I was just reading a bit of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and came across a section that I think applies to the bibliometric obsessions with impact factors, h- and g-indexes, and other quantitative measures of the value of a scholar’s work. The following is from pages 119 and 120 of the translation by Swenson and … Read more Kierkegaard on impact factors
From Philippe Breton’s The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult: Social Fears and Religious Fantasies, forthcoming from Litwin Books: One may distinguish three positions grosso modo: first the “Internet-for-everything” militants, proselytes (sometimes unknowingly) of a new cult. Then there are the technophobes, hostile to all technology. Finally, there are those who think … Read more Three attitudes toward the Internet
Two recent articles in the mainstream press are telling us that paper books and physical libraries are dead (Boston Globe and CNN.com). One of the easiest things to forget about the death of the book is for how many years it has been declared. A few quotations from past decades, from authors who were responding … Read more Death of a thousand paper cuts
Yes, I know I’m supposed to be user-centered and all that, but I think the great wave of populism we’re seeing now is going to lead to bad things. Some friends say it’s a time of opportunity, that maybe the blind rage of the common man can be directed toward support of progressive policies. Perhaps, … Read more “Most People”
The following is the list of authors in the Author Index to Speaking of Information: The Library Juice Quotation Book. (Note that some authors listed, like me, are there because they show up in the notes.) A Achenbach, Joel Aeschylus Agre, Phil Alfino, Mark Allen, Woody Alterman, Eric American Library Association Angus, Ian Atton, Chris … Read more List of authors in Speaking of Information: the Library Juice Quotation Book
Speaking of Information: The Library Juice Quotation Book Foreword by Michael Gorman Books of quotations serve many functions. They can entertain, enrich, inform, infuriate, define (by inclusion and exclusion), and/or provide one end of a strand of knowledge to be pursued elsewhere by the enquiring mind. Some quotations are comical, some profound, but a true … Read more Michael Gorman’s Foreword to Speaking of Information
Speaking of Information: The Library Juice Quotation Book Compiler: Rory Litwin Editor: Martin Wallace Foreword: Michael Gorman Price: $15.00 ISBN: 978-0-9802004-1-6 5.06″ by 7.81″ 172 Pages Published: May 2009 Speaking of Information: The Library Juice Quotation Book is a compilation of quotations originally collected for the “Quotes of the Week” section of Library Juice, an … Read more Speaking of Information: The Library Juice Quotation Book
ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy had its annual retreat this month. Barbara Fister, frequent poster to the ACRL blog and a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, presented a talk there called “Open Access and Books in a Digital World – What Role Should Libraries Play?” Her talk is an interesting exploration of … Read more Barbara Fister on Google and OA
From Lara Moore’s Restoring Order: The Ecole des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870 (pages 208-209): It … appears that the late Empire had strong political misgivings about the extension of libraries to the “popular” classes. In April 1864, Interior Minister Paul Boudet dispatched a circular marked “confidential” to department … Read more Napoleon III and public libraries
The current issue of LRC: Literary Review of Canada has a light essay by an acquaintance of Marshall McLuhan, discussing what the man was like and assessing his influence: In the Garden with the Guru. If you’re only vaguely familiar with Marshall McLuhan I definitely recommend it for a little taste of he was like … Read more Bob Rodgers remembers Marshall McLuhan
Kurt Vonnegut died last night, at the age of 84. At one point he wrote, “Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.”
Here is an excerpt from Jesse Shera’s 1936 article in The Bulletin of the American Library Association, “The College Library and its Future.” (Vol. 30, pp. 495-501.) A PROFESSIONAL CREDO Having seen that technologically librarianship has made significant progress, and that investigatory activities have already achieved impressive beginnings, we now turn our attention to a … Read more Jesse Shera on academic librarians’ professional values
Library Juice Concentrate Edited by Rory Litwin Preface by Kathleen de la Peña McCook Price: $25.00 ISBN-10: 0-9778617-3-2 ISBN-13: 978-0-9778617-3-6 6″ by 9″ Published: December 2006 Library Juice Concentrate is a compilation of the best of Library Juice, an e-zine published by Rory Litwin between 1998 and 2005 that dealt with foundational questions of librarianship … Read more New from LJP: Library Juice Concentrate
“Critical thinkers can be parodied either as disgruntled and bitter subversives, or as elitist mockers of others’ well-meant efforts. The pejorative associations surrounding the word critical have meant that advocating critical thinking is a form of social and educational bad taste.” – STEPHEN D. BROOKFIELD; Developing Critical Thinkers, 1987. Quotation from International Education Quotations Encyclopaedia, … Read more CRITICAL THINKING