Hitting the Reset Button, Again

Over the past few months, I have created a new blog chronicling my thoughts and reflections as I discern my call to ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church. The byproduct of that blog, is a renewed interest to restart blogging about my other passion, library and information science here. This renewed interest comes just in time for the ALA Annual Conference starting this week in Anaheim, California, and it is shaping up to be a busy conference for me. Here’s a preview of what I’ll be attending at the conference:

Friday 6/22

Town Hall Meeting on Diversity
08:00am – 12:00pm
Hilton Anaheim – California B

Opening General Session featuring Rebecca MacKinnon
04:00pm – 05:15pm
Anaheim Convention Center – Ballroom A-E

Exhibits Opening / All Conference Reception
05:30pm – 07:30pm
Anaheim Convention Center – Exhibit Hall

Saturday 6/23

Leaders Wanted / LIS Doctoral Program Options Fair: Cultivating Diversity in LIS Education
10:30am – 12:00pm
Anaheim Marriott – Marquis South

President’s Program (LLAMA)
01:30pm – 03:30pm
Anaheim Marriott – Elite Ballrooms

ALA Council / Executive Board / Membership Information Session (ALA)
03:30pm – 05:00pm
Anaheim Marriott – Platinum 1-6

ALA Membership Meeting
05:00pm – 06:00pm
Anaheim Marriott – Platinum 1-6

ALA / Proquest Scholarship Bash
08:00pm – 10:00pm
Anaheim Convention Center – Ballroom A-E

Sunday 6/24

ALA Council I
09:00am – 12:00pm
Anaheim Marriott – Platinum 1-6

ALA-APA Council
12:00pm – 12:30pm
Anaheim Marriott – Platinum 1-6

ALA President’s Program
04:00pm – 05:30pm
Anaheim Convention Center – Ballroom CDE

ALA Awards/President’s Reception
05:30pm – 07:00pm
Anaheim Convention Center – California Terrace

GLBT RT Social
06:00pm – 08:00pm
Offsite Location – Toritlla Jo’s, 1510 Disneyland Drive, Building A

ALA Council Forum I
08:30pm – 10:00pm
Anaheim Marriott – Newport Beach/Rancho Las Palmas

Monday 6/25

ALA Council II
09:00am – 12:30pm
Anaheim Marriott – Platinum 1-6

Coming Out in Print: The LGBT Literary Landscape Today
04:00pm – 05:30pm
Anaheim Convention Center – 202B

Battledecks 2012
05:30pm – 07:00pm
Anaheim Convention Center – 201D

ALA Council Forum II
08:30pm – 10:00pm
Anaheim Marriott – Gold Key I/II

Tuesday 6/26

ALA Council III
07:45am – 09:15am
Anaheim Marriott – Platinum 1-6

Closing General Session and Inaugural Event featuring J.R. Martinez
09:30am – 11:00am
Anaheim Convention Center – Ballroom DE

ALA Inaugural Brunch
11:15am – 01:00pm
Anaheim Convention Center – Ballroom AB

I’m really looking forward to the conference and hope to see many of you there.

Sense and Reference: Reorganizing literacy

Lane Wilkinson reorganizes his “Taxonomy of Literacies” and makes some important distinctions between the communicative and evaluative. The “money quote” is this: “Transliteracy is about containers. Information literacy is about content.” 

Sense and Reference: Reorganizing literacy.

Blogging Once Again

After a long hiatus and busy summer consumed with library renovations, staff changes, and other sundry projects, I finally have some time to start blogging again. I’m going to try and use the blog as more of a “professional stream of consciousness” and write more often about my current research, the state of the profession, and where I see library and information science heading. There will, of course, be forays into technology, diversity, and higher education in general — three more areas of professional interest.

Thanks for sticking with me, those of you who subscribe. I promise I’ll be a little more forthcoming in the future.

Siva Vaidhyanathan on the Google Books Ruling

Two well-reasoned articles by Siva Vaidhyanathan on this week’s Google Books Settlement ruling:

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://chronicle.com/article/Thank-You-Judge-Chin/126888/

From Slate.com:
http://www.slate.com/id/2289155/

Library Reactions to the Google Books Settlement Ruling

Judge Chin’s ruling on the settlement between Google and authors regarding the Google Books project made news this week. Here’s some reaction from libraries and library organizations participating in this project.

Penn State University Libraries Google Book Project Page
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/googlebooksproject/news.html

Committee on Institutional Cooperation (Big 10)
http://www.cic.net/Home/NewsAndPubs/News/11-03-22/CIC-Google_Scanning_Continues_After_Google_Lawsuit_Settlement_Rejected.aspx

Library Copyright Alliance
http://www.arl.org/bm%7Edoc/lca_gbsstmt24mar11.pdf

HathiTrust
http://www.hathitrust.org/hathitrust_asa_response

The Synchronicity of This Week’s Events

As followers of my Twitter feed or Facebook page know I have been reading Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book The Googlization of Everything which has an entire chapter dedicated to a critical analysis of the Google Books project that aims to scan books from the world’s foremost libraries and make them available in digital form, copyright be damned. Add to this the fact that a ruling was announced on the settlement between some large publishing groups and Google (long story short the settlement is moot), it has been an interesting and synchronous week for me. I’ll post more once I have the chance to read through the backlog of chatter on the matter and finish Siva’s book!

Mission Statement, or Why I Created a New LIS Blog

I have been asked by a few people why I decided to create a new blog on librarianship, library science, and technology. Why now when there are so many similar blogs out there? And what do I have to add to the conversation?

Many of the blogs I see in my field predict the imminent death of libraries, books, and anything else related to a traditional sense of librarianship. Indeed, there have been voices in the field that have made these predictions throughout my 15 year+ career as a librarian. First it was the Internet, then Google and Wikipedia, and now it’s e-books and mass digitization and the next-great-gadget setting their sites on the destruction of print media and librarianship as the guardians and archivists of all things book. Yet circulation numbers are up from year to year, the publishing industry is still alive and kicking (for the moment – more on that in subsequent posts), and books still have many more users worldwide than any other technology. Books may be transformed by technology, but they will be with us for a long time in the future.

On the other hand, librarians and librarianship must change and adapt with changing times. I would argue that as a profession, we have done a pretty decent job of adapting and reinventing ourselves. Librarianship has kept pace as civilization moved from handwritten manuscripts to typeset books and to microforms and multimedia to our present digital state, and I anticipate that it will keep up as technology and information science progresses. Indeed, I see this as our responsibility as librarians and information professionals to advance the field by learning new technology and always looking for ways to improve our profession.

Librarianship is an evolving field and, together with the cognate disciplines of information science and technology, it possesses the tools to transform people’s lives through providing better and smarter information resources and the education necessary to use them in ethical and productive ways. What we do is essential to society and we must strive to enhance the profession rather than destroy it or replace it with something else. This is why I created this blog: to celebrate librarianship, together with information science and technology, and to add a voice to the profession that sees the value in what we do and hope for improvement and evolution of the field in the future.