Learning from the anti-collection
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?
Cartoon citations
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?
The ramanization of everything
Once they figure out how to put it in a cellphone, everyone will have one of these.
Classification rules!
Playing the Teaching MasteryCard
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!)
Crockpot theories
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!!
Search committee advice
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.
Straight line!
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”!)
