Well, I can’t say that I haven’t been reviewed by some of the best people in the field with this one! *fans self*
Interestingly, it’s also very good evidence for the importance of what Cronin termed “the scholar’s courtesy” (acknowledgment for help given: reviewers comments, etc.) as the article is now greatly improved for the rounds of critique. (Not my research methodology, which didn’t garner much in the way of criticism, but for the way in which the rationale for focusing on practice theories could be best framed within the literature of the field— I know the literature reasonably well, but not quite as well as some of these reviewers do, as they wrote a lot of it!)
So, some minor revisions, and this one is finally “done.”
Good practice for the next one!
Got an excellent response and some very useful comments from the reviewers for this one: go, me! Who knew that I’d become a collection theorist myself?
I’m not a current member of the Popular Culture Association, but I’m seriously thinking about joining, if only to become a member of the Comics Citation Committee. During the past few years, I’ve been doing bibliometrics based on the research front, the patent frontier, the practice field… and, perhaps, now the punch line?
from The Atlantic.
Once they figure out how to put it in a cellphone, everyone will have one of these.
Classification rules!
Having a really positive teaching evaluation from someone who’s herself a winner of the ALISE Teaching Award for Excellence in Library and Information Science to put in my tenure dossier—- priceless!
Thanks to all the students in my classes who have contributed student evaluations over the past four years. Many of them were very helpful in pointing out things that I could be doing to enhance their learning environment and praising things that I was doing well. A learning experience for all concerned.
Thanks to the recent alums who wrote such nice letters on my behalf.
Special thanks to dear Barbara Kwasnik at Syracuse, who encouraged me to try teaching, when it was not really something that I had ever considered doing.
And now the dossier’s done, and turned in for the long tenure deliberation process over the summer.
(Oh, and some of my research isn’t bad, either!)
One of the difficulties of theorizing pretty much on my own is that it’s a very slow process, as apparently things take a long time to heat up in my little crockpot of a brain. I just had a flash of insight about one of my models, and I suspect that it’s something that other people in my specific little niche might have seen right away, because it’s a very obvious connection between two separate literatures (if you happen to know them…..)
Oh, well, speaking of flashes, I’ve just submitted my heavily revised manuscript (“Practicing Theories: Citation Analysis for Practice Fields”) to Manuscript Central right in the middle of one of the many lightning storms and tornado watches we’ve had here in Tulsa this week. Hopefully it will electrify the reviewers as well (in a positive way— usually I just make people’s hair stand on end!)
Update: it didn’t exactly electrify them, but it’s still apparently novel and interesting enough that I do get another chance to submit another heavily revised version. One reviewer is fine with the current version, the other made lots of actually quite helpful suggestions that I will work on. No problems with the data, just the way I frame this within the literature. Now I know why people sometimes thank their anonymous reviewers so effusively!!
I’ve now had the opportunity to serve on five search committees in the roughly four years that I’ve been here: one for director of the School, one for director of the OU-Tulsa library, two for faculty appointments, and one for a librarian appointment.
A piece of advice: don’t, don’t, don’t list one of your own former classmates as a reference unless you have been out of grad school for at least 20 years (and the classmate has become the Librarian of Congress, or whatever.)
It just always looks as though you couldn’t find anyone else to recommend you.
We had a straight line wind incident near our house in Tulsa early the other morning. Apparently one can sleep through tornado sirens, because I did! No damage to our house, though many trees came down in the neighborhood, and power was off for about 30 hours. One doesn’t realize how Net-addicted one is until one is forced to go cold turkey like that!
A good thing about the enforced “idleness,” though, was that I was able to devote my undivided attention to Donald McKenzie’s brilliant essay “Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts.” He dealt in such a prescient way with the various issues that we are having today with “texts”— and this was 25 years ago. And the really good thing is that, having read it, I can now recommend it to all my students (and tell them, no, it’s not at all about “how to cite things”!)
Had some interesting final projects in “Digital Collections” this semester, ranging from a Community Overdrive audio collection of Aesop’s fables, to a fantasy collection of celebrity memorabilia, to a historical account by a child patient at the Eastern Oklahoma Tuberculosis Sanitarium, to pilot projects for ongoing collection activities at the University of Oklahoma School of Dance, the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History, the Oklahoma Historical Society, and the American Choral Directors Association. Two people were working on a digital repository project, which was new for this class, which tends to be rather image-driven! One really nice project focused on developing metadata for spoken language recordings in the Caddo language. An excellent paper also, on the difficulties faced by designers trying to make a collection user-friendly for people at various points along the autism spectrum (this one was obviously too difficult to do as an actual project during a one-semester class!)
This was also the first time I offered people the chance to choose between putting their collections on OMEKA or on CONTENTdm, and there were some interesting challenges on both platforms, which I hope people realized was a valuable learning experience (even if there were some panic-stricken project moments along the way, such as “where did my collection go!”
Of course, the readings as always were fascinating (at least to me, though I suspect that some people wished I wouldn’t have assigned the entire NISO Framework for Building Good Digital Collections.)
And the final exam involved explaining what made the Galaxy Zoo a collection… or not. (No, that’s a joke— there was no final exam, as this class was mostly a survey/studio class for collection design.) Unfortunately, I don’t know when I’ll be teaching this one again… but I do know that some excellent digital collection builders emerged from this class, hopefully with their inspiration intact (and possibly even enhanced)!
Really, really pleased about how the draft of “relevance work in the LIS curriculum” is shaping up, and looking forward to discussing it with my esteemed co-author this week. Even though this one may not make it into my tenure dossier, she thinks we’re onto something intriguing here.
*dances*
