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Library Hold Shelf Pros and Cons
I recently got a notice that I had a book waiting for me at the circulation desk. Thrilled, I raced over there having completely forgotten a) that I had put a book on hold months ago, and b) anything...
View ArticleThank you, Steve
What with one thing and another, getting this space looking functional again seemed like an insurmountable task. I couldn’t even make myself find a new base theme that didn’t have that awful, huge,...
View ArticleHow students (and faculty) really find articles
In January we started piloting the Wiley pay-per-view option. Based on our usage stats and other schools’ usage stats, we bought tokens that would get us through the calendar year, after which we would...
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The Reference Pager; or, Things That Will Probably Kill Me
Last summer, our workhorse of a pager finally fell to bits. Literally. So we had to buy a new one, and it’s actually not a walk in the park to find one that will transmit all the way through our...
View ArticleAcademia, Libraries, Work, and the Public Good
As our public debate swirls around whether the working poor should go to college, whether academics work hard enough to justify their pay and social standing, and whether libraries are worth their...
View ArticleWhat’s in a name
This week, as I and those I talk with have been mulling over Bibliographic Instruction, Information Literacy, and Transliteracy, I keep circling around to thoughts about the act of naming concepts —...
View ArticleStatistical Abstract of the United States: getting access to the 2013 edition
This is from the department of Probably Everyone Knew This But Me. I’d been aware that ProQuest had taken over the Statistical Abstract, but I hadn’t realized that they were also producing a print...
View ArticleBrief explanation
So… I got kind of stuck in the middle of a 4-part series when life and work swallowed all the time and energy I had for blogging. But the new school year has started, and there’s no way I’m going to...
View ArticleOn Discourse, Civility, and Vendors; or, JoVE and ACS and bullies
By sheer coincidence, one vendor demonstrated the fallacy of another vendor’s beliefs in the space of the last few days. I give you two vignettes: The American Chemical Society dismissed Jenica’s...
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Why yes, I have been teaching in my office lately
It’s been and instruction filled couple of weeks in my neck of the woods, both in classrooms and in my office. Here you see snippets of me teaching indexing rules for the MLA International...
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Resilience
Four or five years ago, my supervisor gave me a little Christmas Cactus planted in one of those little gift pots with gold foil around them. Thank goodness it’s a cactus because I remembered to water...
View ArticleAn ebook plan by Iris Jastram and Steve Lawson
Reposted from 5/9/2011* For obvious reasons, we have been thinking about ebooks recently. We thought that the new HarperCollins policy of setting an arbitrary limit of 26 checkouts was absurd....
View ArticleDreaming of libraries
There’s a recurring character in my dreams about work. He’s an independent researcher/hobbyist who’s obsessed with a particular artist. Both the researcher and the object of his obsession are...
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Focal Flexibility
One of my favorite metaphors for humanistic inquiry is “unpacking.” Sometimes it feels like an over-full suite case springing open, scattering previously unseen clothing and toiletries all over the...
View ArticleDo you MOOC at all?
So, I’m taking a MOOC in social network analysis. Last week when I signed up and saw that it started in March I thought “whew, in a while then.” Turns out, this week is March. Who knew? Anyway, the...
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An amateur anthropologist walks into a MOOC
My Facebook Network The first week of this MOOC I’m taking has been fascinating. I’m in a class of about 1,000 people from all over the world and (it seems) all levels of experience with Social...
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If feel like I must get less email than pretty much everyone I know. Like most of the time when people talk about how much email they get in a day I nod and commiserate and hope they don’t notice that...
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From the department of “People will buy anything”
I bring you: Silence. So many versions of John Cage’s controversial work.
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Reasonable Expectation of Privacy, the NSA, and the value of metadata
My almost-two-year-old nephew still likes phones. A week ago, the general public didn’t know or care about metadata. Now, thanks to the NSA, it’s all anyone talks about. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court...
View ArticleMotivation Follows Action
This has really been my first week of “summer.” School runs through mid-June here, and then there’s Reunion to keep us busy, and then sophomore portfolios to read and annual reports to write. Then I...
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