Category
Trends
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Library School, Trends
Online Education – When the Ivory Tower goes to Bits
reading, originally uploaded by kendrak. (That’s me, lo almost 4 years ago doing course work for my online MSLIS/MSIS program.) I’ve never been able to (or really tried) to hide the fact that I went to school online. Was it my first choice? Not exactly, but given my options and my field I think it [...]
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Observations, Trends
Tenure and Academic Freedom: Times are changing.
Last week I asked if academic librarians should be faculty. The issue of academic freedom came up, as faculty status (and tenure) should protect librarians. Is that really the case though? Is tenure the only way to achieve that? According to the American Association of University Professors it is. The bottom line is that librarians [...]
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Trends
Organized Librarians and Rocking the Vote
Librarians and Archivists at University Western Ontario recently voted 88% in favour of a strike. This doesn’t mean that they are going on strike immediately, but that can go on strike now. (Could somebody please correct me if I’m wrong?) Their issues are ones that librarians face on many campuses, and include: “language on Annual [...]
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Trends
Organizing Librarians – Does it work?
Disclosure: I’m an active member of UC-AFT Local 1474 aka the librarians and lecturers union at UC Berkeley. Yes, we’re organized. I participate because I care about the profession on campus and would like to see more people have the opportunity to make careers as librarians at UC Berkeley. This past week, the UC Union [...]
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Library School, Trends
Branch out from Cataloging
Cliff Landis, who rocks, recently blogged about the future of cataloging and the disconnect from library school. Many schools don’t teach about recent advances in cataloging, such as FRBR or RDA, and I don’t really remember either coming up in any of my cataloging courses. If new library school graduates are expected to get a [...]
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Trends
Don’t call me that.
Yesterday, Stephen Abram blogged about how generations are labelled. He was prompted by a recent YPulse press release that announced that Millennials don’t like being called Millennials and Gen Xers hate that title too. This isn’t exactly news, but I appreciated Abram’s closing remark: Of course every generation hates being labelled. There’s been a whole [...]
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Trends
That Retirement Thang.
This week’s Uncontrolled Vocabulary will discuss the retirement issue: Do senior librarians have a moral obligation to retire? It’s a sticky question, both in academia and libraries. Do newcomers to the profession have a right to jobs? Not necessarily, but it’s hard to think people will stick around for any length of time if they [...]
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Trends
Save the NAL!
It seems that federal libraries are always under attack from various foes. First the EPA library was almost dissolved, but SLA helped save it. Now the National Agricultural Library is being threatened by huge budget cuts which will limit their services and perhaps reduce it to EPA levels. Here is some more information about the [...]
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Trends
What’s wrong with people who Google?
Absolutely nothing. LIS News linked to a story on ZD Net called, I love Google… don’t tell the librarian!. I don’t think that her librarian is alone in her dislike of Google. Unfortunately, despite its outstanding search algorithms and wide variety of free, value-added resources, it gets a bad name with library scientists since so [...]
