Had a great trip to UBC a couple of weeks back to speak at the SLAIS inaugural Johnson Memorial Lecture, a new series funded through the generosity of Stephen Johnson to honor his parents. As I noted in my talk, funding for such a series is a tremendous gift to the field and I was [...]
ASIST and CLIR have organized a meeting this week to discuss possible new accreditation processes for graduate education in information. So, you might ask who, among the programs, would really want another accreditation process? Correct, nobody. But, there can be value in examining the process if it allows us to engage constructively and widely with [...]
Just back from a pleasant, if damp, visit to Ireland which coincided with the Olympics (great) and the annual college placement frenzy for Irish 18 yr olds as results from the Leaving Certificate are released. Ireland is facing up to a post-Tiger economy (the cab driver told me the tiger had ‘lost its voice long [...]
I spent the weekend in Norman, OK, serving as a guest speaker at the SLIS annual alumni event there (nice idea!). I used the occasion to present the case for moving beyond the fault lines of typical LIS discourse (you know, paper versus digital, the traditional versus the technological etc.) so that LIS educators and [...]
Am just back from a very interesting workshop at CLIR where a group of about 20 people discussed the future of academic libraries, launching the discussion with a set of prepared essays from eight of us. Too much was discussed across the day to cover here, and there will be a summary of the event [...]
In the dim distant past, some of us used to distinguish our work from the masses by declaring proudly that we were ‘user-centered’. At one time this actually meant you did things differently and put a premium on the ability of real people to exploit a product or service. While the concern remains, and there [...]
US News put out another list of top careers this week. Apparently they determined there are 31 careers with exciting futures. Among those listed were:
librarian,
usability/user experience specialist,
curriculum and training specialist
The say average librarians make over $50k a year and are steeped in technology and research activities. If you get into usability (and [...]
The Council for Library and Information Resources is organizing a one day workshop on this topic next month in DC. I was asked to prepare a white paper of no more than 3000 words dealing with how education for LIS professionals might be impacted. You can now read a draft: Accelerating Learning & Discovery, comments [...]
Indiana University’s School of Education has received a federal grant of $3m to study how technology is used in the classroom and to what effect. Am pleased there will be more data on this since some of us have conducted significant reviews over the last decade that raised serious doubts about the claims made for [...]
I am working on a paper for CLIR that speculates (briefly) on the future of academic libraries. It will form one part of a six-paper presentation for them that aims to stimulate discussion. This has me examining many of the assumptions we make about these libraries and it is obvious many people are thinking similarly. [...]