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.
Google Books has an amusing typo in its header for Terry Pierce’s Warfighting and Disruptive Technologies: Disguising Innovation (an excellent book that I’ve used in my “practice theories” research, by the way…. no disrespect intended to Captain Pierce!)
Google Books calls it Warfighting and Disruptive Technologies: Disgusting Innovation. If it weren’t for the fact that this involves only OCR scanning, I’d think it was a little irony on the part of the indexer.
But, no….
Saw Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side, interviewed on OETA last night. As someone who follows research techniques relating to “actionable intelligence“, I am sickened by the story she has to tell about the turn that the SERE program has taken. As someone who is proud to be an American citizen, I am outraged. And as someone who believes that rigorously-tested theories as the product of open scientific research can be our best hopes of making a better global society, I am shocked and saddened by the whole sordid mess. Read more…
Obviously I’m not the only one casting a pretty wide net in terms of thinking about collections, their building, and their possible uses…
People coming out of my CI class should already be familiar with the National Security Archive, the independent research institute and library at George Washington University, but here’s a link that I don’t think I ever mentioned in class. This one allows you to browse and search the so-called CIA “family jewels” up through 1973 and to read PDFs of the actual documents. Note the subject headings in the sample below and take a moment to consider which of these might well still be in active use by the agency for similar documents 35 years later…. Read more…
Early warning of trouble ahead in this excellent bibliography from the Naval Postgraduate School library for the library community itself, as I suspect that we can pretty much count on considerable collateral damage from the IMPACT of emerging government cybersecurity initiatives, as well as the direct damage from other quarters, which seems entirely possible, based on the work of both Richard Betts and Rebecca Knuth.
Haven’t blogged much about my other class (KM/LIS 5553: Competitive Intelligence), but now that it is finished and grades are in, I have to say that this too was an excellent group of thinkers and doers. As mentioned in an earlier post, everybody brought a lot to the party, in terms of contributing information and news relevant to their “briefing topics,” both national and international. Pretty high standard of final projects recommending competitive intelligence strategies for their target firms, including several that could definitely be considered “professional grade.” All this despite the fact that at least half the class were probably enrolled only because their preferred course had been unexpectedly cancelled!
Fair warning for anyone considering taking this class in future: it isn’t all just fun and guessing games trying to find clues about the strategy of some rival firm for McDonald’s or Merck Vaccines: the final included questions on how people actually used concepts from Matthew Herbert’s “The intelligence analyst as epistemologist” during the implementation of that final project… and they did!
I find it embarrassing to admit that I wasn’t even aware of this lawsuit involving a former Boeing employee and his use of classified documents until Eve brought it up in Competitive Intelligence last week. (Thanks, Eve!) The case has now at least temporarily ended in a mistrial, according to Mr. Eastman’s blog. This case reminds me of the frightening book by Fred Alford on the fate of most whistleblowers, and is a sad and scary reminder of the fact that corporations own an increasing amount of society’s information, and classify and control that information as they see fit. You might call it the dark side of knowledge management.
Presumably my concerns about this are also colored by the fact that my father, a lifelong employee of The Manville Corporation, died of mesothelioma. What if Manville had also been able to prosecute those employees who brought forward the information the corporation had had for years about the health effects of asbestos for “information theft”?
“Secrecy” is premiering at Sundance this month, and documentary director (and Harvard professor) Peter Galison has kindly made his 2004 paper on “Removing Knowledge” from Critical Inquiry available as a download from the film’s website. (Right next to the trailer!) Haven’t seen the film, but love Galison’s unfailingly elegant style on full display here in his paper (“Epistemology asks how knowledge can be uncovered and secured. Antiepistemology asks how knowledge can be covered and obscured.”) en route to a “classified theory of knowledge.”
Galison famously studied “how experiments end” in the rarefied world of micro-physics, but the so-called “classified universe” may be much harder to penetrate — even for someone like him, let alone someone like me. Certainly some new dimensions of relevance to ponder here!
. . . that Homeland Security will be setting up a National Applications Office to administer the use of spy satellite data from all over the U.S for a variety of purposes. I can hardly wait to see Mark Monmonier’s take on this one. Meanwhile, it kinds of makes you want to go and spell out “Civil Liberties” in a crop circle, doesn’t it?
