Scott Walter

Higher Ed BlogCon

From the Bibliocasting discussion list:

Thomson Peterson’s, PRNewswire, and CASE are pleased to present *HigherEdBlogCon – Transforming Academic Communities with New Tools of the Social Web. * This brand-new, all-online event aims to bring together in a single Web space many of the leading players who are transforming academe with their use of the new tools of the Social Web.

All presentations will be made available on the event Web site at no charge to participants (with the exception of the live, Web/audio CASE Online Speaker Series events).

*HigherEd BlogCon 2006* will focus on the use of blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasts, vblogs, and other digital tools in a range of areas in academe. We invite you to propose presentations for HigherEd BlogCon 2006.

See the full CFP at Information Wants to be Free.

MLA Engages Tenure, Scholarly Communication Issues

For those who haven’t followed the various reports from the recently-completed annual meeting of the MLA, there were interesting discussions of re-thinking tenure requirements for faculty in the Humanities and of the role of digital scholarship as a route to tenure. An overview can be found in today’s Inside Higher Education.

As with Andersen’s Digital Scholarship in the Tenure, Promotion, and Review Process (2004), the fact that this discussion is coming from within a discipline suggests an opportunity for the academic librarian to act as an advocate and a resource for innovation in scholarly communication.

John Willinsky on “The Access Principle”

John Willinsky of the Public Knowledge Project provides an interview on his new book, The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship.

What is the “access principle”? In a nutshell:

“The access principle holds that with a form of knowledge that is constituted as a public good, which is the case with research and scholarship, the knowledge should be circulated as widely and publicly as possible, especially as that wider circulation increases the value and quality of that knowledge.”

The Debate Over Conference Participation

There is a fascinating discussion going on across the biblioblogosphere (and on the ALA Council list) about Jenny Levine’s comments about ALA policy regarding compensation for presentation at conferences. While some are posing this as a “generational” issue, or as an unfortunate financial reality that we should all simply accept, there are a wide range of thoughtful (and not so thoughtful) comments posted on multiple blogs linked through Jenny’s posts.

Having been a conference presenter and organizer for ACRL and ALA (and AASL), I know the problems that come with ALA’s strict policy regarding compensation. Likewise, I know that many people have complained about the multi-layered costs of membership in our professional associations (with ALA dues forming the foundation onto which divisional dues are built) and the financial demands made of those wishing to participate at all owing to equally arcane rules about attending both Midwinter and Annual every year during which you serve on a committee (kudos to those sections exploring virtual meetings and virtual committee membership!). All are symptoms of a larger problem affecting our association(s).

We talk a lot about wanting to increase active participation and about recruiting the next generation of leaders for our libraries and our professional associations, but policies like these provide a real hurdle to people dealing with stagnant salaries and declining budgets for travel and professional development. I have been lucky to be able to participate in a number of ACRL programs and I have benefited greatly from that participation, but it came at a high price and I can see why others might balk at it.

I hope that ALA Council will take these concerns seriously and I hope that ACRL will remember them when related concerns come up at meetings of ACRL Leadership (as they have in almost every meeting I’ve attended over the past few years).

New Journal on Academic Integrity

From this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education comes the announcement of a new journal focusing on issues of plagiarism and academic integrity. The International Journal for Educational Integrity is an open-access journal led by Australian scholars inspired by the work of the Center for Academic Integrity. With its first issue currently online, this journal promises to be another potentially useful venue for discussion of information literacy instruction and academic integrity in the global educational environment.