librarianship
jdupuis | August 31, 2009"The past can survive only if it can beat out the future" (p. 142)
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Laurence Lessig is a great and important book, one that should be read by anyone interested in the future of the Internet, culture and expression.
This book is a plea and an argument for a business model for culture and creativity, one in which supporters of the arts are willing to pay creators directly for their output. I'm not convinced. I'm also not not convinced.
Like the best non-fiction, this book engages you in an argument. I literally found myself…
jdupuis | August 18, 2009During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from January 13, 2009. It ended up being pretty popular and was the reason that ALA Editions initially contacted me about doing a book.
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This was a hard post to title, in that I wanted it to be reasonably short yet pack in a lot of information. The real post title should be: What can library web sites learn from commercial book-related web sites such as Tor.com and the brand new Globe and Mail Books site?
First of all, a brief note…
jdupuis | August 12, 2009During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from October 10, 2008. It provoked a bit of angst out in the library student blogosphere, which is kinda what I was hoping.
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It's interesting times in the world out there.
And not surprisingly, the world of the internet is thinking about the implications. One of the big implications is that it's going to be harder to get a job, and that's going to be true librarians as much as anyone else.
As it happens, I've been collecting some…
jdupuis | July 29, 2009During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from November 7, 2007. It generated quite a few interesting comments, so you might want to check back at the original post. My feeling on a lot of these points has shifted a bit with time, so I'll probably revisit the topic in the fall.
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This is a topic I've been thinking about a lot recently, as we (at York and as a profession) start to move in a coordinated way to making ebooks an important part of our collections. What's the…
jdupuis | July 17, 2009Those of you with long memories may recall that I gave a presentation at the Ontario Library Association conference in 2008 based on the My Job in 10 years blog posts.
Shortly after that presentation, I was approached by Cecile Farnum, the OCULA divisional editor for the OLA magazine Access about writing the presentation as an article. To make a long story short, it's just been published in the Summer 2009 issue!
Of course, I've deposited a scanned version of the article in our IR here, with the scanned version here and my slightly longer original here. I came in a little longer than the…
jdupuis | July 7, 2009Yes, as promised I'm going to start workshopping the book I'm working on: My Job in 10 Years: The Future of Academic Librarianship. (Note title tweak.)
First of all, this is all just provisional; I'm at a point where I need to stop tinkering if I just going to get something out the door. Some parts are over-developed for an outline, others are under-developed.
I'm still thinking bout the book structurally. I'm also still thinking about what kinds of topic areas belong in or out. I've been picking nits with the TOC for a while now, moving bits here and there, and that probably won't stop,…
jdupuis | June 19, 2009From McSweeny's, this is both very funny and very poignant. A working day's worth of tweets from a public librarian.
Boy wants book on how to make paper airplanes. I challenge him to a paper airplane contest.
about 3 hours ago from web
*snip*
Ask patron not to talk on their cell phone. They explain that the cell phone designated area is too loud.
about 8 hours ago from web
These are an actual day's worth or tweets from public librarian Scott Douglas, author of Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian. I've just subscribed to the Twitter feed.
(Via Rachel Walden.)
jdupuis | June 2, 2009As you may have noticed, ScienceBlogs is making a concerted effort to engage a broad range of the Information Science community. That community includes librarians, publishing people and scholars who are interested in issues around libraries, information management, scholarly publishing, Open Access, research metrics, human-computer interaction, privacy, intellectual property and a whole host of other topics.
The first step was recruiting a couple of new bloggers from the library community -- Christina Pikas and myself -- to supplement the considerable amount of IS discussion that's already…
jdupuis | June 1, 2009Every once in a while I get an email out of the blue from a science student who's thinking of a career as a librarian and they want to know a bit about the field and it's job prospects.
I always respond very positively because I think science librarianship is a great career and that, on balance, the job prospects are pretty good.
Christina has a post up today with a little more detail:
If you are a scientist, but you want to get out of the lab, want to have a little more variety in your life, like helping people and finding information, but still want to use your science degree and be part…
jdupuis | May 26, 2009Yes, the book. My Job in 10 Years: The Future of Academic Libraries.
To rewind a bit, the story begins this past January. I did a little off-the-cuff post on how libraries could model their web presences on commercial book-related sites like Tor.com or the Globe & Mail Books site. It ended up being surprisingly popular, even getting picked up by AL Direct.
Shortly after that, I was contacted by Christopher Rhodes of ALA Editions to see if I was interested in proposing a book for them about designing library web pages that way. (Thanks, Chris!)
Well, like any good blogger, I've always…
jdupuis | May 25, 2009For those of you new to Confessions of a Science Librarian, I've been publishing various lists of books and reports/white papers for the last little while. The reports and books explore various ideas, issues and trends that I think will be important in the development of academic libraries over the next several years and range pretty far and wide in terms of subject matter.
I've done four lists so far, mentioning a rather frightening number of different items:
Sixteen books
Twenty-nine reports
Thirty-four books and eight reports
Nine reports and sixteen books
Reports
Online Catalogs: What…
jdupuis | May 21, 2009Apparently, there are thousands of librarians that read ScienceBlogs. No surprisingly, the ScienceBlogs brain trust wants to know why.
In particular, they are looking to gather some information about what librarians hope to get out of reading the site. The question is: how does the content on ScienceBlogs help you in your role as a librarian?
You can send your thoughts to editorial at scienceblogs dot com or just leave it as a comment here.
I'll start.
I'm a science librarian so I have a couple of information needs in my work. First of all, I need to understand science and where it's…