Libraryland is a-buzz about a new role we can play in the pursuit of scientific knowledge: data curation. Data curation serves, in particular, the new scientific methodology that goes under the name e-science. E-science involves the collection of data sets which are made widely available to the research community. Researchers then “mine” these data sets … Read more Data Mining
Rory Litwin: I’m talking with Jennifer Szunko, Clarion Services Director. Jennifer offered to be interviewed for Library Juice to talk about Clarion’s services in doing paid reviews for authors and publishers. Thanks for being willing to do this interview. Jennifer, can you explain a bit about what you do at Clarion, and how it is … Read more Interview with Jennifer Szunko, director of paid-review service Clarion Review
CALL FOR PAPERS 2nd Milwaukee Conference on the Ethics of Information Organization June 15 – 16, 2012 Milwaukee, WI Information organization, like other major functions of the information professions, faces many ethical challenges. In our literature, ethical concerns have been raised with regard to, topics such as, the role of national and international tools and … Read more CFP – 2nd Milwaukee Conference on the Ethics of Information Organization
Last month in Varanasi, India, the First International Conference of Lokavidya Jan Andolan, or the Peoples’ Knowledge Movement, was held. The original call for participation talked about the situation of the displacement, environmental destruction, and poverty experienced by people throughout India: All these people, the displaced, the communities they belong to, have never gone to … Read more Valuing the People’s Knowledge
Julie Bosman writes in the New York Times about a logical new development in book publishing: finer quality, fancy print books to compete with e-books. What is not expected about this, to me, is that major publishers are moving in this direction, rather than boutique houses that specialize in it.
The recent assaults by the police on various Occupy movement encampments highlight the tenuousness of our right to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances. Certainly, there is good reason for municipal ordinances against permanently occupying public spaces. Under many circumstances, this would amount to appropriating public spaces for private use, but the … Read more Occupying the First Amendment
New address for us: Library Juice Press (or Litwin Books) PO Box 25322 Los Angeles, CA 90025 Mail sent to our PO Box in Duluth, Minnesota will still reach us, but there will be a delay.
We’re intimately familiar with the pressures on public libraries, and worried about closures and reductions of service. Independent bookstores have it worse, for a number of reasons. Indie bookstores’ fortunes decline as online retailers thrive, and as people move from print books to e-readers and non-literary, screen-based reading in general, while public libraries are able … Read more Local Indie Bookstores
I want to share a fascinating resource I found: the Google Books corpus of American English, 155 billion words in size. Obviously too big to download, so for analysis purposes you’re limited to what you can do via the website at Brigham Young University. The easy thing to do is type in a word or … Read more Google Books American English Corpus
Library Juice Press / Litwin Books gift certificates are great as personal gifts or as library-related awards. You can pay for a gift certificate in an amount of your choosing with funds in your PayPal account or with a credit card.
Great Onion article lampooning those among us who lack imagination: “Books Don’t Take You Anywhere” WASHINGTON, DC—A study released Monday by the U.S. Department of Education revealed that, contrary to the longtime claims of librarians and teachers, books do not take you anywhere. “For years, countless educators have asserted that books give readers a chance … Read more Books Don’t Take You Anywhere
Podcast on “Archives and Activism: The Contemporary Turn,” from a panel discussion moderated by Emily Drabinski and featuring some others you may know. From the site: Over the past two decades, the archive has emerged as a central site of feminist knowledge production and activism. Feminist archives and special collections have been able to document … Read more Podcast: Archives and Activism: The Contemporary Turn
Just a tip of the hat to our friend and fellow Library Juice blogger Alison Lewis, who was honored at the National Distance Learning Week Awards Ceremony as an outstanding online instructor. Alison is the author of Literary Research and British Modernism, from Scarecrow Press, and the editor of Questioning Library Neutrality: Essays from Progressive … Read more Alison Lewis Honored at National Distance Education Week
Call for Chapters Piracy: Leakages From Modernity Edited by Martin Fredriksson (Linköping University) and James Arvanitakis (University of Western Sydney) Published by Litwin Books We are inviting proposals for chapters for an anthology on Piracy planned to be published by the end of 2012. ‘Piracy’ is a concept that seems everywhere in the contemporary world. … Read more Call for Chapters: Piracy: Leakages from Modernity
CFP: Queers Online: LGBT Digital Practices in Libraries, Archives, and Museums (An Edited Collection to be published as part of the Series on Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies) Litwin Books and Library Juice Press Rachel Wexelbaum, Editor Emily Drabinski, Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies Series Editor Contact Information: Editor: Rachel Wexelbaum, Collection Management … Read more CFP: Queers Online: LGBT Digital Practices in Libraries, Archives, and Museums
Here is a guest post from Julie Teglovic, an MLIS student at the University of Denver, where students have been protesting a decision regarding the library… Library as Space: University Students Want Books This April, the paper books at the University of Denver’s Penrose Library began a move into a storage facility 10 miles away … Read more Students at the University of Denver Want Books
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
New Library Juice blogger Alan Mattlage has posted a review of John Miedema’s Slow Reading on his own blog, books, etc. While we’re on the topic of John’s book, I will note that he has a new book in the works, which he is writing as a series in web form first. It is about … Read more Alan Mattlage reviews Slow Reading
This post dovetails coincidentally with Rory’s 10/22 post about the solidarity library in Bethlehem – looks like it’s Israel/Palestine week at Library Juice. Hannah Mermelstein, a school librarian in New York City, is also a Palestine solidarity activist (and generally awesome person). She’s reworked her thesis into an article, “Overdue Books: Returning Palestine’s ‘Abandoned Property’ … Read more Looted Books