Category: Uncategorized

  • Holding the Line: Professional ethics, procedures, praxis

    I’ve been thinking a lot about the impossible task of trying to hold decaying institutions together while a fascist coup burns through all of our structures. We have to try to preserve and persevere because there’s no other choice. A couple of things I read lately have helped me focus these thoughts. First is this…

  • Liaison Librarians and Democratic Institutions

    It feels kind of trite to blog about liaison librarians during a coup eviscerating our country, but here we are. In November I wrote about the need for library workers to self reflect and organize in preparation for the fascist takeover on the horizon. I called for the need for us to organize not just…

  • 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…