I have posted the first chapter of Juris Dilevko’s The Politics of Professionalism: A Retro-Progressive Proposal for Librarianship to the Library Juice Press website: Chapter One: Fateful Choices. It is the introductory chapter and provides a good feel for the book as a whole.
Press Release Baker & Taylor Acquires Blackwell North America and James Bennett – Blackwell U.K. Acquires B&T’s Lindsay and Croft in the U.K. As Part of Deal. Customers to Benefit from More than 300 Years of Bookselling Excellence – CHARLOTTE, N.C. – December 7, 2009 – Baker & Taylor Inc. today announced it has acquired … Read more Baker & Taylor Acquires Blackwell North America
Uhhh… Hey Beavis. This scholarly recommender service wants to know how I rate this article.
Welcome support for intellectuals who are making the choice NOT to go for a Ph.D.: The Ph.D. Problem: On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal, by Louis Menand, Harvard Magazine, November-December 2009.
A cultural theme in America for the past few decades has been a certain conservative populist “anti-elitism.” Barack Obama’s victory despite his vulnerability to the charge of elitism – owing to his statements about small town America “clinging to guns and religion,” his educational background, and his personal choice to assume an intelligent audience when … Read more Anti-elitism and academic libraries
John Buschman sent a link out this morning to this article by Chris Dede in the current EDUCAUSE Review, “A Seismic Shift in Epistemology. The article examines the deep changes in the meaning of knowledge in the academy and elsewhere that are being effected by new technologies, with a focus on Wikipedia and other Web … Read more A Seismic Shift in Epistemology
Mark C. Taylor has an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times titled “End the University as We Know It,” which has been circulating rapidly on Facebook. I’m sharing it here because I think people ought to see it. I think Taylor’s insights about higher ed are on the money, for the most part.
From today’s Inside Higher Ed, “Digital Archives That Disappear,” a brief article about Google’s shutdown of the historical newspaper archive Paper of Record, which it secretly purchased in 2006. This is a good example of what many people have feared about Google’s success – that turning over information resources from shared, public control in library-related … Read more The constraining effects of information privatization: Google’s purchase and shutdown of Paper of Record
Librarians facing an expanse of free time this economic season, please contact me with your project ideas for Library Juice Press. I know from first-hand experience how good unemployment can be for creative projects, and how creative projects can end up leading to employment or at least things to boast about on a resumé. Let … Read more Open Invitation
I found these three items in Arts & Letters Daily…. In the New Yorker, a look back into the distant history of newspapers, “The Day the Newspaper Died,” by Jill Lepore. She puts the present newspaper crisis in perspective. In City Journal, Brendan Boyle reviews A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and … Read more Three from Arts & Letters Daily
There is a great article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education about today’s students, how they think, and why: Wake Up and Smell the New Epistemology, by Tim Clydesdale. I think what it says has a lot of applicability to anyone working with students, and especially information literacy instructors.
Kevin Arthur has posted a few paragraphs from recent article by Lewis Lapham on the education and intellectual life in the United States. Kevin picked out a few choice parts that concern the place of the humanities in the technological age (this being the focus of his blog), but Library Juice readers may be interested … Read more Lewis Lapham on education and intellectual life in the postmodern USA
This link is flying around the internet and being talked about on NPR: The Beloit List. It is a list of facts about the Millennial generation’s cultural situation that is supposed to show how amazingly unaware “they” are of things that “we” older people take for granted. I’m only linking to it to mention that … Read more About that Beloit List
Critical Pedagogy and Library Instruction: An Edited Collection Critical pedagogy seeks to identify, critique, and disrupt the inequalities of the dominant culture, thus equipping learners to transform oppressive social, cultural, and economic conditions. While many theorists, critics, and practitioners have considered how critical pedagogical strategies and perspectives might be employed in higher education, the academic … Read more Call for papers on critical pedagogy and library instruction
A book of interest: Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation. What it says is that the under-30 generation is so removed from books and reading that it is shockingly ignorant, and we should all be worried. Bauerlein blames the internet. The Chicago Tribune published a decent review a few days ago. The students at the university … Read more Book: The Dumbest Generation
Stephen Mitchell of UC Riverside wrote me the other day to ask, Do you know of academic libraries who have done BI on the War? We’re starting to talk about it and it occurred to me that someone has probably done a nice powerpoint somewhere that we could build on. I asked him if I … Read more BI on the War, anyone?
The Los Angeles Times reports that Wendy Gonaver, an American Studies instructor at Cal State Fullerton and a Quaker, was fired from her job for refusing to sign a loyalty oath. She was willing to sign it with an attached statement qualifying her willingness to “defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic” through … Read more Instructor fired for refusing to sign a loyalty oath
I should have mentioned this conference when I first learned about it. Thinking Critically: Alternative Perspectives and Methods in Information Studies. It’s coming up next month at the Center for Information Policy Research at the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. I’m planning to be there, so if you’re there and … Read more Thinking Critically: Alternative Perspectives and Methods in Information Studies
Message from Terry Epperson, chair of PLG’s Braverman Prize committee Hello ‚Äì We‚Äôre pleased to announce the fifth annual Miriam Braverman prize, sponsored by the Progressive Librarians Guild, for the best student paper on progressive library issues. Below are the guidelines for the prize. The announcement flyer can be found at: http://libr.org/plg/Braverman-08-flyer.pdf. Feel free to … Read more Miriam Braverman Prize – essay contest