December 11, 2013

Peer to Peer Review

Regular LJ Academic Newswire column rotation including Barbara Fister, Dorothea Salo, Wayne Bivens-Tatum, Kevin L. Smith, and Rick Anderson.

Education is not Salvation | Peer to Peer Review

In my last column, I discussed research on cognitive bias and the human mind, and speculated that what librarians call information literacy is a deeply unnatural state. The human mind hasn’t evolved to analyze carefully or think critically without a great deal of effort, and even then, the effort is often misplaced. That’s of course one reason we educate people, and higher education particularly values traits like intellectual curiosity and critical thought that often help us overcome our natural intellectual inclinations. But education is not necessarily a salvation.

Can, Should, and Will, Part 1: Because What Libraries Need Is One More Venn Diagram | Peer to Peer Review

Can Should Will Venn Diagram

I came up with the diagram below while I was thinking about library management during a lull in traffic at the reference desk recently. My original intent was sort of wryly humorous (it is hilarious, don’t you think?) but the more time I spend looking at it, the more I think it’s a potentially valuable tool for helping give shape to conversations about priority-setting and decision-making in libraries, and maybe in other organizations as well.

Organizing a Growing Organism | Peer to Peer Review

Jamie LaRue, an erstwhile public librarian (recently turned consultant) in Colorado who has done some cool things (such as negotiating directly with publishers for ebooks while refusing to pay crazy amounts for popular titles), has thought-provoking things to say about the dynamics of change in libraries. Reflecting on a discussion at the Arizona Library Association where something he said apparently raised eyebrows, he expanded on his remarks in a blog post, taking particular aim at a pattern he sees (and many of us will recognize) in library organizations. A decision is made, a direction taken, and then the sabotage begins, conducted by people who contributed little to the discussion as the decision was being made.

Economics 404: Fixing What’s Broke | Peer to Peer Review

This year, several announcements and blog posts combined to focus my attention on a slightly different question. What problems can open access solve? The answer seems obvious; open access will solve the problem of highly restricted and limited access to scholarship. A somewhat different problem that OA can help solve is the problem of scholarship locked up in the hands of badly run businesses that have come to believe that their inefficient and ineffective ways of doing business must be preserved at all costs.

The Reskilling Muddle: Wasted Time, Money, and Opportunity | Peer to Peer Review

I’ve had some strange experiences teaching workshops and continuing-education courses over the last couple of years. These challenges simply don’t happen in my regular library-school classrooms. Sometimes I can easily take them as a salient reminder to me to explain clearly the “why” behind the “what” in my teaching. More often, though, I find myself worried, both for these learners and for the state of the overall pool of professional skill.

Information Literacy as an Unnatural State | Peer to Peer Review

Librarians tend to view information literacy in light of the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards. Information literacy is a set of competencies, a set of things we should be able to do. However, one of the many problems with becoming information literate in any robust sense is that it’s completely unnatural. The entire enterprise goes against the way the human mind tends to gather and use information. Human beings are animals perhaps capable of information literacy, but apparently designed to work in other ways.

Authentic Librarianship and Procrustean Management | Peer to Peer Review

When you apply for any kind of managerial or administrative job, there’s one interview question you can always count on: “Tell us about your management style.” I hate that question. Not because it isn’t a fair and legitimate one, but because (in my opinion) a good manager won’t be able to answer it.

Show Your Work | Peer to Peer Review

I am always amazed that people who have ideas to share don’t actually take steps to share them. Yes, academic librarians, I’m looking at you. Why is it that librarians agitate for open access and, at the same time, are content to put our own scholarship behind paywalls?

A Circuitous Journey with Black Elk and Ezra Pound | Peer to Peer Review

Black Elk Speaks has been published by three different publishers in the U.S. The rarity that this movement creates is the availability of different editions of the book from different publishers. That is, there is a semblance of competition in the publishing of Black Elk Speaks. This anomaly brings into relief the normal effects of the copyright monopoly. It offers an opportunity to reflect on what alternatives to the strict publishing monopoly might look like.

Breaking the Panopticon | Peer to Peer Review

Teaching from the real world is pure joy most of the time. Students love it when they see something from class in the pixels of library journals and magazines, the mass media, or the technology press. Most of the time, discussing change while it’s happening is a visceral lesson in professional adaptability and continuous learning. However, I could have done without having to teach technology-related privacy issues to my “Digital Trends, Tools, and Debates” students in the shadow of the NSA’s newly-revealed surveillance practices.
http://lj.libraryjournal.com/category/opinion/peer-to-peer-review/
lj.libraryjournal.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2013-48
83284
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:FRJ65UGU3W6JPQCLSHAYTRRUOY7KKBUJ
<urn:uuid:4ab15fe9-abb9-4cc3-bdcd-db8ae54fcf14>
2013-12-12T03:39:19Z
216.70.86.237
sha1:KCGFHRLASTPICB6DRQ6QHCD5LDQJGFVO
<urn:uuid:5817c7e3-2fa6-44b2-af33-3604eaf74f1c>
http://lj.libraryjournal.com/category/opinion/peer-to-peer-review/
length
response
<urn:uuid:f3b8bb8d-68b2-4d86-b7d0-de4451f24ac6>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-33-133-15.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2013-48
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Winter 2013
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf