theorywatch

I had the pleasure of giving the pre-dinner speech at our spring SLISebration last night, and it went reasonably well. (Note to self: when white tablecloth is on speaker table, mouse does NOT work well– adapt quickly!) Due to having prepared much more material than necessary (typical junior faculty error in making public presentation to outside audience!), I rushed through some introductory material about normative theories, and didn’t clearly state the relationship of theories to models. One of my colleagues raised the issue and I feel that I didn’t really address it as well as I might have (my excuse being that I was trying to bear in mind that most of the audience were librarians rather than academics per se, and that these library management models qua normative theories were hardly formal enough to discuss at such length.) So, if anyone heard me last night and is wondering what I meant, please see John Sowa , who explains it so much better than I can!