Stephen Francoeur's Commonplace Book

Meredith Farkas, "Spare Me the Hype Cycle, " American Libraries Magazine

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:10:50 -0400

Meredith Farkas, "Spare Me the Hype Cycle, " American Libraries Magazine:

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.”

Eric Phetteplace, "Blacklisting Wikipedia & Information Literacy," PataMetaData

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:05:29 -0400

Eric Phetteplace, "Blacklisting Wikipedia & Information Literacy," PataMetaData:

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.”

Lane Wilkinson, "Creation, consumption, and the library," Sense & Reference

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:02:00 -0400

Lane Wilkinson, "Creation, consumption, and the library," Sense & Reference:

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.”

Abby Clobridge, "You Say You Want a Revolution? - Open Access on the March," Online Searcher

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:52:00 -0400

Abby Clobridge, "You Say You Want a Revolution? - Open Access on the March," Online Searcher:

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.”

Laura Krier, "What’s Wrong with MARC? (NISO BIBFRAME Roadmap Meeting, Part 2)," Words for Nerds

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:53:42 -0400

Laura Krier, "What’s Wrong with MARC? (NISO BIBFRAME Roadmap Meeting, Part 2)," Words for Nerds:

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.”

Kevin Smith, "Let Me Count the Ways," Peer to Peer Review

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:12:00 -0400

Kevin Smith, "Let Me Count the Ways," Peer to Peer Review:

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.”

danah boyd, "why I’m quitting Mendeley (and why my employer has nothing to do with it)," apophenia

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 13:59:32 -0400

danah boyd, "why I’m quitting Mendeley (and why my employer has nothing to do with it)," apophenia:

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.”

Mike Eisen, "Door-to-door subscription scams: the dark side of The New York Times," it is NOT junk

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 12:51:31 -0400

Mike Eisen, "Door-to-door subscription scams: the dark side of The New York Times," it is NOT junk:

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.”

Library Loon, "The Mendeley endgame," Gavia Libraria

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 12:33:12 -0400

Library Loon, "The Mendeley endgame," Gavia Libraria:

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).”

Lorcan Dempsey, "Defining the library ... reflexively," Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:34:38 -0400

Lorcan Dempsey, "Defining the library ... reflexively," Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog:

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.”

PF Anderson, "A Personal Timeline of Library Privacy & Transparency," Emerging Technologies Librarian

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:09:00 -0400

PF Anderson, "A Personal Timeline of Library Privacy & Transparency," Emerging Technologies Librarian:

Pull quote: “One of my favorites was a librarian who announces at every monthly board meeting, ‘There have been no legal requests for patron records.’ Then, if she is ever asked, she will go silent, and the board will know. It happened. Many libraries emulated this once she thought of it, and there are libraries all around the country where we make forced silence obvious and evident by surrounding it with ‘sound’ beforehand.”

Alycia Sellie, "Street Librarianship, Without the Streets," dh+lib

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:42:02 -0400

Alycia Sellie, "Street Librarianship, Without the Streets," dh+lib:

Pull quote: “First, we need to share our own work as widely as possible. This means investigating and getting comfortable with open licenses for our writing, images and creative work as well as our code. Further, we must be critical of proprietary systems that are costly and hard to use—from Blackboard to Facebook. We need to use alternatives to the technological giants, and we should talk not just about how to use a tool or a resource but how to understand its structure and how it works (or doesn’t). We have to acknowledge the world beyond our university or our stacks, and not remain in digital ivory towers. We should invite the messiness of an unjust world into our work and confront the contradictions. We have to make it ok that not everyone feels immediately comfortable with technology, and that there are still many socioeconomic factors that create real barriers.”

Richard Nash, "What Is the Business of Literature?," VQR

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:43:00 -0400

Richard Nash, "What Is the Business of Literature?," VQR:

Pull quote: “You begin to realize that the business of literature is the business of making culture, not just the business of manufacturing bound books. This, in turn, means that the increased difficulty of selling bound books in a traditional manner (and the lower price point in selling digital books) is not going to be a significant challenge over the long run, except to free the business of literature from the limitations imposed when one is producing things rather than ideas and stories. Book culture is not print fetishism; it is the swirl and gurgle of idea and style in the expression of stories and concepts—the conversation, polemic, narrative force that goes on within and between texts, within and between people as they write, revise, discover, and respond to those texts. That swirl and gurgle does happen to have a home for print fetishism, as it has a home for digital fetishism. This is what literature has always been.”

Kevin Smith, "The quest for 'super-property,'” Scholarly Communications @ Duke

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:35:00 -0400

Kevin Smith, "The quest for 'super-property,'” Scholarly Communications @ Duke:

Pull quote: “Publishers were seeking a ‘new deal,’ a super-property right that is unprecedented in any other market place. And what libraries ‘won’ (remembering that no library was a party to the case) was simply the right to proceed as we have been for many years. I have no doubt that if the lower courts had been upheld in this case, publishers would begin to demand ‘public lending fees’ from libraries whenever a book was printed in another country, and would have moved operations offshore to increase the situations in which they could demand such a fee (as the Second Circuit Court of Appeals acknowledged was a likely outcome). It is an overstatement to call this a victory for libraries; it was merely a successful defense of what we have done for many years, which, it turns out, is something that our courts really value and appreciate.”

Kevin Smith, "International First Sale is upheld," Scholarly Communications @ Duke

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 13:34:23 -0400

Kevin Smith, "International First Sale is upheld," Scholarly Communications @ Duke:

Pull quote: “It appears that the Court took very seriously that ‘parade of horribles’ that were suggested if they upheld the Second Circuit — libraries would be unable to lend some materials without a license from publishers., student could be prevented from buying or selling second-hand textbooks, etc. According to the Court, these were too distressing, and too likely to occur.”

Bob Stein, "The Future of the Book is the Future of Society," if:book

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 11:44:00 -0400

Bob Stein, "The Future of the Book is the Future of Society," if:book:

Pull quote: “Although we date the ‘age of print’ from 1454, more than two hundred years passed before the ‘novel’ emerged as a recognizable form. Newspapers and magazines took even longer to arrive on the scene. Just as Gutenberg and his fellow printers started by reproducing illustrated manuscripts, contemporary publishers have been moving their printed texts to electronic screens. This shift will bring valuable benefits (searchable text, personal portable libraries, access via internet download, etc.), but this phase in the history of publishing will be transitional. Over time new media technologies will give rise to new forms of expression yet to be invented that will come to dominate the media landscape in decades and centuries to come.”

Jacob Berg, "Dear Aspiring Librarians (On MLIS Program Rankings)," BeerBrarian

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 13:54:00 -0400

Jacob Berg, "Dear Aspiring Librarians (On MLIS Program Rankings)," BeerBrarian:

Pull quote: “What we have here is a lazy, crude metric that attempts to get at something like “reputation,” but the magazine’s staff doesn’t know how and doesn’t care to know how to really do it.”

Jim DelRosso, "Libraries’ Glass Escalator," The Nascent Librarian

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 11:34:50 -0400

Jim DelRosso, "Libraries’ Glass Escalator," The Nascent Librarian:

Pull quote: “In fact, I’ll go further and say that any male librarian who does not take a step back and consider that the raises, promotions, and laurels he receives come to him easier than they do to his female colleagues is doing himself, his peers, and his profession a disservice.”

Chris Bourg, "The great librarian identity crisis of 2013," Feral Librarian

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 19:43:00 -0400

Chris Bourg, "The great librarian identity crisis of 2013," Feral Librarian:

Pull quote: “But I wonder if there is a way to “change the narrative” (hat tip to Bess Sadler for the phrase). What if the story was that the work libraries do is so important and so cool that everyone wants a piece of it? Or that libraries are such logical places for a broad range of services and resources that of course we need to hire folks with a broader range of education and skills and talents?”

A Library for the Subway

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 12:19:34 -0500

A Library for the Subway:

counterpunches:

A trio of students from the Miami Ad School—Max Pilwat, Keri Tan and Ferdi Rodriguez—have came up with an innovative concept that allows people to read the first ten pages of popular books while riding the subway.

Using near field communications (NFC) technology, commuters select the desired book from a list of popular titles and read its first ten pages—upon finishing, the reader will be informed of the closest library location from which they can pick up and read the rest of the book.

This is a simple but ingenious idea that can be adopted and adapted to encourage reading in the 21st century, when new technology is changing the way we consume books.