Now that faculty outreach and collection development for English and American literature are officially part of my job description, I've been making an effort to stay more up-to-date with the field. I'm scanning a much bigger field than I used to when I was a grad student in English, though, and I have fewer hours […]
Catching up on several weeks’ worth of articles in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, I spotted Todd Gilman’s ominously titled “Subject Experts Need Not Apply,” which reports that librarians with subject Ph.D.s aren’t getting jobs at the rate one would expect. Writes Gilman: Many recent job postings for humanities librarians, reference librarians, or those specializing […]
Personally, I think the alleged ghost in the New Paltz library is a bug crawling over the security camera lens. But the video‘s still kind of eerie to watch. (Paging agents Mulder and Scully!)
Since several of you who read this have asked about it, I wanted to point out that the Questioning Authority conference proceedings are now online, and you can get to my conference talk from the page with the rest of the papers from my panel. The slides should go up too, at some point. If […]
One of the good things about this weekend’s conference was discovering common interests with fellow presenters. During one of those common-interest-finding conversations, I had an idea: “Wouldn’t it be neat,” I said, “if there were some kind of working group for people who work on both the history of the book and what’s happening with […]
The main conference day is finished, and my paper went well — various people told me afterwards that they’d liked it. I think it benefited from being on a really good panel on a day of interesting and lively talks. I’m impressed that the conference organizers made everything go like clockwork, with good food appearing […]
(Title of this post stolen shamelessly from a Frank O’Hara poem, in case you’re wondering. He got an MFA here in between sojourns in New York.) So here I am in Ann Arbor for day 1 of the conference I’m attending; the papers are all being delivered tomorrow and Sunday morning, so today was mostly […]
For the past several weeks I’ve been using my Fridays (which, in my work schedule, are the start of the weekend) to work on my project for the special collections class I’m taking. It’s a faux exhibit (i.e. we have to turn in an introduction and set of labels for an imaginary exhibit we’d like […]
I’ve just had a paper proposal accepted at the Questioning Authority 2008 conference, upcoming in March at the University of Michigan. The conference is organized around the theme of the authority of digital information; I’m going to be talking about authority control and LibraryThing. Very exciting. Now I have to get cracking on actually writing […]
I’ve been thinking, in a work-related context, about close reading, and how librarians might help students learn to do it. The standard "bibliographic instruction" model — class meets in library, librarian shows students how to find what they need — tends to be geared toward paper research. Close reading is a skill that isn’t usually […]