendees for the upcoming Science Online 2010 conference, I thought I'd list all the library people that are attended. I'm not going to try and introduce each of the library people, I'll leave that to Bora, but I thought it might be nice to have us all listed in one place.
I did a quick list in my post a while back, but I revisited the attendee list after it closed and noticed a couple of people that weren't in the first list.
As I said in the earlier post, there's been a good tradition of librarians and library people…
Christensen, Clayton M. The innovator's dilemma. New York: Collins Business Essentials, 2006. 286pp.
jdupuis | January 8, 2010This book is about the failure of companies to stay atop their industries when the confront certain tyupes of market and technological change. It's not about the failure of simply any company, but of good companies -- the kinds that many managers have admired and tried to emulate, the companies known for their abilities to innovate and execute....It is about well-manged companies that have their competitive antennae up, listen astutely to their customers, invest aggressively in new technologies, and yet still lose market dominance. (p. xi)
Clayton M. Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma isn…
jdupuis | January 4, 2010Burn down the library. C'mon, all the books in the world are already digitized. Burn the thing down...Stop air conditioning the books. Enough already.
-Adrian Sannier (via)
Optimism seems like a strange thing for a librarian to have at the start of the second decade of the 21st century. There's no shortage of people who seem to think that we'll be completely replaced by Google, that everything is available online for free, that students don't read.
And we've all had experiences where we tell someone at a party what we do for a living and the person just gets a puzzled expression on their…
jdupuis | December 30, 2009A nice quote from Rick Salutin's most recent Globe and Mail column, In praise of words, not books, which I actually read in a print edition of the newspaper this morning. Yes, we get two daily print newspapers, The Globe and The Toronto Star. My teenaged sons read them too.
Anyways, the point Salutin is making is that true knowledge and wisdom aren't communicated by static media like books or articles, but by human interaction -- conversation is key in that human culture is essentially oral. Of course, you can define oral culture to include a lot of technologically mediated forms of…
jdupuis | December 17, 2009Thinking about the future is very hard.
You'd think I'd know just how hard it is, having engaged in it on numerous occasions during my blogging career and even writing a book about it. But the more I think about the future -- of the climate, of society, of the economy, of information, of publishing, of libraries and, ultimately, of librarians like me -- the harder it is to pin down what I really think is going to happen. The future has a nasty way of sneaking up on you and actually happening in the past. Some things happen faster than you thought, some slower. Some things you thought were…
jdupuis | November 30, 2009...present of public and academic libraries?
What got me thinking along these lines most recently was the recent Clay Shirky blog post,
Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization. It's a pretty good post that puts a particular kind of physical retail into the context of current online retail and media shift realities.
In the first section of the post, Shirky basically outlines the trouble that physical bookstores are in, caught between the rock of the competition of online/big box store and the hard place of the coming media singularity.
Like record stores and video rental places,…
jdupuis | November 18, 2009Or, Twitter & blogs as ways of knowing, Part 2.
A month or so ago, I poked a little gentle fun at social media extremists, basically exploring the idea that engaging online is the be-all and end-all of the library profession versus the idea that much of what we do online is peripheral to the main thrust of what librarianship is all about. To a certain degree, I guess I was setting up a couple of straw people just for the purpose of knocking them down but at the time it seemed like contrasting those extremes was a useful way of looking at the issue.
Of course, I don't believe either…
jdupuis | October 19, 2009As I mentioned in my previous post, I did a little Q&A about the new outsourcing arrangement that CISTI has negotiated with Infotrieve.
Q1. What's the effect on jobs at CISTI from this move?
As you may know, NRC-CISTI is transforming itself to be well positioned to serve the needs of Canadian knowledge workers now and in the future. This transformation is a major undertaking for the organization and will require a significant transition for NRC-CISTI's workforce.
NRC is working to mitigate the effect on employees by seeking to place as many of the affected employees as possible within…
jdupuis | October 19, 2009Such is the subject line of an email I got from the NRC-CISTI people last week. NRC-CISTI is Canada's National Research Council -- Canada Institute of Scientific and Technical Informamtion. In other words, Canada's national science library. Many of you probably know them for their document delivery service.
The basic message is that the document delivery service has been outsourced to a US company:
NRC-CISTI, Canada's national science library is changing and we are energized by the possibilities as we move forward in the transformation process announced in February 2009.
Today, we are…
jdupuis | October 15, 2009As has been buzzing around the scitech library mailing lists lately (thanks, Joe!), the great news is that the STELLA! Science, Technology & Engineering Library Leaders in Action unconference is coming up in Denver in January 2010.
What is the STELLA Unconference?
This meeting is for any librarian interested in scientific, technical and engineering resources. The acronym stands for Science, Technology & Engineering Library Leaders in Action!
What is the STELLA Unconference?
This meeting is for any librarian interested in scientific, technical and engineering resources. The acronym…
jdupuis | October 13, 2009A silly title to reflect some overhyped posturing found, guess where, on the Internet.
First up, Joe Murphy on librarians and their proper relationship to Twitter: "it's reprehensible for information professionals not to be on Twitter."
A loaded and diva-dramatic statement like that is a sure sign that Twitter has jumped the shark. Time to pull a Miley Cyrus, if you ask me. (Friendfeed discussion here, here and here)
On the other end of the spectrum, from Steven Bell over at ACRLog, on the use of social networks by librarians:
A passionate academic librarian would be so immersed in their…
jdupuis | October 8, 2009On October 1, 2009 librarians and archivists at York University Libraries voted unanimously to adopt the following policy:
York University Open Access Policy for Librarians and Archivists
Librarians and archivists at York University recognize the importance of open access to content creators and researchers in fostering new ideas, creating knowledge and ensuring that it is available as widely as possible. In keeping with our long-standing support of the Open Access movement, York librarians and archivists move to adopt a policy which would ensure our research is disseminated as widely as…
jdupuis | October 1, 2009In a reputation economy, social media can provide a powerful set of tools for establishing and enhancing your reputation. An enhanced reputation can lead to enhanced opportunities, in the form of job offers or other professional opportunity.
Academia is a reputation economy, of course, but really any knowledge economy/creative class job is going to be easier to get if you have a good reputation. Which brings us back to social media.
It seems to me that in a competitive job market, students can really make their own applications stand out if they can refer potential employers to a really…
jdupuis | September 30, 2009It's time for the annual Mocking of the Thomson session.
Check out my previous iterations of this amusing pastime: 2002, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2008.
Yes, I've been at this for a while, but to no avail. My main point in all this is to make clear that I don't believe that the Nobel prizes are chosen on the basis of citation count. Sure, there's going to be a correlation between the two, but the causation is extremely weak. Thomson's constant hawking of their "Citation Laureates" is, in my opinion, self-serving and wrong-headed.
And yes, they do get them right occasionally, but that's because…
jdupuis | September 28, 2009Here's an amazing and fairly unique opportunity for a research-minded librarian who wants to significantly advance her or his research program. The appointment is for up to three years and the starting date is somewhat flexible.
Here's the terms of reference for the position:
Each appointment to the Chair will be a limited term appointment for up to three years.
A committee will be established to undertake a search for the Chair.
The selection will be based on the quality of the proposed research program along with evidence for the successful completion of the research proposal.
The…
jdupuis | September 16, 2009I haven't done one of these in a while, so there's quite a backlog to clear.
Reports
Digital Scholarly Communication: A Snapshot of Current Trends
Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity
Strategic Outsourcing and Cloud Computing: Reality Is a Sober Adversary
Library Storage Facilities and the Future of Print Collections in North America
XC User Research Preliminary Report (Extensible Catalog)
Edgeless University: why higher education must embrace technology
Beyond Scientific Publication: Strategies for Disseminating
How Teens Use Media: A Nielsen report on the myths and realities of teen…
jdupuis | September 11, 2009No, I don't mean the werewolf entry in Wikipedia, I mean the use of Wikipedia by werewolves.
You see, I recently received a review copy of The Werewolf's Guide to Life: A Manual for the Newly Bitten by Ritch Duncan, Bob Powers and Emily Flake.
As you can imagine, it an imaginary non-fiction book helping new werewolves to cope with their newly transformed lives -- it talks about work, romance and all the rest. I'm not quite finished it yet, but it's very amusing and definitely worth a look if you like that kind of thing.
What struck me, though, is something from the entry on figuring out when…
jdupuis | September 8, 2009An interesting article from the most recent IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Preserving Records of the Past, Today by James W. Cortada. In concerns the difficulty that scholars of the history of computing have in finding primary materials to work with, mostly in the form of documents.
Scholars examining the history of information technology run into many practical, nuts-and-bolts problems more frequently than historians in other fields that
have existed for considerable periods of time, such as diplomatic and political national history. Problems with the history of information…
jdupuis | September 3, 2009Keywords of a Librarian is the title of a new blog by academic librarian Mary W. George. What's very interesting about the blog is where it's being hosted.
It's part of InsideHigherEd's BlogU community so Mary George is a fellow academic library blogger embedded within a faculty blogging community. This is a great development as I think it's incredibly important to raise librarians' profile within the broader faculty/academic community; so having regular blog posts bring our perspectives and concerns to that audience is great. A hearty congratulations to Mary on her new post!
She's taking…