My Job in 10 Years Book
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 | January 17, 2013On January 10, 2013 Rick Anderson published a post at The Scholarly Kitchen published on six mistakes library staff are making when dealing with our vendors. Most of them were fairly standard stuff like don't be rude, don't waste people's time. That sort of thing. (Yes, sometimes I think that every time I link to a Scholarly Kitchen article, an open access journal loses its wings.)
The sixth, however, was a bit different.
Putting political library concerns above patron needs. I’ve saved for last the “mistake” that I know is likely to be the most controversial, but I think it must be said.…
jdupuis | January 7, 2013Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure.
Every year for the last bunch of years I’ve been linking to and posting about all the “year’s best sciencey books” lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year.
All the previous 2012 lists are here.
This post includes the following: Jack Uldrich/Jump the Curve: A Futurist’s Top Ten Books for 2012.
Note: This list includes some slightly older books and some books that are more strictly business books rather than tech or science books. I decided to include them…
jdupuis | December 31, 2012While it has not generally been my practice to do year end review posts, artificially trying to tie the various and disparate strands of my blogging habits together into some sort of coherent story, I think for this year it's worth doing. And that's because my blogging year did seem to have a coherent theme -- advocating for a fairer and more just scholarly publishing ecosystem.
In particular I spent an awful lot of time advocating for Open Access in one way, shape or form. Not that I haven't always done so, but with all the various events happening in the academic and library worlds this…
jdupuis | December 18, 2012The End of the University as We Know It
The future of online vs. residential education by futurist Ray Kurzweil
Librarians or Baristas?
Prioritizing Academic Programs
Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College
Assessing Campus Libraries (space, yes, services...)
Where is Library Technology going?
MLA President Offers a Sobering Critique of Graduate Education in the Humanities
Confessions of a (former) gatekeeper
Full Text Of The Grim Meathook Future Thing
Massive Open Online Courses -- A Threat Or Opportunity To Universities?
jdupuis | November 29, 2012Like the old saying goes, information wants to be free. In particular, the consumers of information would prefer for the most part not to have to directly pay for the information they are consuming. The information itself, if I may anthropomorphize for a moment, also wants to circulate as freely as possible, to be as consumed as widely as possible, to be as highly regarded as possible. That way it gets to be the information that "wins" the best-used-most-used information sweepstakes.
This seems to me to be a first principle for scholarly communications. Both the users of the information and…
jdupuis | November 28, 2012Or, more precisely, a university designed by libertarians.
Over the last number of months, I've featured a fair bit of apocalyptic MOOC Disruptionism in my regular Around the Web posts. Recently, the libertarian think tank, The Cato Institute (Wikipedia) via their Cato Unbound site, has put online a series of essays discussing just how the traditional academic system can be radically reworked and rethought via a highly commercialized online academy. It's interesting because they've also included some responses questioning their assumptions and the overall MOOC triumphalism that's floating…
jdupuis | October 1, 2012The most recent controversy to whip up the library and science blogospheres revolves around SUNY Potsdam cancelling their American Chemical Society journal package because the subscription packages on offer sucked up too high a percentage of their total budget. SUNY Potsdam Library Director Jenica Rogers wrote about the decision on her blog, garnering quite a bit of attention, including a feature in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The feature included some rather rude and derailing comments from a representative of the ACS, who later threw some gasoline on the PR fire on a chemistry…
jdupuis | September 27, 2012Why do people go into science? Why do people go to work at scholarly societies? Why do people choose scholarly publishing as a career? Why do people choose a career at the intersection of those three vocations?
There are cynical answers to those questions, for sure, and even the non-cynical need to put food on the table. But I truly don't believe people start out their path in life based on cynicism. Rather I believe most people start their careers based on hope.
I can only hope that for a person to pursue a career in scholarly publishing at a scientific society, their goal in life is to try…
jdupuis | September 13, 2012Jenica Rogers is Director of Libraries at the State University of New York at Potsdam. Like so many institutions SUNY Potsdam subscribes to the suite of journals published by the American Chemical Society. Now, that's always a challenge since the ACS prices their products very aggressively as well as pushing the envelope with annual price increases.
Well, push finally came to show and SUNY Potsdam is Walking away from the American Chemical Society.
The problem:
In May 2012, after much internal discussion and debate, three SUNY library directors from the comprehensive colleges (myself…
jdupuis | September 5, 2012About a month ago The Scientist published an interesting set of interviews with a set of scientists, publishers and LIS faculty on the future of scholarly publishing.
They called it Whither Science Publishing? with the subtitle "As we stand on the brink of a new scientific age, how researchers should best communicate their findings and innovations is hotly debated in the publishing trenches."
It's a pretty good set of questions and answers, provocative and thought provoking, with a few good shots especially from the scientist side of things. Unfortunately, I think it lacks a bit in terms of…
jdupuis | August 28, 2012Imagine a scenario where suddenly over night all toll access publishing suddenly converts to Open Access. You go to bed and your average academic library spends millions of dollars on serials. You wake up, and the subscription bill is zero.
Now, that doesn't mean that suddenly scholarly publishing doesn't cost anything to support. It just means that the money to support that publishing is coming from somewhere other than library budgets. I would generally assume that an entirely open access publishing ecosystem would be significantly less expensive overall than the current mixed publishing…
jdupuis | May 23, 2011A very nice article by Ian Brown in this past Saturday's Globe and Mail, Don't discard the librarians.
He very nicely summarizes the recent library/librarian angst that's been free-flowing around the media and blogosphere over the last little while.
The world of librarians was thrown into a tizzy this week - it doesn't take much these days - when the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board announced it will shut its school libraries and dump all but four of its library technicians.
*snip*
That was the tip of the iceberg. While Windsor defended its slash, top-level librarians attended a…
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 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 17, 2011In all of our organizations fostering innovation is an important goal. But how do you turn the innovation fawcett on? Somehow it seems so much easier to turn it off.
Of course, it's all about institutional culture. The way problems and solutions are framed. The way management/leadership/peer culture frames, encourages and rewards ideas.
Sometimes it just the way we ask questions about new ideas.
A nice articles from Tony Golsby-Smith at the Harvard Business Review blog site: Three Questions that Will Kill Innovation.
They're mostly aimed at commercial organizations but can easily be re-…
jdupuis | March 3, 2011I saw this just after I published my previous post and think it really encompasses what I'd like to say to HarperCollins and its fellow travelers.
This is from The Capitalist's Paradox by Umair Haque.
So here's my question: Does what you're doing have a point -- one that matters to people, society, nature, and the future?
Beancounters, listen up. To paraphrase Shakespeare, I come not to praise you, but to bury you. I don't care about your "strategy," "business model," "campaign," "product," or "deliverables" (sorry). All that stuff is focused on outputs. What matters to people, in contrast,…
jdupuis | March 3, 2011Over the last week or so a huge issue has sprung up in the library and publishing world, which I touch on in my eBook Users' Bill of Rights post.
The publisher HarperCollins has restricting the number of checkouts an ebook version of one of their books can have before the library needs to pay for it again. The number of checkouts is 26 per year. Bobbi Newman collects a lot of relevant posts here if you're interested.
There was a comment on my post by William Dix:
Publishers are shooting themselves in the foot on this issue. As well as alienating a lot of the potential market with idiotic…
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…