When I was in high school, one of my English teachers taught one day about Lady Chatterly’s Lover. We didn’t read it in class, and not because of any curricular intent to avoid it (at least, I assume), but we learned…
Libraries and information
Musings on life, librarianship, and LIS education
by dcdotnerd • • 0 Comments
The semester starts Monday. It’s been eight months–almost nine–since I was last in class and I’m starting to feel the HOLY FISH HOW AM I GOING TO HAVE TIME TO DO EVERYTHING anxiety that I haven’t felt since right before…
It runs in the family
by dcdotnerd • • 0 Comments
Almost everyone in my family is an academic. Grandpa Blau taught at Columbia. Grandma and Grandpa Katz were both medical doctors but also did some university teaching. Aunt Rachel retired from Temple; Uncle Bob from Swarthmore. Aunt Jan is a…
Tisha B’Av and Ostriching
by dcdotnerd • • 0 Comments
Today was Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, which is a day of communal mourning. In a fascinating stroke of coincidence, both the first and second Temples in Jerusalem fell on the ninth of Av.…
Information Literacy, then and now
by dcdotnerd • • 1 Comment
A digression deleted from my post on Hack Library School about information literacy. Go read that post, and come back here where it says to. Old standards: Determine the extent of information needed Access the needed information effectively and efficiently…
Networking at the Special Libraries “Symposium”
by dcdotnerd • • 0 Comments
On Thursday night, one of the class sessions of Special Libraries, which is a summer class offered at CUA, held a symposium of practicing librarians. This is an annual event hosted by the professor of the class. I have one…
Conferences and Diversity
by dcdotnerd • • 0 Comments
When I go somewhere new (like a conference), I tend to look around to gauge the visible diversity of the attendees. AALL was definitely more white than my place of work. I’m fairly confident it was more white than the…
Questions of Scholarship
by dcdotnerd • • 0 Comments
A law school acquaintance of mine was killed on Friday, and just as I did 12 years ago when two other friends were killed — that time in a bombing, this time what was likely and shockingly an intentional homicide…
Rigor, revisited
by dcdotnerd • • 1 Comment
When the Library Loon first (recently, at least) wrote about rigor, I responded at Hack Library School. She wrote again about rigor last week, and I feel that she again is calling for a response. Now, despite my linking to her own…
On ranking LIS programs
by dcdotnerd • • 0 Comments
School rankings are very important. Because I went to Harvard Law School which is ranked really high. Great, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about how school rankings are not at all a useful way…