Month: November 2011

I’ve been mulling over a couple of documents that have generated a lot of chatter in my online circles in the past couple of weeks. First, Ithaka surveyed library directors and found that only about a third of them agree with the statement “my library has a well-developed strategy to meet changing user needs and…

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been acting cynical and complaining about our cult of excess information when what we need is access to information in a way that’s sustainable and not quite as likely as the current state of affairs to make my head explode. A big piece of the problem is that…

In last Sunday’s New York Times Jonathan Franzen wrote about the ways love, technology, and consumerism are growing blurred. We collect friends, we show affection for things by clicking on them, and we gather followers in a hall-of-mirrors projection of our selves as an aggregation of connections. Those connections, in turn, determine what we see…

I’m always interested in what Project Information Literacy is up to. This week they have posted an interview with Sandra Jamieson and Rebecca Moore Howard, the researchers behind the Citation Project, an effort to measure the extent to which first year college writers use various strategies for writing from sources (as previously reported here). Many…

Last week, I riffed on a controversy over a library organization restructuring that led to new positions being created, old positions being eliminated, and a handful of long-time library staff members being out of a job. Since I don’t know the details of that particular library, I made some general remarks about the need for…

When I read “Library Limbo,” a news story about library staff members being laid off the University of San Diego, I had to resist adding a comment because I needed what preschools sometimes call a “time out.” My first responses were strong, but not measured, and in stories like this there are always layers of…

Ten years ago, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper published a nifty book about how and why people use paper in their workplaces. The Myth of the Paperless Office reported ethnographic observations of people struggling to do things with computers that they were used to doing on paper; sometimes there were good reasons why paper was…

The book based on the Hacking the Academy project is now online and soon will be available in print from Digital Culture Books, the innovative open access imprint of the University of Michigan Press – also known as MPub. This publishing enterprise, integrated into the library and beyond, is where you should look if you…

I have been intrigued by the possibilities ever since I first heard of Anthologize – a WordPress plugin created by a “one tool, one week” digital humanities barn-raiser sponsored by the Center for History and New Media. It seems like a good platform for a class that might want to work together on a writing…