There’s a good interview with Library Juice Press author and series editor Emily Drabinski by Julia West in The Desk Set blog. Emily is co-editor of Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods and series editor for Library Juice Press, with the Series on Gender and Sexuality in Librarianship.
Ron Day and Hamid Ekbia of the IU library school have an article in the new First Monday titled, “(Digital) experiences.” The article looks at three types of “digital experience” using analytical perspectives on modern “experience” coming from Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. Day’s and Ekbia’s work gets at the roots of some of the … Read more Ron Day and Hamid Ekbia on “digital experiences”
John Allen Paulos is a mathematician who writes books about numeracy for a popular audience. The New York Times Magazine published a brief but insightful essay by him about the dangers inherent in relying on numbers without looking at how they are arrived at (my basic issue with Wolfram Alpha). Here is the starting paragraph … Read more “Metric Mania”
Many librarians, when asked what is involved in being a librarian besides checking out books, will say something to the effect of, “I don’t know the answers, but I know how to look them up.” Where a doctor has knowledge of medicine, a librarian has knowledge of how to find out knowledge of medicine. (Or … Read more Knowing how to find out
There is a hot issue in librarianship that I think has great significance in terms of how society and the institution of libraries is changing. The issue is how the profession will deal with claims by native cultural groups who desire that their cultural works, documents, and artifacts be kept in public libraries, but with … Read more Wayne Bivens-Tatum on Librarians and “Traditional Cultural Expressions”
The big theme in the current era of librarianship is to be user-centered. Being user centered is the key to maintaining relevance, changing with the times, and erasing the barriers to access that turn many people off to libraries. In the background of the idea of user-centeredness are two parallel but very different theories: critical … Read more Motives in the conception of the “user” in user-centered service design
LACUNY is sponsoring an event tomorrow on Critical Library Instruction at the Brooklyn College Library. The organizers are Alycia Sellie and Jonathan Cope. Ira Shor will be the featured speaker. Wish I could go…
Arcades Collaborative is a new academic group blog, started by Patrick Keilty, on what could be called critical information theory. Ron Day and a number of really sharp doc students (and a couple of sharp practitioners) are applying critical social theory and philosophy to questions in information studies (or more accurately, using theory to raise … Read more New group blog on critical information theory
Maria, Emily, and Alana met in Google Chat, as they did often over the course of this book project, to reflect on the process and product of Critical Library Instruction: Theories & Methods. Alana: Hello! Emily: Morning, y’all! Maria: Hi! Emily: How’re we all doing? Maria: I’m doing okay. Nervous about my presentation at noon … Read more Critical Library Instruction – editors’ chat
I’d like to thank Wayne Bivens-Tatum of Princeton University Libraries for his thoughtful review of André Cossette’s Humanism and Libraries: An Essay on Library Philosophy. I’m pleased to read that he and I have the same disagreements with Cossette, and that, like I do, he finds the book useful and interesting despite those points of … Read more Review of Humanism and Libraries
Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods Editors: Emily Drabinski, Alana Kumbier, and Maria Accardi Price: $35.00 Published: March 2010 ISBN: 978-1-936117-01-7 Bringing together the voices of a range of practicing librarians, this collection illuminates theories and methods of critical pedagogy and library instruction. Chapters address critical approaches to standards and assessment practices, links between queer, … Read more Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods
The talk I gave in Alberta on February 5th was recorded. The recording is now on the web in mp3 form. Toni Samek’s introduction feels a bit grand, but the real me will be on the mic shortly. The recording itself came out all right. Not all of the audience questions are audible, but as … Read more Podcast of Alberta Talk: Disintermediation 2.0
Notice that I am not using the word “ontology.” I’ll get into why later, but if you’ve read any Heidegger you can guess… Hope Olson, Sandy Berman, and many others who have done work based on theirs, have shown how classification systems tend not to represent all users well. Hope Olson has described the problem … Read more Quick note on taxonomic transparency
Slides to go along with my talk at the University of Alberta in Edmonton this morning…
Adorno and Horkheimer might have something to say about this, too. I thought I had noticed this beginning to happen and was actually planning to post something about it soon, but Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has the full story: “Google’s Personalized Results: The “New Normal” That Deserves Extraordinary Attention.” Read through this and … Read more Google splits apart the search
John Miedema gave his talk at the Library of Congress the other day, and has posted his text and bibliography. John is working on an interesting follow-up project to Slow Reading…
Leveraging our impact with technology means certain things. It means substituting machine processes, which are good at certain kinds of thinking, for intellectual processes, which are good at other kinds of thinking. In terms of “recommender engines” or other systems intended to connect people with information automatically, it means relying on aggregate data and averages. … Read more People and Machines
“Verbiage” is a derisive word describing prose that uses many words to say not a lot, or more particularly, prose that uses words carelessly, to create impressions without attending to what the words actually mean in a specific sense. For techies, “verbiage” is stuff that English majors add later for the benefit of end users, … Read more “Verbiage,” “Intuitiveness,” respect for language, respect for users
Library of Walls Foreword by Davin Heckman My first experience of what would become Samuel Gerald Collins’ Library of Walls came several years back, when I was an editor for the journal Reconstruction ‹reconstruction.eserver.org›. My editorial curiosity was piqued by the title of an article that Collins submitted for consideration in a special issue of … Read more Davin Heckman’s Foreword to Library of Walls
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