College Faculties A Most Liberal Lot, Study Finds
My only reaction to this news? DUH.
College Faculties A Most Liberal Lot, Study Finds (washingtonpost.com)
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Monthly Archives: March 2005
Attack on pundit at Earlham College
Pundit Faces Pie Attack in Speech at Earlham College
I have no idea who William Kristol is, but apparently he is a conservative commentator who made a speech this week at Earlham College. In the process, an Earlham student threw a pie in his face.
Now, Earlham is a consortial partner with my institution and it has a well deserved reputation of excellence. (Actually, Indiana has, I think, a disproportionate number of highly regarded liberal arts colleges considering its population.) It is a Quaker institution that adheres to a pacifist tradition.
One can have some fun with this incident. Does that make the student who threw the pie, a “Quaker Baker”? A “Pert Pacifist”? A “Pundit Pie Polluter”?
How much faith?
Yesterday I finished converting all of my web diary entries, going back to April 2002, into blog postings here. There are a lot of gaps where I didn’t make any entries, but I enjoy reading some of the earlier entries because they help me remember events and special things that happened. Somehow the tone of my postings has changed since the early days. Maybe I need to spend more time in “diary” mode.
One other thing I noticed is that I haven’t posted anything about my faith in a long time. Maybe that says a lot about my general state right now. I’ve felt pretty low for a very long time in terms of my relationship with God. Even if I don’t feel near to Him, though, I know He is always near at hand. I long for the “peace that passes all understanding” (Philippians 4:6-8).
Teaching @ UIUC GSLIS
This a.m. I filled out the rest of the online paperwork necessary to complete my appointment at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science (UIUC GSLIS). This appointment involves teaching a course, Technical Services Functions, during the upcoming summer term, in UIUC GSLIS’s online education curriculum, known as LEEP. I last taught this course in the Fall of 2003. I’m getting excited at the prospect of interacting with students again, although I’m anxious (as usual) about all the work I need to do to be prepared. I need to completely revise the syllabus I first developed a few years ago.
Sittin’ on the front porch, just a swingin’
Right now I am sittin’ on the front porch, just a swingin’…on our porch swing, with my laptop in my lap, watching the kids play outside for the first time in months. The weather is really beautiful, warm, sunny, with a nice breeze. And NO INSECTS (yet).
Michele made it through all of the various tests today. The mammogram showed that she doesn’t have a cancerous lump after all. That is great news. Now, we just need to wait for and hope that the EEG and CT Scan results will tell us what’s going on in her body that is causing these seizure-like episodes. Anyway, there is a lot to be thankful for.
How neat is it, to have the freedom of a wireless network and a wireless laptop that enables me to post to my blog, check my email, and do other things while sittin’ on the porch swing watching my kids play? As Steven Cohen of Library Stuff fame is so fond of stating, Suweeeet. (Reminds me of the woman named Stacy on “What Not to Wear” on TLC who constantly says, “Shut up!”)
Website redesign process
I’ve been working with my students on a website redesign project for a while now for the library where I work. The existing website looks terrible right now — outdated and, as Ashley (a former student) put it, “Frontpage-ish.” ‘Course that was a severe blow to Matt’s pride 
The existing website has functioned pretty well for a few years, but in the meantime, the larger university implemented a major upgrade to the look and feel of its website and we want to make the library website more consonant with the general university site.
We’re at work on several things, but the main elements that we’re putting in place include:
- a new logo that tries to convey a new view of the library as a “hybrid” or marriage of traditional and online collections
- a new, open source CMS platform to replace our existing, homegrown CMS, that will make it much easier to accomplish the goal of “push button publishing.”
The latter point is particularly important because if we make the right choices, we can drastically reduce the effort required to bring up a new website, as well as the effort required to maintain it and refresh it over time. We’ve decided to use Drupal because it most closely matches our requirements and because others in the library technology community spoke highly of it (see, e.g. discussion of CMSs in the Web4Lib discussion list archives). The only library website that I know of that’s using it in production is the Louisville (OH) Public Library, but there probably are others. This is a really exciting open source project with a ton of useful add-on modules that we plan to use.
Regarding a new logo, we’re working on refining a design chosen from a class project done by typography students at my institution. The intention is for more consistent branding across all library publications, not just the website.
So, now what? Well, any redesign is a big challenge in terms of getting it “right.” What are some things we’re thinking about in terms of the new site? Here are some:
- a Google-like search box on the first page, powered by MetaLib
- a simpler, more professional look all ’round (this is hard to define, of course)
- prominent placement of our Ask-A-Librarian service
- RSS-ify as much as possible
- enable most recent five or so postings from Z-Blog to be visible on first page
- make it as easy as possible for other people in the library to create and maintain content rather than relying on me to do it all, all the time
- make the interface not only nice to look at but highly functional
- meet W3C accessibility standards
One of the things I’ve tried to do is scan other library websites to cadge ideas. If anyone reading this blog has a suggestion for a website that they really like for whatever reason, would you please leave a comment to tell me where to look? Thanks.
Crerar Library News
I just discovered that some of my former University of Chicago Library colleagues, specifically those in the John Crerar Library, have created their own weblog, called Crerar Library News. As far as I can tell, this is the only blog in use among the libraries at the U of C, which I find interesting. I also find it interesting that they chose to “outsource” by using a third-party software program (Typepad) rather than use something set up and maintained by the U of C Library’s IT department.
Crerar people have always been ahead of the game, in my opinion. They are a savvy bunch. An announcement of this new service is available here. Good for the Crerar librarians!
CNN.com – Jesse Jackson joins fight for Schiavo’s life – Mar 29, 2005
CNN.com – Jesse Jackson joins fight for Schiavo’s life – Mar 29, 2005
I have just one response to this news headline: Who really cares??? (I mean, about Jesse Jackson “joining the fight.”) I hope Terry Schiavo’s case is resolved in favor of her parents, but I don’t particularly appreciate or care that Jesse Jackson, of all people, got involved.
When you don’t fit in
This article in The Chronicle of Higher Education caught my eye today. Although the details are somewhat different, the reality is the same. Michele and I definitely do not fit in here in rural, east central Indiana. I wonder sometimes if we ever will. Or if I even want to fit in here. Like the author of the article, I am up for tenure next year. I’m not at all a fan of tenure. It’s not that I mind the requirements. I’ve been there, done that, not because I had to, but because I wanted to. I’ve published, presented, become deeply involved in professional organizations, taught a graduate level LIS course (and will do that again in a few months). I’ve done more, professionally, than many people I know who have tenure. The only piece I am missing at this point is another advanced degree, and again, I am planning to pursue that anyway because I want to, not just because it’s a tenure requirement.
I have seen tenure (or its equivalent) abused too often, in all of the places I’ve worked, to think highly of it.
To quote from the article:
If it doesn’t feel like home by now, when will it?
Google Scholar and OpenURL
Google Scholar recently began what it describes as a “small pilot project” with a number of libraries, to link Google Scholar search results through their OpenURL services. See Google Scholar Preferences for a complete list of current libraries participating in the project.
It took me only a few minutes to achieve much the same thing for my institution, thanks to the work of Peter Binkley at the University of Alberta and the folks at Openly Informatics. Students and faculty at Taylor who use the Firefox web browser (and in my opinion, more of them should be using Firefox) can add in an extension that will make Google Scholar results link directly through the “Get It! @ Taylor” OpenURL service that I set up.