March 30, 2009
Posted at 2:34 PM
No, not that kind of March madness. (Sorry, sports fans.) Deadlines--and trips to Seattle, Williamsburg, and Charlottesville--have kept me away from blogging the last two weeks, but I have a good run of publishing and schol-comm stories to show for my absence. The headlines are pretty self-explanatory if not entirely satisfying from the reporter's point of view. (This is worth repeating: The person who wrote the story is not usually the person who wrote the headline, which can make for some awkward or infuriating moments if you're the byliner.)
--"Humanities Journals Confront Identity Crisis" (The Chronicle, March 27, 2009)
--"Publishers Face Pressure From Libraries to Freeze Prices and Cut Deals" (The Chronicle, March 27, 2009). FYI, this marks my debut as the Hot Type columnist for the Chronicle. Hot Type has been a staple of the Chronicle's publishing coverage, but now it will be a reported, "voiced" column with my name above the logo. I hope to make the most of the space.
--"U. of Michigan Press Reorganizes as a Unit of the Library" (The Chronicle, March 23, 2009, subscription req'd)
--"U. of Missouri Press To Cut Nearly Half Its Staff" (The Chronicle, March 18, 2009)
--"College and Research Librarians Discuss the Economy, Looking on the Bright Side" (The Chronicle, March 13, 2009, subscription req'd)
March 14, 2009
Posted at 12:26 PM in Lost in the Stacks
Greetings from Seattle. Yes, it's raining. (To be fair, it was sunny yesterday.) I'm here for the Chronicle, covering the 14th biannual conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries. What's on the minds of 3,000 academic librarians? Quite a lot. Read my first report here. (You all do realize that reporters don't usually get to write their own headlines, right?)
Substance-related foonote: I'm still looking for a good cup of coffee, having vowed not to set foot in a Starbucks while I'm here. Coffee-shop recommendations from Seattle aficionados would be welcome. If you have ever been to a conference, you know that caffeine (not too much, not too little) is critical to the experience.
March 9, 2009
Posted at 1:27 PM in Capital City
Bringing back streetcars to D.C.
What's not to love? Change we can all believe in. Or ride on. Some details here.
(Photo: streetcars in front of the Russell Senate Office Building, circa 1910. The image is part of the Library of Congress's collections. I found it here on Flickr.)
March 2, 2009
Posted at 8:39 AM in The Way We Live Now
At the 2009 WebWise Conference on Museums and Libraries in the Digital Age, held here in D.C. last week, I collected a new term: switch-tasking. Definition? Instead of doing a number of things all at once--multitasking--you rotate among tasks. I haven't figured out yet whether the difference is more semantic than substantive, but it's worth thinking about.
The conference itself was fascinating, as much for the anthropology of it as for the substance. Here's part of the report I posted to the Chronicle's Wired Campus blog:
If you’re used to the decorum of a big academic conference—the Modern Language Association’s annual confab, for instance—the atmostphere at the WebWise Conference ... comes as a bit of a shock. No more furtive tapping away at your laptop in the dark corners of meeting rooms. Laptops are not only tolerated at WebWise, they’re practically mandatory.
At this year’s WebWise conference, held here Feb. 26-27, the organizers—the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Wolfsonian museum at Florida International University—arranged for a designated conference wifi connection. They also set up a backchannel Twitter-style feed (via a service called Today’s Meet) where attendees kept up a lively running dialogue in short-message form during the presentations. Many were tweeting at the same time, tagging their posts to create a running Twitter stream of commentary and i-reports. (Twitter also turns out to be a handy way to solicit local restaurant recommendations.)
