I should have posted something about this earlier, sorry. I will be speaking at Drexel in Philadelphia tomorrow afternoon (Tuesday, 8/11/09), at the iSchool, 5pm, Rush Building, Room 014. They have posted a description to their news site. If you have a chance to go and you have found out about it here, say hello … Read more Speaking at Drexel
Questioning Library Neutrality: Essays from Progressive Librarian, edited by Alison Lewis, has been out for a while. I was just taking a look at it, and it occurred to me that it might be a good thing to put Alison’s introduction to the book online, so I have done that. It’s a good, quick read … Read more Questioning Library Neutrality – Introduction
There is a common assumption that trends should be identified quickly so that we can more quickly and more fully adapt to them, in order to stay competitively ahead-of-the-curve and relevant. But trends are not all the same. Let me give you an analogy. I have heard of two primary policy themes in response to … Read more Interior space as a social cause
Progressive Librarians Guild Calls for Elsevier to End Corrupt Publishing Practices and for Library Associations to Take Advocacy Role on Behalf of Scientific Integrity http://libr.org/plg/elsevier.php Progressive Librarians Guild. May 12, 2009. Elsevier, which describes itself as the “world’s leading publisher of scientific and health information,” was partner to the efforts of Merck & Co. to … Read more PLG statement on Elsevier’s fake journals
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
Peter Suber is covering the Elsevier scandal on his Open Access News blog, and reports that the STM publisher has now admitted to publishing six fake journals out of their Australia office, without the proper disclosures of advertising for drug companies, etc. I am curious to see whether library associations, which receive large donations from … Read more Elsevier admits to six fake journals
This is really outrageous if true and ought to lead to some serious consequences for Elsevier. An online magazine called The Scientist has reported that Elsevier published a two-off fake journal with reprinted and summarized articles that presented data favorable to Merck products. And that’s all that was in these journals. They were made to … Read more Elsevier publishes fake journal promoting Merck drugs
MIT has posted podcasts from the five plenary sessions at Media in Transition 6, at the Comparative Media Studies program’s podcast page. The plenary sessions were on “Archives and History,” “New Media, Civic Media,” “Institutional Perspectives on Storage,” “The Future of Publishing,” and “Summary Perspectives.” I think these plenary sessions were the best part of … Read more Media in Transition 6 – Podcasts
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
“Exploring the Ethical Implications of Technological Change through the Thought of Walter Ong and Other Media Theorists” That’s the title of my paper for the conference coming up this weekend in Boston, Media in Transition 6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission. The paper is not the greatest thing I’ve ever written, but it is … Read more Exploring the Ethical Implications of Media Technology Through the Thought of Walter Ong
This is going to be my obnoxious post for the year, the kind of post I write periodically that leads to ugly Google results on my name. There are things that I sometimes need to say that I know a lot of people won’t like. Helps me maintain a sense of integrity, I guess. Like … Read more Library 2.0 talk enters backwardation
Library of Walls: The Library of Congress and the Contradictions of Information Society Author: Samuel Gerald Collins Price: $32.00 Published: April 2009 ISBN: 978-0-9802004-2-3 Printed on acid-free paper “The experience [of reading this book] was something akin to watching a reality show featuring Jorge Luis Borges, Marshall McLuhan, Michel Foucault, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Virilio … Read more New from Litwin Books: Library of Walls
Chapter two of John Miedema’s Slow Reading, “Slow Reading in an Information Ecology,” is now online at the Litwin Books site. The first two paragraphs here: Isaac Asimov (1969) tells a story of a future in which a character is asked to demonstrate his astonishing talent to the president. The talent is to perform basic … Read more Chapter Two of Slow Reading
Author: John Miedema Price: $12.00 Published: March 2009 ISBN: 978-0-9802004-4-7 Printed on acid-free paper https://staging.litwinbooks.com/slowreading.php In the face of ever-increasing demands for speed-reading of volumes of information fragments, some readers are choosing to slow down. While it often seems necessary to read quickly, many readers share a conviction that reading slowly is essential to enjoyment … Read more Slow Reading
I’m giving the keynote lecture at the 4th Annual University of Arizona SIRLS Graduate Symposium this Saturday. My talk is called “From duality to dilemma: balancing the library on mission, community, and democracy.” (It had a longer, bulkier title that is still floating around out there.) If anybody is interested, I have posted handouts from … Read more From Duality to Dilemma
Interesting post at Stay Free! commenting on a New York Times story about kids using YouTube as their primary search engine for information about topics assigned for homework. Carrie McLaren gets into some of the differences between text and video as information media…
…[T]he question isn’t whether one is neutral, but whether one is independent from control and allowed to pursue free and open inquiry. In a healthy society, professionals would be given that independence–not just in theory but in practice–and out of the many choices that varied professionals would make, we could expect a rich cultural conversation … Read more Robert Jensen on library neutrality
Since the second half of last year I’ve been reading a lot of financial news, where the major theme of the financial crisis is the “crisis of trust” – banks not wanting to take the risk of extending credit to counterparties. But we’ve been living through a worsening crisis of trust in another sense for … Read more The Other Crisis of Trust (and a question about what it means for Info Lit)
The most frustrating thing about eight years of Bush Administration nefariousness and stupidity, from a librarian’s point of view, was their attitude of secrecy and contempt for the public. It is important for government to be open and transparent, and to avoid rather than seek corrupt relationships with moneyed interests. In that regard the Bush … Read more Obama’s Policy Agenda on Government Ethics
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.