Mon 6 Feb 2012, 2:43 pm
Jessy Randall and I recently taught our January-term class on the history and future of books. We changed things from the last time we did the course, so I thought I’d share here the full syllabus and other documents from 2012 History and Future of the Book (PDF). I can also share the electronic version [...]
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Fri 21 Oct 2011, 12:02 pm
Thanks Barbara Fister for Occupy Knowledge and John Dupuis for The power of blogs, or #OccupyScholComm who helped inspire this post. Let’s talk money. The current inflation rate is 3.87%. Academic library budgets are flat, or worse. But at my college library, SAGE is charging us about a 9% increase over what we paid last [...]
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Thu 25 Aug 2011, 2:27 pm
This week, I have seen a lot of discussion around two measures of information literacy. The first is the ERIAL report that studied Illinois college students and their information-seeking behavior, while the second is Alexis Madrigal’s post at The Atlantic, Why Using Control+F May Be the Most Important Computing Skill. I have a few thoughts rattling [...]
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Mon 22 Aug 2011, 4:20 pm
When teaching college students, most professors want to put the emphasis on concepts and critical thinking rather than skills and facts. The conceptual is the “higher-order” thinking, making the skills of reading and writing and researching seem a bit beneath consideration. I know that I, too, would rather talk to students about how to think [...]
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Thu 18 Aug 2011, 8:42 am
Thanks, John Dupuis, for re-tweeting Bonnie Swoger’s link to this guest post on The Thesis Whisperer on Researching then and now. Texts cry out to be read as you meander past them on library shelves. Amazon’s claim that others who bought a particular book also bought the following operates similarly. Serendipity and inefficiency are powerful tools. [...]
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Wed 22 Jun 2011, 10:48 am
An example from Open Cover Letters Open Cover Letters is a clever site and a welcome addition to the library job-hunter’s training camp. The idea is simple: the site publishes anonymized cover letters for library or archives jobs that resulted in the applicant getting the job (or at least an interview). The letters as they [...]
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Wed 19 Jan 2011, 3:57 pm
I have never worked at a college or university where the librarians had tenure-track or faculty-status positions. This doesn’t stop me from having an opinion on the subject, though–the topic ended up on the Library Society of the World list of evergreen topics for polite librarian arguments, so you know it’s the kind of thing [...]
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Thu 9 Dec 2010, 4:01 pm
Having seen what my library’s percentage increase will be for the American Chemical Society’s journal archives this year, I’m once again cast into that state of wanting to do something about Big Access besides just foam at the blog about it. I don’t think switching to print subscriptions is gonna do it, either. Last time [...]
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Thu 9 Dec 2010, 12:31 pm
A few things I try and tell library school applicants.
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Tue 30 Nov 2010, 4:45 pm
A recent article argues that Google Scholar’s improved coverage of the online scholarly literature means that libraries should consider canceling abstracting and indexing databases. I can’t see how that would work out well.
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Mon 15 Nov 2010, 4:04 pm
My ideal for library teaching is zero-preparation. I like to come into the session, ask the students about the work they have done in the class so far and the work they are now expected to do from this point forward. From there, we look at ways to approach their topics given the resources and [...]
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Thu 1 Jul 2010, 11:28 am
I received a provocative statement I found interesting: librarians are dying, and we should work to make it happen faster. The entire statement is published here.
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Fri 11 Jun 2010, 10:10 am
My email to faculty about the CDL vs. NPG clash of the titans.
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Wed 9 Jun 2010, 10:10 am
NPG to UC: 400% price hike? UC to NPG: Enjoy life without us.
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Wed 7 Apr 2010, 9:40 am
Some disconnected thoughts on librarians, vendors, Scylla, Charybdis.
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Mon 5 Apr 2010, 3:39 pm
Seniors keep graduating, and I’m still here.
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Wed 10 Mar 2010, 1:02 pm
On being in the library when spring break has begun.
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Tue 23 Feb 2010, 4:17 pm
I’m trying to be sure to spend the first part of my library instruction sessions sitting away from the computer, asking the students about their work, and listening closely to the answers. Most of the time, this seems to help the class be more open and worthwhile.
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Sun 3 Jan 2010, 11:23 pm
The class I’m teaching with Jessy Randall starts tomorrow.
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Mon 7 Dec 2009, 5:58 pm
Mulling over what “information literacy” might really mean.
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Tue 24 Nov 2009, 12:05 pm
My reaction to two recent articles that show a disconnect between how academic librarians and faculty view the role of the library. With cartoons!
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Thu 19 Nov 2009, 11:36 pm
I blurted out at a library meeting that when students don’t get a first-year intro to the library, “it’s not like they missed their polio vaccination or anything.” Here’s what I meant.
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Wed 7 Oct 2009, 11:25 am
Ah, what fun. I got an email today from Dr. Rivera-Ayala that was cc’d to my Dean and the President of my college. I thought you’d like to see the exchange, starting with the email I sent to Sergio Rivera-Ayala after my last post about the strange emails and comments about his book. I’ll put [...]
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Sun 27 Sep 2009, 10:35 pm
Update 7 Oct 2009: Professor Rivera-Ayala responded to my email and I posted our exchange. This is the kind of thing I can’t stand. A senior student sent Iris Jastram at Pegasus Librarian an email suggesting that she buy Sergio Rivera-Ayala’s new book, El discurso colonial en textos novohispanos: espacio, cuerpo y poder. That’s a [...]
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Fri 3 Oct 2008, 5:24 pm
From Microball, a CC-licensed image by Flickr user SerenityRose. Mark Bauerlein–the man who recently published The Dumbest Generation (wouldn’t you love to be one of his students?)–has an opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind: Slow reading counterbalances Web skimming. The good folks at the Chronicle moved [...]
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Tue 2 Sep 2008, 10:44 pm
The beginning of the school year is always an exciting time, and even more so this year as I work with a class on the history of the book.
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Thu 28 Aug 2008, 3:49 pm
Open Access Day, October 14, 2008. Not sure what that means quite yet, but I’m there.
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Thu 31 Jul 2008, 5:12 pm
On the same day that Dorothea Salo keynotes the Edinburgh Repository Fringe conference, I read about Microsoft efforts to help academic authors and repositories.
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Tue 20 May 2008, 10:15 am
Is it creepy to try to reach students via Facebook? I don’t think so.
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Tue 4 Mar 2008, 6:56 am
I think the average librarian may be a fan of Open Access not because of its impact on the budget, but for its effect at the reference desk.
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Thu 28 Feb 2008, 3:02 pm
Steven Bell wants to know if anyone is reading academic library journals and Heather Morrison says publishing in toll-access journals without self-archiving amounts to aiming for obscurity.
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Thu 9 Aug 2007, 9:12 am
Some of my notes on the recent report from Ithaka on the future of the university press.
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Thu 8 Mar 2007, 12:16 pm
Call Mom. Go to special collections. Originally uploaded by Colorado College Tutt Library. This comes to us via Jessy, a portrait of student John Thorp, one of her users. It just makes me smile. Mom should be happy.
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Fri 26 Jan 2007, 3:33 pm
PR’s ‘pit bull’ takes on open access, a news item in Nature, has some truly amazing quotes from open access opponents spreading FUD. My favorite is this bit of doublethink from publicist Eric Dezenhall: “Public access equals government censorship.” And freedom is totally slavery. (You can find good commentary on this article at Caveat Lector [...]
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Sat 9 Dec 2006, 10:00 pm
I was thinking about this quote that I pulled from danah boyd’s Friends, Friendsters and Top 8 in my post of yesterday: While most participants surf the site through the networks themselves, most newcomers and non-participants use the search feature and are absolutely horrified by what they may see. And I felt a certain resonance [...]
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Thu 16 Nov 2006, 4:10 pm
Update: FWIW, I just called the Chancellor’s office at UCLA and the Office of the President of the University of California to register my disgust. Here is the contact information, which I got from the lengthy Metafilter thread: Interim Chancellor Norman Abrams Telephone: 310-825-2151 Fax: 310-206-6030 Email: chancellor@conet.ucla.edu President’s Desk UC Office of the President [...]
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Fri 3 Nov 2006, 4:14 pm
In a post on ACRLog, Marilyn R. Pukkila, Head of Instructional Services at Colby College Libraries, asks Just How Connected Are They?, “they” being her undergraduates. She says that she asked a few students in student government about podcasts and Second Life. Their resonse was a resounding “hunh?” So she asks: If they don’t know [...]
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Thu 2 Nov 2006, 10:00 pm
I have mentioned before my weakness for over-prolific alpha geeks and librarians. There is at least one over-prolific alpha academic who inspires me, and that is Michael Bérubé. Bérubé was on the Colorado College campus today, and I was able to hear him speak to a faculty luncheon today on “Cultural studies in the Bush [...]
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Thu 5 Oct 2006, 9:50 pm
Thanks to Nicole Engard at What I Learned Today, I saw that Zotero’s public beta has begun. You need to be running Firefox 2.0, itself a beta release, so I’m downloading that in the background as I type. Zotero is a citation manager (along the lines of RefWorks or EndNote) that works right in the [...]
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Thu 31 Aug 2006, 11:41 pm
Bound volumes of journals covered by JSTOR online. There is a very interesting article in the September 1 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled Library Renovation Leads to Soul Searching at Cal Poly (note: that link will self-destruct after five days. Chronicle subscribers can always use this permalink to the article). It would [...]
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Wed 7 Jun 2006, 11:22 am
I have blogged about edublogger Stephen Downes before (see my posts The read/write web in academe and Online Learning Daily on Hiatus). One of the things I like about reading his Online Learning Daily blog is that just when I feel like I know where he is coming from, he challenges me a little more. [...]
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Sun 12 Mar 2006, 4:19 pm
A while back, I said that someday soon, we won’t be talking about the “read/write web” or “Web 2.0″; instead we will just say “the Web” and mean exactly the same thing. As more and more people take advantage of social software and create their own content online, the less we will settle for top-down [...]
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Wed 8 Mar 2006, 10:27 pm
Updated 2006-03-09: I changed the title from “Online Learning Daily goes offline,” since that isn’t really true. The site is still there, but Downes is taking a break. I want to read and write a little more about academe and higher education, so in the past few months I have picked up several higher ed. [...]
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