Last week, we had Micah Vandegrift (of Hack Library School and In the Library with the Lead Pipe fame) come in to talk with us about a topic I get really excited about: Open access and scholarly communication. I tweeted the talk, and saved the tweets here. I’m really excited that OA is picking up steam, and I’m looking forward to seeing it continue to blossom in the years to come!
Guest Post for ACRL
Last week, I wrote a guest post for ACRLog on my changing search habits as a graduate student. I’ve been pretty quiet on my own blog lately as I try to settle into my groove of reading and writing at the doctoral level. It’s been much more intense than my Masters work, but very rewarding and fun too! I’ll be writing about the first month soon, in the meantime, head over to my guest post to see what I’ve been up to!
>Modernizing Markham wraps up
>Last night I created the last recipe for my Modernizing Markham project. It’s been a lot of fun, and I’m excited to move onto the next stage. All I have to do now is make the calligraphed pamphlet-y book and upload the POD/e-book version to various sites. I’m still figuring out how best to approach that (with the caveat that I use free services only), so suggestions are welcome. Since I’m at the turning point with my nearly-finished project, I thought I’d take a second and share a few things I’ve learned from blogging outside my discipline.
>Attempts at E-Book Publishing
>Later in the semester, I’ll be putting my Center for the Book final project online as both a POD (print on demand) book and a e-book. Since I wasn’t sure whether or not one platform would publish to all e-bookstores, I am testing it out with my conference paper from ALA Annual last year, and thought I would share the results with you.
>E-book readers’ bill of rights
> This awesome post has been bouncing around the internet, where I saw it on Andy Woodworth’s blog and Sarah Houghton-Jan’s blog. For those who aren’t aware, discussions about e-books have been taking place after Harper-Collins’ announcement that they would be limiting e-book circulation at libraries to 26 uses. This causes tons of problems for access, and while I understand publishers need to make money to continue functioning, my main concern is for library patrons, readers (including students) and for authors.
LIS students–this is a must-read and the topic is one we should all follow. If for no other reason, as a patron who wants to read e-books or even share a book with another student, you want to know that you can use those texts. I have seen a number of people say that e-books are not paper books, and that we need a new set of rules to deal with them. Maybe, but whether or not the suggestions they make are the be all and end all, they are an awesome start because they deal with access and with getting books to readers: the purpose for which they were written in the first place. Since digital books open up the potential for even greater access and sharing because they can be copied almost instantly and without the overhead and resources necessary to create print books. I’m keeping my eyes peeled to see what happens.
>Another article on Scribd
>Second time this week!
I posted my article: “Learning from the Past: Digitization and Information Loss” on Scribd where you can read it for free using this link. It was originally published in B Sides this last May, but since B Sides is awesome and lets authors keep control of rights over their work, I can distribute it as I wish! To see the article on the B Sides site, go here.
“Learning from the Past” is an article that provides an overview of digitization issues and current solutions to information loss for those who are somewhat new to the subject.
As always, let me know if you have any questions or noticed anything in the article that piqued your interest!
March 2011 update: Somehow, Scribd lost my account, so these are no longer available.
>ALA Talk available online
>Hello readers!
I had initially planned to publish my talk from the Library History Round Table symposium at the American Library Association’s Annual Conference in a peer-reviewed journal, but it occurred to me that my other talk (from Library History Seminar XII) is going to be on the same research, and most likely in the same journal. So, I added my conference talk to my Scribd account to share with everyone! While you’re there, you can follow me with your account too. Sometimes they get picky about downloading things if you haven’t uploaded your own work, so I can also e-mail the PDF of the talk to anyone who is interested. Otherwise, go here to read the document in full online.
The talk discusses three of the six libraries I researched (Burlington, Davenport, and Mt. Pleasant) more in-depth, whereas my talk from September discussed al 6 libraries, but with somewhat less detailed attention paid to each in order to keep within time constraints. The published version of that talk will be about 25 pages, so that will give me a chance to pay a little more attention to each of them.
If you have any questions or comments, let me know!
March 2011 update: Scribd accidentally deleted my account, meaning that you cannot read this paper on their site. Sorry folks!
>Circular Texts, both Digital and Tangible
>If you remember my post on readers and new media from a couple weeks ago, I mentioned this article on an author (Jurgen Neffe) who took advantage of the e-reader format to create circular texts, or ones without a beginning or end. A quick internet search on the author revealed this article entitled “The disembodied book,” which is a pretty thorough discussion of the author’s views on the future of the book and authorship, and the future of reading. He is optimistic about the possibility of more authors being recognized and readers interacting with texts in new ways, although he frames this within the downfall of the print book. I’m one of those folks that feels like we don’t have to choose: I have a Kindle e-reader but still read paper texts as well. However, he doesn’t associate the reduction of print books to their complete elimination, which is an argument I feel has been made far too many times (insert frantic ‘print is dying! We will never read printed books again!’ comments here). Continue reading “>Circular Texts, both Digital and Tangible”
>What New Media Means for Me as a Reader
>I am about to make the most obvious statement ever: there is a lot of cool stuff happening on the internet.
Not a groundbreaking observation by any means, but I am ceaselessly amazed by the sheer number of new ways to participate in the world as a reader of texts. I mean this both in the literal sense (e-texts versus paper texts), and also in how we interpret those texts (and how technology influences that).
Take, for example, this article on ‘circular reading.’ This author has found a way to exploit the e-reader technology in a way that gives us stories with a circular narrative (no beginning or end). As readers of these stories, how does this sort of narrative change our interpretation of the text, and how does it change our interaction with that text? There are many books that challenge us to think of narrative form differently than a ‘beginning-to-end’ reading experience (I was fond of the ‘choose your own adventure’ book when I was a kid), and this book takes that to a new level by using a technology that isn’t bounded by a structure with a clear beginning and end.
>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:Â 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.
Continue reading “>Digital Publishing for Higher-Ed Students”
Julia C. Skinner 