By Geoffrey Pullum. You’re 72; a respected male biologist, fellow of both the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences, 2001 Nobelist in physiology and medicine, husband to a distinguished female immunology professor, knighted for services to science. You’re giving an informal speech at a Women In Science lunch, part of a conference of science journalists in faraway South Korea. More...
01 juillet 2015
36 Words
WHAT DID LIBRARIANS WANT IN 1945? Many of the same things we want today.
By Brian Mathews. I’m going to post these quotes without any commentary; I think they hold up well on their own. Some background: 70 years ago at an ALA Executive Board Meeting (October 1945) they devoted a morning to discussing the future of librarianship. The conversation was summarized and published in the A.L.A. BULLETIN from February 1946. More...
Could Your Library Answer 1 Million Reference Questions A Year?
By Brian Mathews. In 1995 the Association of Research Libraries started collecting stats on references queries. The top five that year handled over 500,000 questions each. I’m sure in those early days there were some interesting approaches to collecting the data as well as different interpretations of a reference query. More...
Scientific Utopia: Improving the Openness and Reproducibility of Research
By Brian Mathews. I had hoped to do a full interview on this but that’s not going to happen: running out of time.
Short version, Brian Nosek (Center for Open Science & UVA) spoke at our Open Access Week event last year. More...
Football, Leadership, & Libraries: an interview with Scotty Walden
By Brian Mathews. I read an article last fall about Scotty Walden – a young and exciting football coach at East Texas Baptist University. More...
Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
By Eric Johnson. In the spring of my senior year, I interviewed for a contract-negotiation job at a law firm.My college major was in peace, war, and defense, which may have sounded intriguing to professional litigants. But I had no legal training. My chief assets were literacy, an eagerness to please, and a pressing need to pay rent. More...
When Bad Judgment Is at the Top of the Menu
By Trish Oberweis. Recently a food stand on my campus was the topic of online discussions because it was named Grills Gone Wild. The name was, of course, a play on words related to a series of videos in which young, frequently intoxicated women bared their breasts or engaged in other lewd behavior for the camera. The discussion started when a member of the campus community overheard some students expressing their irritation and shared their concern on an email list. More...
The New York Public Library Wars
By Scott Sherman. What went wrong at one of the world’s eminent research institutions?Scholars who use the New York Public Library are boiling with frustration. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In 2014 the library, under pressure from a coalition that included four senior scholars, abandoned its controversial Central Library Plan, which entailed gutting the stacks at the 42nd Street Library and selling the popular Mid-Manhattan Library across the street. But the situation hasn’t turned out how many critics had hoped. More...
Campus Diversity Efforts Ignore the Widest Gulf: Social Class
By Denis O’Hearn. This spring my university distributed a report by a dean’s committee on faculty diversity. The report was in many ways a fine one, with recommendations about supporting minority and women faculty; hiring; parental leave; and sensitivity training. It said nothing about social class. More...In Defense of Ethnography
By David D. Perlmutter. Controversy over the sociologist Alice Goffman’s On the Run, a study of young people on the margins of society, has put ethnography on trial. Lost in the accusations and rebuttals, I fear, is the reality that ethnography is one tool among many but too valuable to dismiss or ignore. Like other methodologies, it has strengths and weaknesses, but it complements other approaches in crucial ways. More...
