InfoMatters

Then check this out - get your real accredited degree through second life. As one of the instructors put it, without a hint of sarcasm, some people are not very comfortable with their first life so……

I am not sure how to take the elevation of this blog to the list of Top 100 Academic Blogs Every Professional Investor Should Read but that’s where CurrencyTrading. Net just put it…..So it’s true, no good deed goes unpunished.

Outgoing ALA president Leslie Burger announced a new presidential task force this summer to synthesize the ongoing efforts by ALA to advance LIS education (I am choosing my words carefully here). Its workings are somewhat mysterious but presumably we will be told more when it reports next year. It’s membership includes former presidents Michael Gorman, Leslie Burger herself, and Carla Hayden (as chair), but it lacks the present president, Loriene Roy, which is most unfortunate since she alone among these is a tenured faculty member currently working in LIS education.

Of course, like everyone, I want to see improved standards of education but unlike some, I don’t actually believe that rewording the existing standards is the way to go when there are so many other problems that need fixing first. The language used in the former ALA-president’s April 2007 column in American Libraries makes me worry about how this committee views education and libraries. Its traditionalist tone implies more prescription of education by outside constituencies and a narrowing of perspective that could drive quality out of our programs. Of course I could be wrong. Maybe they will take a hard line on the diploma mills. Maybe they will argue for LIS extending beyond narrow interpretations of librarianship. Maybe the committee will recommend that accreditation actually does more than ask people to swear allegiance to libraries and to complete endless self-assessments. Maybe they will use data to inform their opinions. Maybe they will actually listen to the schools and not confuse education with adherence to canon. Let’s see. But it’s been a long time since ALA was led by an academic. What a pity the opportunity provided by this rare co-occurence of leadership bridging the profession and the academy was not seized for the benefit of both.

If you want an example of the cultural impact of technologies on language, look no further than the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Seems that hyphen usage has succumbed to the dual pressures of design-sensitive (oops) publication and shorthand keying styles of many interaction devices. While people have often been unsure of the correct use of hyphens, user confidence is not the determining factor it seems for the editors. Rather, hyphens ‘mess up the look of a nice bit of typography’, says Angus Stevenson. And who can possibly waste thumb pushes on creating a ‘-’? That said, new words have been added, including the hyphenated ‘carbon-neutral’, part of an increased use of environmental terms. Meaning is just use, eh?

The IEEE Professional Communication Society has awarded Arijit Sengupta and myself the Rudolph J. Joenk, Jr. Award for Best Paper of 2006 in the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. The paper, “Query by Templates: Using the Shape of Information to Search Next-Generation Databases,” (see my pubs page for a copy) results originally from Dr. Sengupta’s doctoral dissertation which he completed at Indiana in Computer Science while we were both there. Jit is now an Assistant Professor at the Dept of Information Systems and Operations Management in the Raj Soin College of Business at Wright State University and deserves most of the credit for this - not only was it his research work but he persisted with the paper when others may have been put off by some of the reviewers’ comments which indicated they did not really understand the concept of information shape and when his fellow faculty members wondered just what is a CS guy doing working on this kind of stuff? Congrats Jit!