A Surprise Ending
At ACRLog, I try to write about the biggest issues I can wrap my head around, and I try to write primarily for librarians who are new to the profession, especially those who are only a year or two into school or who have recently graduated. I think of this as following the imperative to [...]
Posted by Brett Bonfield on April 22nd, 2008 under Administration/Leadership, Just Thinking, Technology Issues.
Comments: 4
Telling Our Story
When I look at other academic professions, it seems that most practitioners have a good sense of their own history. For instance, even undergraduate physics majors seem able to speak knowledgeably about Bohr, Curie, Einstein, Fermi and dozens of others who have made notable contributions to the field.
I don’t see that in librarianship, especially academic [...]
Posted by Brett Bonfield on March 19th, 2008 under Administration/Leadership, Just Thinking.
Comments: 2
Academic Librarianship’s Future Strengths?
In my first job after college, as a manager at a small nonprofit, I was taught to use the euphemism “future strengths.” For instance, when I conducted performance reviews, my colleagues would often mention punctuality as one of their future strengths. We also used dozens of other terms that ate at my newly minted English-major [...]
Posted by Brett Bonfield on February 29th, 2008 under Just Thinking, Open Access, Scholarly Communications, Technology Issues.
Comments: 3
ts;db
I’ve noticed that several of my favorite writers have resolved to post more frequently in 2008. Dear favorite writers: at the risk of sounding ungrateful, would you be terribly offended if I begged you not to follow through on this resolution? The odds are, I like your writing because:
You publish relatively infrequently. I think you’re [...]
Posted by Brett Bonfield on January 10th, 2008 under Faculty, Open Access, Peer Review, Scholarly Communications.
Comments: 5
Reflections on Leadership
In 1979, Wayne A. Wiegand assembled an advisory board and asked them to identify the most prominent academic library leaders for the previous half-century. They eventually agreed on fifteen librarians, whose biographies were published in 1983 as a chapbook entitled Leaders in American Academic Librarianship: 1925-1975.
The book serves as a great reminder that issues [...]
Posted by Brett Bonfield on December 27th, 2007 under Administration/Leadership.
Comments: 11