Month: July 2010

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>Crowd-Sourcing Peer Reviews

>While procrastinating and staring blankly at my Twitter feed a moment ago, I noticed this post by ACRL (ALA’s Association of College and Research Libraries):


@ALA_ACRL: RT @chronicle: Open, crowd-sourced peer review works for one humanities journal:http://bit.ly/9HIDJC

As an OA journal editor, I was intrigued. When you click the link above, you’re lead to a Chronicle article about Shakespeare Quarterly‘s new approach to the review process. Basically, a draft of the publication is placed online, and is open for comment by a pool of reviewers with varying specialties. The process is not an anonymous review, so those comments that are made about a submission are attached to the reviewer’s name.
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>Tips and Tricks from Library School

>Lauren Dodd recently posted The Dos and Don’ts of Library School on her blog, and it got me to thinking what advice I would give to people entering a Master’s program. I would definitely recommend reading her post: it has some great suggestions, all of which I agree with! I thought of a couple other things that I would suggest as well, and so I am adding them here.

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>Digital Publishing for Higher-Ed Students

>As some of you know, I’m a co-editor (along with the lovely Katie Devries Hassman) at B Sides: the student journal for the University of Iowa’s School of Library and Information Science. As we draw ever nearer to the beginning of a new school year, I am getting more and more excited about sharing the journal with SLIS’ incoming class. Because of this, I’ve spent quite a bit of time lately pondering digital publishing generally and by students in particular, and how we can make the process of publishing itself and educational experience.

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>Continuing Trends at CRPL

>I am doing research at Cedar Rapids Public Library today, and I always get excited when I notice almost immediately the same trends occurring here that I’ve noticed in other parts of the state. For example, both Cedar Rapids’ and Burlington’s libraries were keen to advertise at the ‘moving picture shows’ starting in 1912. A frame would be shown with an ad for the library on it. Both also publicized themselves in the local newspaper (which seems to have been rather common around the state).

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>Modern Literacy

>Books and Literacy in the Digital Age

I know a lot of writing is going on both in print and in the blogosphere about the future of books and the changing face of literacy in ‘the digital age.’ A lot of it is really good, but the article above (from American Libraries) caught my eye because the author shares my love of the printed book as an object as well as reading material. I have recently flung myself headlong into blogging, tweeting, etc. as professional activities, but I still spend as much time at a quiet table with dusty old library records so I appreciate the balancing act I feel like Raab is describing at the beginning of the piece. I feel like I have to put less work into balancing my digital content with my historical research (which at this point uses the tangible records as a jumping off point for discussions that largely take place in the realm of the digital). My question at this point is how the balancing act differs for folks who are doing research on digital objects/writing code/whatever. Do folks who work with born-digital content feel less of a push and pull between their media? I also wonder how much of this is due to climate: the field of LIS is one that is so rapidly developing and much more willing to embrace change and adopt new technologies than some other segments of the humanities, and I think such adaptable programs will be more likely to remain relevant than humanities programs that stick to the ‘academia as ivory tower’ model.
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>Email and "Oral History" Interviews

>I recently submitted an article entitled “E-mail as a Medium for ‘Oral History:’ A Personal Account” (it’s under review at the moment). Basically I conducted a personal history interview using e-mail, and I wanted to compare that experience with that of recording an oral history interview in the traditional way. One thing that really excited me is that these interviews are already digitized (although obviously there isn’t a digital audio component), which could save libraries money on creating digital copies of interviews (a theory that only works, of course, if a lot of interviews are done this way and then gifted to libraries. Otherwise the effect would be negligible).

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>The Inaugural Post!

>Hello world!

This is the first post of my research blog, where I’ll chat about the latest developments in my research, especially those tidbits that are interesting but perhaps not relevant to the final published articles.
My biggest project I’m working on right now is my thesis, which I’m defending in December. I’m researching Iowa libraries during World War I, and talking about how libraries during this time changed policy/removed materials in order to better align themselves with the sentiment of the time (which was not so favorable toward German-Americans, of which there are many in Iowa). What I’m doing that I’m particularly excited about is looking at the administrative records from the libraries (board meeting minutes, finding lists, etc) so I can get the libraries’ view of what happened and try to determine a motive behind their decisions. So far I’ve visited Iowa City, Mt. Pleasant, Burlington, Davenport, Dubuque, and gotten records scanned and sent to me from Council Bluffs. I still have to visit Cedar Rapids, Wellman, Ottumwa, and Waverly. I was hoping to visit more, but time/money constraints mean that I probably will not get to!