It’s always nice when you have a secret bright idea and never do anything about it and then see someone you know and respect doing something totally awesome with it. I grew up in the 70s when the Book of Lists books were all the rage and I loved them. I’d always liked the idea of doing a librarian’s book of lists. And now George Eberhart – also the author of The Guide to Cryptozoology – has done just that! Announced in American Libraries: the top ten lists in the librarian’s book of lists. Hooray!
Month: June 2010
update on four year old post
I mentioned, back in 2006, the case of Scott Savage vs Ohio State University. Inside Higher Ed has a post about the results of Savage’s lawsuit against the university. Upshot, “a federal judge rejected a former librarian’s lawsuit against the university.” [pdf of decision]. Depending on how you lean in this case, this is either terrific or troubling news (or possibly both) but it’s been interesting to read various reporting about it to see how it’s represented. I think my favorite analysis occurs in a comment on the site.
The headline seems to be “conservative academic forced out for Christian views” ( the headline on Horowitz’s FrontPage, for example, is “Savage Injustice” ) but the story is nothing of the sort. As much as the right wants to depict our colleges and universities as dominated by leftists and radicals the truth is that complaints against Savage were dismissed, he was backed by his supervisors and his position was secure. The headline should have been “University protects conservative academic’s right to express Christian views” because those are the facts of the case, which have been known from the beginning and which have now been established by a court of law.
UC’s polite Nature Publishing Group boycott request
The Awl reports:
Dear Members of the UCLA Faculty,
Please see the attached document regarding a possible boycott of Nature Publishing Group journals by UC faculty. We urge you to read this important update, which has been jointly prepared by the University Libraries and the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication. Please contact me directly with your comments and concerns.
Sincerely,
Gary E. Strong
UCLA University Librarian
[via the infodiva]
interviewed over at UNT
The University of North Texas Library & Information Sciences Student Association has a little blog where they interview library professionals as a resource for students to learn more about the world of work. I answered a few questions for them over there.
I made the cover of Library Journal for no reason whatsoever
Hiya. I’m preparing for a talk on Social Software that I’m giving in Utica, New York next Friday. I’ve been travelling significantly less and staying home writing much more. It’s been going well. I noticed last night on facebook [thanks Trevor] that I appear to be cartoonified and on the cover of this month’s Library Journal. Of course this is the post-Reed Business LJ, so I can’t find the cover on their new website and Trevor confirms there’s no actual mention of him or me in the actual article, but hey why pick nits? Interested folks can head over to his facebook profile and ID all the other luminaries on the cover including Emily Sheketoff, Nancy Pearl, Toni Morrison, Ginnie Cooper, Jill Nishi, Salman Rushdie, Mario Ascencio, Trevor Dawes, Camila Alire and Keith Michael Fiels floating away holding on to some balloons.