Guardienne of the Tomes

Discovery, Collaboration, and Dissemination: Lessons Learned and Plans for the Future Digital Humanities Summer Institute William R. Bowen Iter: Gateway to Middle Ages and the Renaissance . Just passed 20th anniversary, looking forward to 25th. Iter Bibliography, Community, and Press. Iter's mandate is online, Iter meaning a journey or path in Latin, not-for-profit, advancement of learning in study and teaching of Middle Ages and Renaissance through the development and distribution of online resources. Created 1995, incorporated 1997 as a nonprofit partnership. Academic society partners (CSRS, ISAS, MAA, MOISA, RSA, SCSC); projects (DHSI, ETCL, INKE, IRCPS), research centers (ACMRS, CRRS), faculty of information studies (Toronto), U of Toronto Libraries. Marriage of expertise in subject area with info studies and new technologies. Iter planning. Many planning exercises, collaboratories. Inital Steps, Following a Larger Vision: A Feature oriented Pilot Proposal (APril 2009). D...

I received an email from a colleague who keeps us all reminded of faculty development opportunities. One of the things she regularly emails about are the regular weekly faculty writing groups that have been established--a way for faculty to set aside time to write alongside colleagues. My personal favorite is the Friday morning silent writing group that history professor and fabulous colleague Dr. Robin Mitchell set up--no discussion, no talking, just a handful of us around the table, plugged in and surrounded by our notes, clattering away at keyboards. It's my preferred way of group writing. Some of the other groups do regular shares or colleague critiques. I find that what I need most is really just the set-aside block of time where I can focus and dive deep for three or four hours. There's no good way to make that happen in my office with the myriad distractions, and I don't like writing from home because pajamas, dog, tv, bed, couch--you get the idea. I need something w...

You don't even have to have your finger on the pulse of academic news to have heard about the Lacour and Green research debacle. It's been bouncing around in my brain since it's related to the way we maneuver in a world of information, and it is relevant to my work as a librarian and as a researcher. In a drama-filled nerdly nutshell (with links to further reading for the details), the situation: Brief Unofficial Timeline of the Study, and Discovery of Possible Misconduct an important study on persuasion coauthored by a UCLA political science graduate student (Lacour) and a big-name political scientist at Columbia University (Green) was published in (and then retracted from) the peer-reviewed journal  Science; the large-N study indicated that attitudes about same-sex marriage could be significantly changed long-term by brief exposure to someone who was gay; because this would be huge news, it was picked up by NPR's This American Life ; because the conclusions g...

I've been thinking more about research agendas and large-scale research projects lately. I'll readily admit (as will my CV) that most of my research before the dissertation consisted of one-off sorts of things. A lit review here, a best practices there, presentations on bits and pieces of my work that all together paint a decent picture of the sorts of things I was working on as a professional academic librarian. But they were never coherently planned as something to present as a set, or to build upon each other. My dissertation is truly the first time I've articulated a large, multi-stage, likely multi-publication research agenda for a particular phenomenon. My dissertation project itself can, I think, be carved neatly into three separate articles to articulate the research succinctly. The first part, on the relationship between academic library department experience and perceived leadership skill development, was published in The Journal of Academic Librarianship . Anothe...

Things on my librarian brain: Our library team is working on our MOU (Memo of Understanding) in response to the program review we recently had (where outside folks come in and evaluate us). [Side note: in my previous life as an Access Services manager, an MOU was the first step in the disciplinary process of an employee. Not so with this MOU, this is just a normal response with a 2 and 5 year plan to address each item where needs were noted.] Sort of related to the above, the 2015 ACRL Immersion Program has begun! Though I won't head to Seattle until the beginning of August, the Moodle course is up and running, our readings and pre-assignments have been posted. I'm hoping to leverage the Immersion program to inform how we want our information literacy program to evolve for a growing campus with semistatic resources. A "freemium " model of peer-review, where authors could pay for faster review of their articles, was pretty much unanimously shot down as privileg...

In order of importance, the things going on as the semester careens to a close: On the library front: Finals are coming, finals are coming! Students are feeling the pressure, which means we at the library do, too. ALL OF THE PRINTING.  On an admittedly less-than-superior printing setup. And the last papers of the semester, so we're seeing some hail-Marys at the reference desk; This will be my first finals where I take lead on the end of semester feedback. We set up "graffiti" boards with giant post-it's on whiteboards asking what we're doing right, and what we can improve, and collect all that information. We also have a student survey, and a faculty survey. My colleagues all tabulate and organize the data, and we'll see what we can do to improve for next finals season; The 24-hour library. The week before and the week of finals, we stretch the library and its staff to 24 hours for our students. Thank goodness for the folks who work the overnight! I'...

Today I read a piece that hit close to home. The Chronicle of Higher Education published a piece by Andrea N. Geurin-Eagleman on dealing with academia, divorce, and name changes. The article does a good job of relating the concerns of many female academics I've talked to--namely, that changing your name may effectively erase all of the name recognition we've been building in our fields since we started out into the hallowed halls of higher ed. Fabulous Husband and I are approaching our second wedding anniversary at the end of this month. Both before and after our actual wedding, we talked long and hard about what we wanted to do with our names. Our conversations covered a lot of territory, and these are some of the facets of the issue that came up: I already had a significant number of publications under my maiden name, and was concerned about the academia/continuity-of-recognition factor; We were both over 30 years old when we married, so each of us had significant years ...

For those interested in the writing life of an academic librarian who is on the tenure track, you may be interested in what my research and writing schedule looks like. If you include all of my writing for librarianship, professional conferences, my Ed.D. work, and my Ph.D. work, it adds up to a lot. I usually don't list it out this way, since it makes me want to hyperventilate, but it is helpful to see it in this form to (1) give myself credit for what I've accomplished, and (2) budget my time wisely for what remains. Not much writing happened in January and February - largely my focus was polishing up the dissertation, and getting healthy after some wicked bouts of illness. Papers submitted for publication or a grade already this month (March 2015) include: "The Relationship between Academic Library Department Experience and Perceptions of Leadership Skill Development Relevant to Academic Library Directorship" (submitted to peer-reviewed journal in academic librar...

A call for chapters! I'm turning my dissertation into the preface for a book intended to help our directors overcome what data indicate are severe shortfalls in leadership development prior to the directorship. I'm excited that ALA Editions has contracted for the work. See below, and contact me with questions or for more details! Edited volume title (tentative): So You Want to be an Academic Library Director: Leadership Lessons and Critical Reflections Publisher: ALA Editions Editor: Colleen S. Harris-Keith A number of studies have highlighted that we know what the leadership skills and qualities are that make a good library director. However, there’s not much research that says where academic librarians in particular develop those skills along their career paths, giving the impression that all paths are considered equal. Recently collected data from mid-sized college and university library directors (a much larger leadership pool than just ARLs) reveals disturbing information:...

I am always better about getting things done when I write them down. And when I have some sort of accountability factor. Since I hate looking stupid, writing these here for public consumption will force me to get all my shit done. I am also attaching aspirational deadlines in cases where hard deadlines do not exist. Book Chapter abstract: deadline 4/30. (That's not aspirational, that's fact, per editor) Proposal for LI Cookbook: May 15. (Also not aspirational.) ALA poster, "Academic Library 2.0: Self-Paced Guided Training for Faculty and Staff," for Annual: deadline 6/16. Book Chapter: deadline 6/26. (Actual deadline is 6/30 per editor, but am leaving for ALA on the 26th.) Scholarly Article 1 (full 1st draft): deadline 7/18. Scholarly Article 2 (full 1st draft): deadline 8/1. Scholarly Article 1 (final manuscript): deadline 8/22. Scholarly Article 2 (final manuscript): deadline 9/5. Of course, this doesn't take into account various library projects like develop...