On the last morning of my last day at the ACRL Conference I tweeted out a quick observation: Would be interesting to text mine #acrl2013 tweets for the word “authority” — seems to be coming up in lots of contexts/sessions. — Maura Smale (@mauraweb) April 13, 2013 I got a couple of retweets and even [...]

A funny and ultimately disheartening? article in the Washington Post portrays librarians as the last defenders of truth in a decadent culture consumed with trivia and superficialities, even going so far as to describe librarians as “trench warriors for truth.” Here’s a dramatic excerpt from a chat reference service: “We’re losing him! We’re going to [...]

Another way to introduce students to the idea of complexity in the research process is through open and closed questions. In Second-hand Knowledge: An Inquiry into Cognitive Authority, Patrick Wilson describes closed questions as matters which (for now) have been settled beyond practical doubt and open questions as questions on which doubt remains. I suggest [...]

For all the commercial publishers’ (fake) crowing about peer review, turns out the peer review process in medicine is not working so well lately. At least that’s the conclusion one comes to after reading Robert Lee Hotz’s interesting article in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Most Science Studies Appear to Be Tainted.” Hotz references John P. [...]

Michael Jensen has predicted In the Web 3.0 world, we will also start seeing heavily computed reputation-and-authority metrics, based on many of the kinds of elements now used, as well as on elements that can be computed only in an information-rich, user-engaged environment. By this he means that computer programs and data mining algorithms will [...]