Office Hours

As we contemplate our upcoming relocation and remodel, we are attempting to find spaces around campus for our faculty and staff. One obvious solution has been that the subject liaisons could have offices in the building where their faculty and student constituents are located. I was interested to read this post on the ACRLog about [...]

Tenure for Librarians - Is It Worth It?

About once a year or so, I feel the need to say something about tenure and faculty status for academic librarians. Not quite “defend” our position, but at least take stock and reevaluate that position. Am I feeling defensive? Well, perhaps just a little. The truth is, library faculty play a different role than [...]

Association of American Colleges and Universities Embraces Information Literacy

Today on the Association of College and Research Libraries’ blog, ACRLog, Barbara Fister reported that, while attending the AACU Midwinter meeting, she “was struck by how much faculty and administrators embraced information literacy as one of several key intellectual and practical skills, identified in the AAC&U’s Greater Expectations report and revisited in a just-released publication, [...]

Annoyed Librarian: To the Frustrated Trendsetters

Annoyed Librarian: To the Frustrated Trendsetters
“They are not going to start a blog, because they not only have nothing to say, but (and this is what separates them from many bloggers) they know they have nothing to say and they don’t want to bore people with their trivial thoughts.”
I always love the Annoyed Librarian’s posts. [...]

Continuing Education for Librarians

In it [the article mentioned above] Leslie Burger makes me very happy

“I’ve asked Dan O’Connor (chair, ALA Education Committee) to focus his group’s attention on creating an action plan for reforming library education at the ALISE/ALA Education forum planned for Midwinter 2007 in Seattle. Rather than getting educators and practitioners together for a “shoot the breeze” session, we will focus the session on a discussion of Needham’s proposal or any other proposal that comes forward, with the end result being an action plan for changing library education.”

Group of University Researchers to Make Web Science a Field of Study - New York Times

Web science, the researchers say, has social and engineering dimensions. It extends well beyond traditional computer science, they say, to include the emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being used to study how people behave on the Web. And Web science, they add, shifts the center of gravity in engineering research from how a single computer works to how huge decentralized Web systems work.

“The Web isn’t about what you can do with computers,” Mr. Berners-Lee said. “It’s people and, yes, they are connected by computers. But computer science, as the study of what happens in a computer, doesn’t tell you about what happens on the Web.”

…

Web science is related to another emerging interdisciplinary field called services science. This is the study of how to use computing, collaborative networks and knowledge in disciplines ranging from economics to anthropology to lift productivity and develop new products in the services sector, which represents about three-fourths of the United States economy. Services science research is being supported by technology companies like I.B.M., Accenture and Hewlett-Packard, and by the National Science Foundation.

Web science research, said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a technology strategist at I.B.M. and visiting professor at M.I.T., is “a prerequisite to designing and building the kinds of complex, human-oriented systems that we are after in services science.”

Mr. Berners-Lee and his colleagues at the M.I.T. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and in

…

With initial support from M.I.T. and the University of Southampton, the program will hold workshops on Web science and sponsor research fellowships. “But we also want to educate and train people who can understand and analyze how these huge, complex systems on the Web work,” said Wendy Hall, a professor at the University of Southampton. “That means eventually having undergraduate and graduate programs in Web science.”

Annoyed Librarian

Well, I’m sure you have to be a librarian to appreciate this post, but I must say I was practically rolling in my desk chair over this one. To heck with Lonelygirl15! Who is the Annoyed Librarian??
Here’s an excerpt from the Annoyed Librarian’s critique of ALA’s Top 10 Reasons to Become a Librarian. Recruitment material [...]