Well, there went my resolution to blog at intervals over the weekend, but really, I was mostly there for a handful of discussion groups, the chance to schmooze with people in areas I’d like to work in, and the exhibits. (NYRB Editions, you are my favorite booth at every conference.) ALA Midwinter is mostly for […]
I’m sitting in the Convention Center in downtown Philly waiting for the next job-seeker orientation event to start up. Most of what I’m doing today is job-seeker workshops, getting my resume reviewed, and checking out the recruiters; tomorrow and Sunday I’m going to a bunch of Literature in English Section events, the MLA International Bibliography […]
Lately I’ve been hearing about one of the disadvantages of commercial e-books (specifically, the kind sold by vendors like NetLibrary or Ebrary): you can’t lend them from one library to another. Dead-tree-based books can be ILL’d and shared among library consortia, but you can’t ship an e-book when it comes with restrictions about which users […]
Over at LibraryThing, someone suggested cataloging the libraries of famous people, and the project quickly snowballed into a collective effort to catalog Thomas Jefferson’s book collection. Anyone on LT can join in and claim a section of the catalog. I’m doing Pastorals, Odes, and Elegies, and have been deep in 18th-century editions of Theocritus and […]
And while I’m on the subject of supernatural stuff: The Library of the Society of Antiquaries of London is hiring. I didn’t even know there still was a Society of Antiquaries. I don’t have the archaeological and historical background to apply, but the thought of cataloging for the Society of Antiquaries is deliciously M.R. Jamesian […]
At the end of an article on theory in knowledge organization that I read for my cataloging class, I found (and circled) this paragraph: …Another area rife [sic] for theoretical development is the extensive work of cocitation and coword analysis. This work describes relationships among scholars, essentially mapping intellectual relationships within knowledge domains as represented […]
A couple of days ago I went to a forum on libraries and education at UPenn, at which one of the speakers (Alexius Macklin from Purdue) talked about integrating information literacy into the curriculum in a way that most of us in libraries haven’t yet: by teaching writing classes herself and working the information-seeking skills […]
According to Steven Bell in Inside Higher Ed a few weeks ago, "academic librarians are the nice guys of higher education." We agree with each other too much. Instead of engaging in any kind of intellectually rigorous back-and-forth exchange on controversies in our profession, we avoid sounding like we disagree. I’m of multiple minds on […]
The ACRL conference has been blogged exhaustively by the small army of official conference bloggers (note to self: sign up to be one of those bloggers the next time I want to go to a conference). So I’ll just distill the highlights into one post. Luz Mangurian’s talk about learning and cognition was great: a […]
Rachel Singer Gordon at The Liminal Librarian has a meme for library bloggers: Post five non-library blogs that you read. I’ll bite! Here are mine: Apartment Therapy: I visit AT at intervals when I’m feeling the need for home-decoration wish-fulfillment, voyeuristic gawking at other people’s apartments, or advice on finding furniture. Or when I just […]