Pull quote: “I’m starting to see that getting students involved in co-designing services is the next logical step on from usability testing. So instead of a process where you design a system and then test it on users, you involve them from the start, by asking them what they need, maybe then getting them to feedback on solution designs and specifications and then going through the design process of prototyping, testing and iterating, by getting them to look at every stage.”
Pull quote: “We will not survive by focusing on what we think our patrons need and ought to want, in preference to what our patrons say and believe they need and want. We will not survive by trying to convince them to want what we provide, instead of by coming up with provisions that excite and delight them. We need to change. We need to provide new and different services. We need to preserve some services, but significantly change the manner in which they are delivered.”
Pull quote: “We may feel we’re in a difficult position, with so little time in the classroom, with so little power on campus to influence change. But the fact is libraries are a powerful cultural symbol and librarians have more social capital than we might think. Most faculty care about these issues, too, and would love to have the chance to engage them with other faculty. We’ve made huge strides making our libraries sites for student learning; why not also make it a salon for faculty conversation, for discussions about learning, for articulating what it is that we do and why it matters?”
Pull quote: “We have put far too much emphasis on proof of productivity using blunt-force numbers. Number of publications and impact factors of journals, like robo-graders, are easier to administer at scale than actually, you know, assess stuff honestly. So long as we can measure how many papers a person has generated, no need to read them, and with a special sauce that gives us a prestige factor, no need to make any distinctions at all. Just run the numbers.”
Talks about using tool from Google that helps you tag items for Schema markup.
Pull quote: “The likely benefits are two-fold. One is that Google and other search engines can display more full-featured and accurate descriptions of individual search results that have such markup. Another is that search engines may give results that have such markup more “juice” in results ranking. In other words, it is very likely to be worth the little effort it might take to embed this markup in your pages.”
Pull quote: “When I see a shiny new thing, I ask myself, ‘How will this further the library’s goals?’ If I struggle to find an answer, I know it’s not worth pursuing.”
Pull quote: “The Wikipedia ban is a high school scaffold; it needs to be torn down in the first two years of college. Students can benefit from using Wikipedia articles appropriately, from understanding tertiary sources, from thinking critically about the sorts of issues that pop up in alert boxes at the top of questionable articles. If nothing else, the heresy of crowdsourcing—that a mass of amateurs can produce information as good as or even better than a handful of experts—must be taught.”
Pull quote: “Even if the makerbrarians concede that the consume/create distinction is just a catchy soundbite or elevator pitch to throw out when we need to show the “continued relevance” of libraries to potential funding sources, all that implies is that non-maker services somehow aren’t relevant. Put another way, not only is the consume/create distinction a false dichotomy, and not only does it avoid questions of social value, but it’s also unnecessarily adversarial. A library patron who wants to read a book is not ‘simply consuming.’ Story-time can also “embrace imagination.” The “results of knowledge creation” are often cherished parts of a community. Let’s change the rhetoric and treat all of our community and patron needs with respect, not just the needs that can be met with ABS and LEDs.”
Pull quote: “Conversations about open access are no longer about whether it is a good idea; rather, the focus is on best practices, sustainability, and maximizing OA’s impact. With this shift in conversation, it is imperative that information professionals are ready to support open access and all it entails.”
Pull quote: “Sometimes I think cataloging is the third rail of library discussions, but I’m going jump right on it: It is not the library’s responsibility to employ catalogers. It is the library’s responsibility to make our resources easy for our users to find, and if we can do that faster and cheaper, we have an obligation to do so.”
Pull quote: “But three recent events and publications have me made more deeply aware of something I think scholarly authors are also beginning to discover—that the traditional commercial publishing model is actively harmful to the interests of good scholarship. Not just failing to keep up with changing conditions, but lagging behind in ways that threaten the quality and integrity of the scholarly enterprise itself.”
Pull quote: “I cannot say the same thing for Elsevier. As most academics and many knowledge activists know, Elsevier has engaged in some pretty evil maneuvers. Elsevier published fake journals until it got caught. Its parent company was involved in the arms trade until it got caught. Elsevier played an unrepentant and significant role in advancing SOPA/PIPA/RWA and continues to lobby on issues that undermine scholarship. Elsevier currently actively screws over academic libraries and scholars through its bundling practices. There is no sign that the future of Elsevier is pro-researchers. There is zero indicator that Mendeley’s acquisition is anything other an attempt to placate the academics who are refusing to do free labor for Elsevier (editorial boards, reviewers, academics). There’s no attempt at penance, no apology, not even a promise of a future direction. Just an acquisition of a beloved company as though that makes up for all of the ways in which Elsevier has in the past _and continues to_ screw over scholars.”
Pull quote” And yes, a lot of these suspect journals charge authors for publishing their works, just like open access journals like PLoS do. But suggesting, as the article does, that scam conferences/journals exist because of the rise of open access publishing is ridiculous. It’s the logical equivalent of blaming newspapers like the NYT for people who go door-to-door selling fake magazine subscriptions.”
Pull quote: “Elsevier will grab behavior data while the grabbing’s good, analyze it, make business decisions from it, and then drop all pretense of caring. They will let Mendeley fade, its loyal userbase straggling away, its dedicated developers moving on (within Elsevier or outside it).”
Pull quote: “I like the way each of these emphasises the role of the library in a cycle of creation and recreation. The library is not an end in itself but an institution which helps create new knowledge.”
