It’s been over a month, and the faculty blogosphere is still buzzing about Mark Taylor’s New York Times editorial “End the University as We Know It.”  That’s not too surprising, since Taylor called for, among other changes, abolishing both departments and tenure.  ACRLog blogger Scott Walter linked to the editorial here right after it was [...]

Some academic librarians do quite well as solo researchers and writers. Others find they are more productive when they team up with one or more colleagues. Each method has its pros and cons. Going solo you can set your own pace, do things the way you like, and need only to push yourself. It minimizes [...]

After writing my previous post, our library director brought this report to my attention: “The Changing Nature of Intellectual Authority” by Peter Nicholson, presented at the 148th ARL meeting in Ottawa, Ontario, May 17-19 2006. Apparently I was “scooped” by a good three years, as the ideas in the report are similar enough to my [...]

Consider this post to be a little bit like that drawer in the kitchen where you put things because you don’t know where else to put them: buttons, an odd shoelace, a dead battery that may need recycling, that gadget that sculpts cucumbers into fancy shapes that you got for Christmas fifteen years ago, that [...]

This has been an interesting first year for me, and certainly not what I expected.  I’ve learned a lot about bureaucracy, and how to make the best of a clunky administrative system.  I’ve learned that what a librarian requests and what the library actually receives can be two vastly different things.  I’ve learned that without [...]