Fighting through the decline

  • Who are academic libraries for? Administrators?

    Earlier this fall when the Oakland A’s said goodbye to the Coliseum, there was a collective sadness for what we were collectively losing. (Months later, I still have a hard time thinking about it without choking up a little, but baseball is always so much more than the game on the field.) In thinking about…

  • Libraries, professional standards, and praxis

    Longtime readers of this oft neglected blog know I strongly believe in making sure your values are present in your work, whatever that may be. Last week as I was watching the the Twitter/X-odous to Bluesky (Hi- I’m on Blueksy!), I was reminded of so many people I stopped following and forgot about when I…

  • Adventures in bibliometrics – the pitfalls of Google Scholar Citations

    How do you measure the impact of research? It’s a huge question and lots of people have tried to come up with answers, but it’s kind of a pointless question. Believe me, I tried! One of the core issues is how do you define impact? If you’re looking for qualitative methods, it will be extremely…

  • The madness of trusting the consultant class and the illusion of nice things.

    I’ve been reading The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington after hearing Collington talk about it on Tech Won’t Save Us. The interview made me start to question a lot of the hype cycles I bought into throughout my…

  • It’s carbon all the way down.

    Last year I got into an argument with some colleagues about the concept of “decarbonization” for transportation. What does the term actually mean? Nowadays, the most common definition for “decarbonization” is usually something squishy that includes stopping or reducing carbon gasses in the atmosphere. It’s a soft term in this regard – perhaps because policymakers…