Jennifer Howard

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… Read more...

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… Read more...

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.)… Read more...

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… Read more...