unlibrarian

breaking the test-tubes of library science
1 month ago
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With a Wonder and a Wild Desire: Thoughts after the Harvard Libraries Twitter Panic

This is an excellent post on the Harvard Library mess from withawonder:

Maybe the Twitterverse overreacted to the town hall meetings concerning the next step in the Harvard restructuring project. After all, “It is inaccurate to say that all library staff will need to reapply for their positions,” according to a statement made to Library Journal by Kira Poplowski,…

1 month ago
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Harvard has the second largest endowment in the world, second only to the funds held by the Vatican. If Harvard is unwilling to fund research librarians, you can bet most US libraries will quickly ditch their staff as well. This will impact your health, because it impacts medical research. This will impact the economy, because it will impact engineers needing information access. This will impact all areas of R&D in the United States, because much of the in-depth research assistance to those working on DARPA, NIH, and other government grants is - surprise!! - conducted on behalf of researchers by academic and research librarians.

—E Keathley - Google - The nature of academic and research librarianship changed…

1 month ago
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Academic publishers have become the enemies of science

ghardin:

This is the moment academic publishers gave up all pretence of being on the side of scientists. Their rhetoric has traditionally been of partnering with scientists, but the truth is that for some time now scientific publishers have been anti-science and anti-publication. The Research Works Act, introduced in the US Congress on 16 December, amounts to a declaration of war by the publishers.

5 months ago
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This is one of the sobering truths these librarians, representing a group of Illinois universities, have learned over the course of a two-year, five-campus ethnographic study examining how students view and use their campus libraries: students rarely ask librarians for help, even when they need it. The idea of a librarian as an academic expert who is available to talk about assignments and hold their hands through the research process is, in fact, foreign to most students. Those who even have the word “librarian” in their vocabularies often think library staff are only good for pointing to different sections of the stacks.

—News: What Students Don’t Know - Inside Higher Ed

9 months ago
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A few years ago, when I was still teaching at Yale, I was approached by a student who was interested in going to graduate school. She had her eye on Columbia; did I know someone there she could talk with? I did, an old professor of mine. But when I wrote to arrange the introduction, he refused to even meet with her. “I won’t talk to students about graduate school anymore,” he explained. “Going to grad school’s a suicide mission.

—Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education | The Nation