librarianship
jdupuis | January 13, 2012With the final countdown underway and the conference less than a week away, this post follows my post on library people in attendance at Science Online 2012 from a few weeks ago.
And I'd like to start off with another best-tweet-ever, this time Marieclaire Shanahan retweeting Colin Schutze:
+ they'll be fascinating! RT @_ColinS_: #Scio12 Newbie Tips: You will meet more librarians in one day than you thought existed in the world.
And that's long been one of my goals, to promote the integration of librarians into faculty and researcher conferences and social networks. And Science Online has…
jdupuis | January 9, 2012Note: this post is superseded by: Around the Web: Research Works Act, Elsevier boycott & FRPAA.
Following on my post from yesterday on Scholarly Societies: It's time to abandon the AAP over The Research Works Act, I thought I'd gather together some of the recent posts on the issue.
The Wikipedia article is here, full text of the bill here and status here.
2012.01.04. New US Publisher Anti-OA Legislation by Cable Green
2012.01.04. A Threat to Open Access: the Research Works Act by Lisa Federer
2012.01.05. Update on publishers and SOPA: Time for scholarly publishers to disavow the AAP by…
jdupuis | November 21, 2011This past Friday there was a one-day symposium on the state of academic librarianship at the University of Toronto entitled Academic Librarianship - A Crisis or an Opportunity?.
In response to recent developments in academic libraries in Ontario and elsewhere, academic librarians are invited to gather to discuss the challenges facing the profession of academic librarianship today.
This one-day Symposium will serve as an opportunity to hear stakeholders' views of the profession as well as an opportunity for academic librarians to explore ways of re-affirming the legitimacy and the integrity of…
jdupuis | November 16, 2011It all started with this innocent little tweet from @seelix:
In going through the twitter list, I believe that half the #scio12 people are either a librarian, a marine scientist or named Emily.
To which I responded:
@seelix is there a marine science librarian named Emily? #scio12
@BoraZ had to chime in as well:
The holotype #scio12-er RT @dupuisj: @seelix is there a marine science librarian named Emily? #scio12
With @seelix getting the last word:
Found my new career path! RT @BoraZ The holotype #scio12-er RT @dupuisj: @seelix is there a marine science librarian named Emily? #scio12
Over the…
jdupuis | November 10, 2011Welcome to the latest installment in my very occasional series of interviews with people in the scitech world. This time around the subject is Michael Nielsen, author of the recently published Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science and prolific speaker on the Open Science lecture circuit. A recent example of his public speaking is his TEDxWaterloo talk on Open Science.
You can follow his blog here and read his recent Wall Street Journal article, The New Einsteins Will Be Scientists Who Share.
I'd like to thank Michael for his provocative and insightful responses. Enjoy…
jdupuis | November 9, 2011I was at The Charleston Conference last week, thanks to Mike Diaz of Proquest who invited me to be on a panel that he moderated, along with Karen Downing and Clifford Lynch. The topic of the panel was Keeping Up with the Things That Matter: Current Awareness Tools and Strategies for Academic Libraries. Karen, Cliff and I came up with different takes on the subject but overall the panel was quite well attended and I think useful and interesting for audience members.
Not surprisingly, my take was a bit on the "stealthy librarian" side of things:
I enjoyed being a bit provocative and think…
jdupuis | October 24, 2011For your reading and collection development pleasure!
Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Academic institutions are facing a crisis in scholarly publishing at multiple levels: presses are stressed as never before, library budgets are squeezed, faculty are having difficulty publishing their work, and promotion and tenure committees are facing a range of new ways of working without a clear sense of how to understand and evaluate them. Planned Obsolescence is both a provocation to think more broadly about the academy's future and…
jdupuis | October 19, 2011I've long been a believer in the power of blogs to drive and aggregate conversations at every level. Frivolous, for sure. But also serious and scholarly.
The rise of science blogs over the last few years has certainly demonstrated that. In librarianship as well, blogs are a powerful source of comment, theory and practical advice. I've always thought that the practical side of the library world was ripe to be the first field to truly leave journals behind and embrace blogging as a kind of replacement. It would be messy, sure, but it would be democratizing and re-invigorating.
The kinds of…
jdupuis | October 2, 2011It's time for my annual post taking issue with Thomson Reuters (TR) Nobel Prize predictions.
(2002, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2009, 2010)
Because, yes, they're at it again.
Can the winners of the Nobel Prize be correctly predicted? Since 1989, Thomson Reuters has developed a list of likely winners in medicine, chemistry, physics, and economics. Those chosen are named Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates -- researchers likely to be in contention for Nobel honors based on the citation impact of their published research.
Reading this you would reasonably assume that TR thinks there is at least a…
jdupuis | October 1, 2011
10 Reasons Why Your (EDU) Boss Should Tweet
The digital scholar - which way to go?
Facebook is scaring me
#ArsenicLife Goes Longform, And History Gets Squished
Science Online: London 2011 - Keynote, Michael Nielsen - Video & Storify
Op-Ed: Stop Feeding Facebook, It's Time for Moderation
Bibliographies (CS scholars should post copies of articles on their websites)
Reading, Risk, and Reality: College Students and Reading for Pleasure
Access to scientific publications should be a fundamental right
Honor Your Campus Library
Academic Publishing and Zombies
Who killed videogames?…
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 | September 15, 2011As a former IT person and a current librarian, I've got to say that this article,Want Good IT Customer Service? Visit Your Library, has a lot of truth in it -- I definitely see the differences between my former profession and my current one. And as the article points out, many of those differences are on the plus side for librarians. Not all, of course, but that's a different post.
Let's take a look:
I believe IT professionals truly want to help others. However, we tend to focus on the technology, not the client. We believe our job is to fix problems, and we expend considerable time and…
jdupuis | September 8, 2011Another issue full of interesting articles:
E-Science Librarianship: Field Undefined by Elsa Alvaro, Heather Brooks, Monica Ham, Stephanie Poegel, and Sarah Rosencrans, Indiana University
Comparison of the Contributions of CAPLUS and MEDLINE to the Performance of SciFinder in Retrieving the Drug Literature by Svetla Baykoucheva, University of Maryland
Reference Management Software: a Comparative Analysis of Four Products by Ron Gilmour and Laura Cobus-Kuo, Ithaca College
American Woods: Conservation of a Unique Item by Tierney Lyons, Penn State Worthington Scranton
Local Food Systems:…
jdupuis | August 29, 2011The theme at the upcoming Science Online NYC panel is Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils and I guess I'm the perils guy. The purpose of this post is helping me to get some of my thoughts down on pixels and, as a by-product, I guess it's tipping my hand a little bit for the other participants on the panel.
This session and my role as skeptic comes out of the Science Online session on ebooks in North Carolina this past January. I believe I may have refereed to the emerging ebooks app ecosystem as "The Dark Side."
My point was not to explicitly demonize app developers or…
jdupuis | August 24, 2011Whoa. Now that was a intellectual reset button hitting if there ever was one.
From July 31 to August 5 I attended the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians (LIAL) in Boston. It was a one-week, intensive, immersive course not so much on how to be a leader but how to think like a leader and how to understand a little more about the leadership process.
Not solely aimed academic library leadership per se, but more broadly about leadership situated in an academic environment. In other words, it was about people who happen to be librarians leading…
jdupuis | July 28, 2011No, the purpose of this post isn't to reveal the secrets of successful academic leadership. If I had those, believe you me I'd be writing this from my villa on the French Riviera.
However, I am heading off to the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians in Boston next week where I hope to be a least a little more enlightened and educated along that path.
Not surprisingly I've been watching the blogosphere these last few months for insightful posts and articles about academic leadership, in particular academic library leadership. I've found a few…
jdupuis | July 25, 2011My previous post was about Brian Mathews moving his blog to the Chronicle, a non-librarian blog network.
So for this post I thought I'd list all the academic and research librarians I know of that are embedded in non-library blogging communities.
On the one hand, it's a pretty short list. On the other hand, it's not like there are that many relevant blogging communities out there!
Needless to say, I think it's hugely important to get the librarian point of view in front of our patrons and getting ourselves into their blogging communities and talking about issues they care about is a great…
jdupuis | July 25, 2011As I have in the past, I'd like to point out a librarian embedded in a faculty-focused blogging network.
Brian Mathews recently moved his blog, The Ubiquitous Librarian, to the Chronicle Blog Network run by, you guessed it, The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The new URL for Brian's blog is here.
And a few recent posts:
Instructionally Adrift? Are instructors letting their students down?
A Future Space For Reference Services? An Inspiration From GALE
Why does my library use social media?
When talking about the library remember N3P3: an advocacy talking points framework for academic libraries…
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 19, 2011Trust me, I really tried to come up with a cool, funny title for this post.
Anyways...
We have a new reference assistant starting here next week. As somewhat typical for such a position, the new staff member has a science subject background rather than a library background. In this case, Maps/GIS.
So I thought it might be a good idea to gather together some resources for helping our new hire get acclimatised to reference work in an academic science & engineering library. After all, we're not born with the ability to do good reference interviews!
With the help of the fine folk in…