Since the early years of the Web, librarians - as well as teachers and instructors - have been posting criteria for evaluating content found on the Web. These have been designed as guidelines to help students figure out what to...
Library 2.0 Initiatives in Academic Libraries has just been published by ACRL. This is the hybrid book/wiki publication that I've been editing for the past year. You can buy the book online at the ALA Store. Here's the official...
An article in Inside Higher Ed just caught my eye, "Pooling Scholars' Digital Resources ". The article described something that is hopeful for social scholarship, ominous for libraries. The brief article describes the advent of Zotero Commons, a collaboration of...
My presentation at the Charleston Conference, "The Promise of Authority in Social Scholarship," has come and gone. I want to explore the last point I made during my talk. I didn't have time to elaborate on it much at the...
I was pleased to be invited to join Leigh Dodds, Chief Technology Officer of the scholarly publisher Ingenta, to speak at this year's Charleston Conference later in the week. Our presentation is titled "Authoritative? What's That? And Who Says?" Here...
If you're reading this blog, it's because blogs are a routine part of your professional growth. You view blogs as a valuable bedrock of the professional conversation. You may consider them to be at least as important as peer-reviewed publications,...
I thoroughly enjoyed Michael Jensen's piece, The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority, published in The Chronicle on June 15. This is one of the best articles I've read about metrics that can be applied to social scholarship. Jensen, Director of...
At long last, I've had a chance to read Paul Coyne's March 9 blog entry, Scholarship in an age of participation. In his entry, Coyne outlines the rationale for an as-yet unnamed new scholarly journal that will embody the principles...
As an academic librarian, I've been trying to get a handle on the emerging parameters of social scholarship. This is the practice of scholarship in which the use of social tools is an integral part of the research and publishing...
One major characteristic of the social Web is that it is very evaluative. People are gathering online to engage with content in ways that have the effect of passing judgment. These judgments can be either explicit or implicit. Explicit evaluation...
I'm pleased that ACRL has invited me to edit a publication on Library 2.0 Initiatives in Academic Libraries. I'm even more pleased that the organization approved my idea to supplement the monograph with a post-publication wiki to provide updates to...
The prospect of publishing books and articles on wikis has got me thinking about the future of scholarly research in a world in which publications need never be completed. Of course, I don't know for sure if this will happen,...
I've been thinking about the e-mail message recently making the rounds that solicits chapters for successor books to Google and Libraries (aka Internet Reference Services Quarterly Vol. 10, No. 3/4). One of these books will focus on Google Scholar and...
In late November, I'll be in London speaking at the Ingenta Publisher Forum. At this event, Ingenta's publisher customers meet with company representatives to hear about new developments and future plans for IngentaConnect, and to hear from invited industry insiders....