Jillian Wallis is a PhD student in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at UCLA. Her research addresses the data practices of researchers at the Center for Embedded Network Sensing, and developing systems for the effective distribution and use of sensor data. She will be teaching a class for Library Juice Academy next … Read more Interview with Jillian Wallis
The Chronicle of Higher Education published this succinct editorial by Robert Darnton, noted defender of the book and of libraries, titled, 5 Myths About the “Information Age.” Nicely, this is freely available on the web, not just for people whose institutions have access to the Chronicle. You might know Robert Darnton for his The Case … Read more Robert Darnton on “5 Myths About the Information Age”
From Litwin Books, LLC As an academic publisher, we understand our role in the information ecology, and respect the roles of academics and librarians in the same ecological system. To clarify our understanding of our place in that system, we offer the following pledge to the library community: 1. We recognize the free speech rights … Read more Publisher’s Pledge to the Library Community
I have just interviewed Ray Schwartz. Ray is a systems librarian at the William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. He frequently presents on topics relating to the use of many forms of electronic transactional data and datamining. He is teaching a course for Library Juice Academy next month called, “Collecting and Evaluating Electronic Transactions … Read more Interview with Ray Schwartz
I have just interviewed Marcus Banks, who is the Director of Library/Academic & Instructional Innovation at Samuel Merritt University. He has a strong interest in new and alternative methods of quantitatively assessing scholarly work, and that is roughly the subject area of the class he is teaching for Library Juice Academy next month: Digital Scholarship: … Read more Interview with Marcus Banks
Dale Askey, a librarian at McMaster University in Canada, is the one who has been sued by Mellen Press for giving them a bad review. Here are two statements supporting him, one from the Association of Research Libraries and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, and the other from the British Columbia Library Association… ARL-CARL … Read more Two Statements in Support of Dale Askey and McMaster University
I was going to call this post, “Gripes of a Vendor,” but then I checked on the author, Rick Anderson, and found that he is not a member of the publishing community but a member of the library community. His post is in The Scholarly Kitchen, the blog of the Society of Scholarly Publishing, and … Read more Gripes of a Dean
Phil Davis writes in The Scholarly Kitchen about “The Secret Life of Retracted Articles.” Scientific papers are frequently retracted, officially, by the journal’s publishers and editors if it is found that data was faked or for other reasons that invalidate the article’s conclusions. The problem is that the articles stay around, in libraries, on websites, … Read more The Secret Life of Retracted Articles
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
I spent the better part of Wednesday at VuStuff II, a small regional gathering hosted by Villanova University’s Falvey Memorial Library, which focused on the intersection of technology and scholarly communication in libraries. The attendees were an interesting mix of people from academic and special libraries, and included library directors, archivists, systems librarians, special collections … Read more Thoughts on VuStuff II
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility is coming to the defense of biologist Charles Monnett, who is being hounded by the Interior Department because of a 2006 publication that communicated alarming news about the effects of global warming on a polar bear population. Since the publication was in a peer-reviewed scientific journal and the investigators have … Read more Suppression of science has continued, despite Obama’s Scientific Integrity Initiative
I was in Cambridge, MA last weekend for MiT7: unstable platforms: the promise and peril of transition. This conference is put on every two years jointly by MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program and the MIT Communication Forum. The conference is concerned with new media and new communication technologies and their broad implications. Presenters came to … Read more Thoughts on MiT7
MiT7 was a great conference – intimate, warm, stimulating, interdisciplinary, and cutting-edge. There were some brilliant minds at work. I plan to post a few comments on the conference later. For now, here are links to podcasts from the three topical plenary sessions: Media in Transition 7: Unstable Platforms Archives and Cultural Memory Power and … Read more MiT7 podcasts
Media in Transition 7 (MiT 7), a small conference at MIT, is starting Friday and running ’till Sunday. I will be there; if you will be there too please say hello. Anyone wanting to follow the Twitter hash tag can look for #mit7.
I am not personally diving into the discussion of Judge Chin’s decision on the Google Settlement, because I am too war-weary of fighting it out with other librarians on issues where I feel like a lone dissenter, but I will go as far as to say that I like this post on the topic by … Read more Smart commentary on Judge Chin’s decision
I just read and enjoyed this paper by MaryBeth Meszaros, “Who’s In Charge Here? Authority, Authoritativeness, and the Undergraduate Researcher,” in Communications in Information Literacy, vol 4, no. 1 (2010). It paints a more pessimistic picture of GenY students than we usually see. I wonder how GenY optimists would respond to her argument. I tend … Read more Undergraduates and the crisis of cognitive authority
Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education has a piece about “link rot” within scholarly journal articles, which was the topic of our recent book by Michael Bugeja and Daniela Dimitrova, Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age. Bugeja is interviewed in the article, which is titled, “A Modern … Read more CHE interviews Michael Bugeja
Chapter one of Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age, by Michael Bugeja and Daniela V. Dimitrova, is now online: Extinct Citations, Missing Links and Other Bibliographical Wonders A decade ago, most research was done in the library rather than through its Web site, and scholars, editors, … Read more Extinct Citations, Missing Links and Other Bibliographical Wonders
Richard J. Cox of the University of Pittsburgh i-School has posted a review of Michael Bugeja and Daniela Dimitrova’s Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age to the group blog “What SIS Faculty Are Reading. (Full disclosure: Dr. Cox is the author of two books for Litwin … Read more Richard J. Cox reviews Vanishing Act