Tales of a Prickly, Nocturnal Infodiva
It is a perennial annoyance that librarians get to wake up to yet another overly confident editorial or heavily biased survey paper asserting that we should just get rid of the MLS and that would solve all hiring problems in librarianship or us being taken seriously or job-preparedness. The various solutions always seem [ ]
In my sphere there have started being a number of new conversations about use of GenAI in the use of scholarship and how that will impact assessment for promotion and tenure. We re having these conversations from a what advice do we give as a college to each other and to our junior colleagues. It has [ ]
The ALA spring elections have just opened and I d like to offer my recommendation in one particular race: please vote for Yasmeen Shorish for ACRL President. Her statement to ACRL Insider is here: https://acrl.ala.org/acrlinsider/meet-the-candidates-yasmeen-shorish-2/ and to C RL News here: https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/27183/35017 I have known and worked with Yasmeen…
To listen to the generative AI enthusiasts and vendors with exclamation riddled decks, you would think that every boring and mundane task was now easily handled, freeing me up to lead that mythical life of a librarian you know, the one who gets to read print books all day, drink tea, and work in [ ]
It is exhausting being of the Old Faith where you wanted to know the source of the material you were reading and perhaps how to critically evaluate it. Letter from Me to DD* When we study history at least as a child studying history I often wondered how it was that we [ ]
This is an incomplete thought that I bounced off of Andromeda and Kristin recently. It s incomplete because (a) I don t do this kind of instruction [deliberately] (b) I know the answer is no for a variety of reasons at least for now (c) my ability to write long form of late in the face of [ ]
Like many academic institutions, my university has announced that we now have a contract with Microsoft Co-Pilot. Through our centralized webstore faculty and students can purchase individual licenses for it at the cost of just over $400/seat/year. (https://it.uic.edu/news-stories/ms-copilot-available-to-uic-staff/). As with most technological roll outs, this was a single announcement buried…
It s a truth universally acknowledged that a mid career faculty member who passed her full professor review and survived the NIH DMP rollout might look around and go, okay well, now what? Academia tends to have limited foci when it comes to mentoring and career directionality academic librarianship moreso some days. If you don t [ ]
I ve been asked to write up what my concerns are with the Medical Library Association (MLA) speaker agreements. This has come to the forefront again because a colleague was invited to speak for the data services specialization track and asked why I wasn t on their speaker list. The response was Abigail doesn t like our contract [ ]
This post is a write up and expansion of a short presentation I recently gave at the Institute for Research Design in Librarianship Online Conference. I am grateful to the IRDL Online planning committee and especially Marie Kennedy for giving me the space and the impetus to summarize this data and focus some thoughts. Also, [ ]