Libraries and information

It runs in the family

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

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

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…

Conferences and Diversity

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

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

When the Library Loon first (recently, at least) wrote about rigor, I respondedĀ at Hack Library School. She wrote again about rigorĀ last week, and I feel that she again is calling for a response. Now, despite my linking to her own…

On ranking LIS programs

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…

Reading update

Looking at my list of posts, it appears that I’ve completely neglected to keep up my running commentary on my 50 states, 50 books project. You might have noticed that you’re not really missing anything, as my “reviews” of the…