I’m grateful to Roger Schonfeld at the Scholarly Kitchen for his synopsis of a study conducted by Ithaka S+R and the Harvard University Library about the organization of scholarly communication at ten major research university libraries. His typology is helping me find some clarity on something I’ve been struggling with lately: libraries as open access publishers. What’s troubling me is the how, not the what. Scholarly publishing in its current form is on an unsustainable path; it must change or … [Read more...]
Teaching Information Privilege
October 1, 2015 By
As the Assistant Director for Information Literacy at Davidson, I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to teach students information literacy. In my experience, our students and faculty often equate information literacy with the ability to write research papers, so our librarians frequently are asked to teach skills and concepts that will help students succeed on specific academic assignments. We value this important educational role, but we also know that an information literate person … [Read more...]
I’ll Resist the Seinfeld Reference
January 28, 2015 By
I'm currently participating in Davidson’s first cohort of faculty, students and staff experimenting with Davidson Domains. Davidson Domains is a program spearheaded by ITS and the Digital Studies program at Davidson: “which will provide every Davidson student a unique domain name and access to an open source platform like WordPress. The Web domain will serve as a foundation students’ online presence at Davidson and beyond. As students progress through the Davidson curriculum, they will learn … [Read more...]
Happy New Year!
January 7, 2015 By
Library staff have returned from the holiday break and are gearing up for the spring semester, and some of us are having some re-entry adjustment (getting up early in the morning—eeuuw!), so I offer something light to help us all ramp up to the new year. I’ve just started reading Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, a novel by Robin Sloan. I’ll participate/lurk in an online book discussion on Friday afternoon, organized and hosted by the TLT Group as part of its series on using cognitive science … [Read more...]
Read this about Scholarly Publishing
December 17, 2014 By
If I could persuade faculty colleagues to read one thing over the holiday break, it would be this short piece in the current Harvard Magazine: “The ‘Wild West’ of Academic Publishing: The Troubled Present and Promising Future of Scholarly Publishing.” If you’ve ever wondered: Why university presses are struggling and why they’re publishing fewer books than they used to, Why libraries don’t buy as many scholarly monographs as they used to, Why the whole scholarly communication system seems … [Read more...]
