Blogs

There was a terrific post a little while ago on ACRLog (cross posted at Library Hat) by Bohyun Kim about what it is that appeals to us about being in the stacks of a library. She suspects that the reasons we give when we yearn for the stacks isn’t actually the ability to serendipitously discover things through browsing. The real value is ambience that is inspiring and conducive to promoting a sense of “flow” for researchers. Being in the stacks inspires awe because we sense the physicality of knowledge.

This is one of those “laugh or cry” articles. The Wisconsin Technical College system is looking for a new chancellor. Apparently, enrollments have grown forty percent since 2004, to the point that the system now has a 12,000 student waiting list. But state funding for the system dropped 30 percent in a single year.

Apple's iTunes U app and the accompanying web based iTunes U Course Manager remains the least noticed but potentially the most important edtech innovation of 2012.

When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Northern Iowa, I had my first experience with Adobe's creative solutions. Photoshop, Illustrator, Pagemaker (the predecessor to InDesign), and the now defunct web editors PageMill and GoLive, were wonderful creative tools that enabled me to engage in all sorts of artistic endeavors. The pricing for these applications was fairly high even in the late 90s. Academic pricing certainly helped, but the pathways to upgrades were costly. Thankfully, in 2012, Adobe has gone to the cloud.

If you listen to the news coming out of New York and New Jersey these days, water is still on everybody's mind. Not water per se, perhaps. But certainly the long-lived impacts of water having been where no one particularly planned it to be. Places like tunnels and electrical substations and the first floors of houses. It seems that water is becoming an image, synecdochetic perhaps, for nature or the environment or the planet as a whole.

I got asked a great question yesterday: if you could just send one message to the public, what would it be?

Hearing that a new, stripped down product or service in your marketplace is “good enough” should strike fear the hearts of market leaders.

One chilly day in November, with a few morning hours surprisingly free of meetings or classes, I decided to stay home later into the day than usual due to what felt like an impending sinus infection (thereby putting the lie to all my fantasies of omnipotence). I lead a book discussion group on women's life writing at a local public library, and in honor of election season our selection this month was Janny Scott's A Singular Woman, the biography of Barack Obama's mother Stanley Ann Dunham.