Wikis for History

January 15, 2006 at 11:33 pm | In history, open access | Leave a Comment

I’ve been thinking for a while about how wikis could be used in an academic setting.  An idea I had recently (this morning while in the shower) was a wiki that would provide annotated reading lists for various subject areas in history.  Major pages would be geographic (European, African, World, etc.) and then broken down topically/chronologically.  This would be a good resource for grad students putting together comps lists and would also be a great place to find the 4 or 5 books to read on different topics (it could also turn into a useful resource for librarians checking their collections).  The wiki could be closed to a restricted population of advanced grad students and faculty or it could be totally open (I’m inclined to advocate the partially-closed model).  The wiki could be a good project for the AHA or for the RUSA History Section.

Subject Librarians and Institutional Repositories

January 10, 2006 at 1:44 am | In libraries, open access | 2 Comments

Dorothea over at Caveat Lector is the Institutional Repository Evangelist (IRE; likely not her real job title) at the university library where she works. She posts from time to time about the trials of getting faculty to actually put stuff in the IR, a problem that many, if not most, IRLs (IR Librarians) face, and today she has posted about her strategy for getting faculty to go all OA in the IR (as it were). She notes that she doesn’t have a plan of attack as such, taking an open-ended approach to her IR evangelizing. I read this and had a thought, perhaps a terrible thought: why aren’t the subject librarians at her library working with her? If a library is actually serious about its IR, shouldn’t the librarians whose primary responsibility is outreach to faculty get themselves very closely involved? Wouldn’t the subject librarians be encourage to include in their annual goals something about increasing faculty participation in the IR? This seems perfectly sensible, but I fear it isn’t happening. Maybe I’m wrong and Dorothea and other IRLs like her meet frequently with the subject librarians and they all work as a team to get faculty submissions, but I doubt it. It has been my experience in my admittedly brief career as a librarian that digital projects in libraries are cordoned off. My hypothesis is that library organization is partly to blame; a chunk of blame probably can also go to cultural separation between “librarians” and “techies” (we’re not all blended yet). But it seems pretty simple to solve – make the subject librarians work with the IR librarians to make the whole IR thing work. If the library isn’t willing to leverage the skills and experience of its own staff in order to develop an IR, maybe the whole IR thing is a bad idea – why have it only to do it half-assed?

Thoughts on “Library 2.0″

January 6, 2006 at 7:53 pm | In libraries | 1 Comment

It has almost become obligatory for librarian bloggers to write about Library 2.0 (check out Tame the Web and Library Crunch for many discussions of L2). I wasn’t going to get involved (we’ve all heard that before), but it seems to be a discussion that is growing and continuing and maybe here to stay. I was initially ambivalent about the concept – essentially latching onto Web 2.0 language and applying it to library situations – but the more I think about it, the less I like Library 2.0, particularly as a way of talking about where libraries might be headed. Michael Casey at Library Crunch has remarked that Library 2.0 is not about technology:

Library 2.0 is a service philosophy – a theory, if you will – that attempts to guide libraries in their effort to win new users while, at the same time, acknowledging that our current service offerings are insufficient and inflexible.

I agree completely with the sentiment, but think that the terminology is pointless. “Library 2.0″ as a term seems to represent a feeling that technology will save libraries from irrelevance, that without technology libraries are nothing (the philosophy behind information commons in some ways). Technology is a tool – wavecrests on the ocean, but not the ocean itself; I fear that adhering to “Library 2.0″ conceptually, we will come to mistake the waves for the ocean, as it were. Technology can never replace service, but it can enhance it. That’s why it seems to me that we should be focusing on the service philosophy that underpins what we want to indicate when we say “Library 2.0″ – that librarians and libraries need to be more open and responsive to their respective communities rather than blithely running along inside of some insular feedback loop. If I were to talk more broadly about librarianship today (and I may at some point), I wouldn’t focus on the tech stuff/social software, but on the groundswell of discussions focusing on the user (e.g., the user is not stupid if they can’t use our catalogs or prefer to search using a Google interface – see, for example, Meredith’s post on “dumbing down the catalog“). By taking a bigger-picture approach (stepping back from the techne and looking at the underlying intention), we create a more inclusive philosophy of librarianship, one that can accomodate libraries running library 1.0 (or 0.0!) all the way to library 2.0.1 and beyond.

Understanding Contemporary France

January 2, 2006 at 8:05 pm | In history | Leave a Comment

Nathanael Robinson has posted a list of 10 things people need to know in order to understand contemporary France; here’s his list: French Revolution, Liberation, the Dreyfus Affair, Bonapartism, round II [I assume he means the Second Empire], making the Versailles Court, war in Algeria, Code Napoleon, Ruhr Crisis, Franco-German rapprochement, 1914. It’s hard to disagree with what he’s listed, though I would have the war in Algeria much higher (it would be the first thing I’d suggest) – especially as it’s a way of encapsulating the colonial legacy and contemporary attitudes towards African/Muslim immigrants and thus Le Pen. I agree with his assertion of the importance of the Dreyfus Affair – anti-Semitism is an important part of 20th C. France, and also offers some insight into current political feelings about French identity. I would also add in there (in place of Versailles?) laicisation; maybe it’s a personal bias given what I studied in grad school, but the way that France secularized seems pretty important now given current debates about Islam there (and in Europe in general).

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