Just finished going over the final edits for “Approaching the Anti-Collection” for Library Trends: interesting to think that when I was first researching this, WikiLeaks was on almost no one’s radar. (And by the time my article finally appears, it may not even exist!)
Wouldn’t you know it! The same week that my JASIST article (“The Production of Practice Theories”) goes online, I find that one last thing that I would have loved to include: Martha Feldman and Wanda Orlikowski have an article called “Practicing Theory and Theorizing Practice” that will appear in a forthcoming issue of Organization Science (which I haven’t seen except as a rough draft on Martha Feldman’s website, and it’s too late to add anything to my lengthy lit review anyway, though I did cite Orlikowski’s excellent earlier work on practice.) Oh, well, at least I didn’t use their title for my article!!
Haven’t updated this for awhile, as during the semester I tend to do my rambling inside Desire2Learn for the benefit of whatever class I’m teaching. (This semester it’s LIS 5033, and that means that I get to ramble a lot, given the scope of the topic: information and the knowledge society!)
But, for anyone interested, I was told back in September that my tenure dossier will be making its way up the hierarchy of the University toward the Provost and the Regents, which means that a majority of my colleagues who are eligible to vote did vote in favor of my bid for tenure. It’s not official til it’s “official,” though.
I ran the Tulsa Run 15K to celebrate anyway: and of course I finished strong.
Well, the orientation for KM/LIS 5033 was Friday, and hopefully we’re off to a great start! The two sections that I teach are in Norman and Tulsa (as it’s online, natch!), so Dr. Snead (who has an additional Norman section of 5033, as the new student numbers were much higher than expected) and I shared orientation “facilitating” duties at both sites. Our new director gave an excellent and fun talk, OLISSA provided pizza for all, and I hope that everybody went home feeling pretty comfortable about the program and what it can offer them.
One thing I said during the orientation was that this program, at its best, is something like the book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven. That is, you can both influence and be influenced by people you won’t realize were important to you until afterward. That influence can be both personal and professional, I believe.
For me, those “five people” back in the seventies when I was at school in Syracuse were: the creative theorist I never dreamed I could become (Bob Taylor, dean of the School), the best friend forever I wanted to find (Jon Martens, then a fellow graduate assistant, now my husband), the thoughtful scholar I hoped to mature into someday (Antje Lemke, humanities professor at the School), the teacher I didn’t want to be anything like — ever—! (who shall remain nameless here, as she’s long since left both the faculty and the profession), and the hard-working information professional I needed to become very quickly (another of my classmates who will also remain nameless, but who seemed not only completely “grown-up” to me— as most people over the age of 23 did to me back then, when I was one of the younger students in the program— but who also delighted in the career possibilities ahead for us all.)
So, those are my five people. I hope everyone in my 5033 class will have at least that many “people” to remember from their time in our School.
Well, it looks like I’ll be teaching both LIS 5033 and LIS 5503 for Tulsa students in spring 2011, so that will be a nice combination. Especially anxious to work with LIS 5503, as that’s our Information Literacy and Instruction class, so I can now defend my interest in things ranging from this to this (as well as the more traditionally serious side of literacy issues!)
So, we have a position for an assistant professor in our School open right now, as June Lester retired last May. If you’re looking at my blog in an attempt to find out more about us, and are even more curious about what our students are like, try reading this blog from one of our recent graduates. If this is the kind of student you’d like to work with, you may indeed want to apply here!
For the last week, I’ve been at the OU School of Community Medicine Summer Institute here in Tulsa, which is described in the following paragraph from their website:
“The OU School of Community Medicine inaugurated one of the most innovative education programs in the nation with the School of Community Medicine Summer Institute. The five-day program gathers first year medical and physician students, faculty from a range of professions and community leaders for an immersion in community medicine and Oklahoma’s health care needs.
The Summer Institute curriculum is creative, thought-provoking and engaging, taking attendees out of a traditional classroom and into the community to experience health care from the patient’s, not the physician’s perspective.”
Fascinating experience, and the attending faculty will be continuing to meet once a month to work on some of the projects that came out of the Institute, I think. I enjoyed meeting people that I normally wouldn’t get the chance to talk to, and going places I normally don’t (and won’t, if I’m lucky, though the issue of “situational poverty” was pretty eye-opening.) I was also involved in a hit-and-run accident on my way home from the Institute one evening, and the whole issue of uninsured drivers and some of the reasons for that (especially here in Tulsa) are a lot clearer to me now. One other thing I learned is that the social work students in my group were way more knowledgeable about specific community information resources relevant to the at-risk local residents of Tulsa than most of our library students are likely to be, so that’s something to work on.
A parting thought, though: we had a so-called “poverty lunch” one day (what $2.50 buys you for a meal), and I’m pretty sure that Spam isn’t all that popular with people on food stamps, either….
Like those old ads by Revlon (“What makes a woman unforgettable?”), the criteria seem to vary from discipline to discipline. I’ve heard of a single paper with the right equation being sufficient in some math departments, and probably discovering an important new prion or protein or whatever is sufficient in various fields of science, but I’ve never heard of anyone in the humanities being tenured simply because of a similar striking discovery. And, yet it must happen:
“His interest in the history of printing led him to discover a discrepancy in chapter and line numbers between the 1667 and 1674 editions of Paradise Lost, as cited in the Oxford English Dictionary.” (from keynote speaker Jorge Reina Schement’s brief bio on the ALISE conference website.)
Of course, Dr. Schement has considerably more claim to fame than this one episode. (In fact, I’ve read several of his books on information policy with great pleasure and profit!) But I think this one might well be enough for most schools: though I doubt that I’ll ever get the opportunity to find out!
Job candidates should always have a few interesting books to mention during casual conversational moments that come up in their on-campus interviews. Here’s one from yesterday that I was pleased to hear about: The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr (author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, which I read and enjoyed when it appeared in The Atlantic a while ago.) Always a pleasure serving on these search committees, as I pick up such intriguing information along the way…. also, the lunches are generally wonderful!
Depressing new information-behavior-related research on how facts can backfire. Librarians, take note!
