Melody's Blog

A Catholic book lover’s heaven, Via della Conciliazione is the street that leads directly up to the piazza and then St. Peter’s Basilica. The street, though relatively short (about four blocks) is filled with bookstores, souvenir shops, religious goods shops, and gelaterias (which very annoyingly close early in November).  I am confessing that I am not a numismatic fanatic. Lorraine has numismatics that she needs to catalog and the Vatican Library has very nicely cataloged numismatics collection , so she did need to hang around for those sessions. So, I decided to ditch the long session on coins and head off to get some material for a blog post on books on the Via della Conciliazione . Lorraine and I stayed at the Hotel Columbus which is on the street at number 33, and from our side balcony we could see out to a tiny sliver of the street.  St Peter's is, of course, at the end of Via della Conciliazione and the conference was held at number 5 in the Vatican School of Library Ser

Here I am in Rome at the Vatican Library conference with my colleague from Mundelein, Lorraine. This is not working out the way we thought at all, but we are hanging in there (well, I should only speak for myself--Lorraine is doing much better and understands loads of it). The conference was held to analyze the period of the last sixty years, both in terms of the studies undertaken in the Library and its contacts with external institutions, and the life and activities of the Library and the experience it has acquired in its various departments, according to Msgr Pasini, the prefect of the Library. So far, yesterday all the presentations were in Italian except one in French and only one has shown any slides. It seems very odd to me that a scholar would discuss a collection of medieval manuscripts without slides, but it is so. (An aside, for those who are on the no powerpoint bandwagon--if you think you might have non-native speakers at your presentation, kindly use some slides.

Next week is Open Access Week . Better sign up now. More education is needed so badly. I had a discussion with an editor of two journals last week and every time I mentioned open access he immediately went to the gold model ( see news of gold model in today's IHE ) which is not necessary for humanities journals. Who gives these people there information? Why don't they know about models which are much more suitable for the types of journals that theological schools subscribe to? Why did I have to find out today that yet another journal I subscribe to has gone up 300Euros? That is one more cancellation. I hope more of you will sign up to follow Open Access Week!

Here I am at LaGuardia (well, I was when I started this—two weeks ago!), just having left the ITHAKA Scholarly Sustainability conference. The topic this year was discovery. I find new ways of discovery very interesting and realize that for scholarly material to be sustainable, it must be discoverable, but I have to say that is not where my interest really lies. However, I did learn several really cool new things. JSTOR is working on mobile that looks like it will have great functionality; and also, of high interest to me, they are piloting Alumni access. I am totally pumped about this—our student body and alums are so global—they work in places where they really do not have other recourse to access (JSTOR is becoming available at more public libraries, so many alums can get access that way). Further, JSTOR will be adding search notifications soon! For my theological librarian colleagues, in case you missed the announcement, JSTOR has made special arrangements for ATLA members and it

After getting a late start due to car rental issues, I made it to the Raynor Library at Marquette University, which houses the Catholic Library Association archives. I arrived there to research the life and work of Fr. Simeon Daly, a Benedictine monk who has been one of the most influential Catholic librarians in the U.S. The nice archivists had pulled about fifteen boxes of correspondence, conference programs, and other material that might contain references to the work of Fr. Simeon in CLA. My research will (I hope) be published sometime in the next year or so. So about that I will just put in a plug for archives. If you belong to an organization that generates documentation--consider finding an appropriate archival home for it. I believe archival material will just keep becoming more and more important for research in the coming years. If you are unsure if your possible archive is important, consult a librarian or archivist.  I managed to get in a couple of hours of work be

I have given a tiny bit of thought to democratization of scholarship and how it fits into the concept of scholarly sustainability, just enough to realize that I'd like to give a lot more attention to the thought (but it is the first week of classes!). Yesterday's article in IHE on Wikipedia for Credit demonstrates so many of the narrow views that are holding up the forward movement of scholarship and need to be debunked. Some people have an overly romanticized view of print encyclopedias. Just go hear a couple of encyclopedia editors talk about the process and you will lose that view forever.  Yes, some encyclopedia articles are written by the great thinkers in the field, others are sloughed off to any student they can get to work on it. Sometimes writers for encyclopedias show extreme bias; sometimes they cannot be bothered with doing any updating of the subject they are assigned. Print encyclopedia articles need to be evaluated just as much as Wikipedia!Librarians teach thi

Back to London and another day. Well, every librarian likes to stumble on books where they least expect them and it was a surprise to me to find books at the Wallace Collection , “a family collection, and national museum.” I chanced on this small museum which is the collection of five generations of collectors, four Marquesses of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace, housed in their family home near Oxford Street. Not only was it rather a surprise to see Hals’ The Laughing Cavalier and Watteau’s The Swing, but there were really books in the bookcases in the library of the home.   I am guessing that some of the books have been changed over the years, well, I know it—the 1911 Britan nica and the Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie were in the cabinets, along with the Mémoires secrets of Bachaumont . The Wallace Collection has an amazing collection of furniture and other objects that being to Marie-Antoinette. Apparently one of the Marquess of Hertford’s had the forethought to

Not long ago I read with interest, Meredith Farkas' blog on "Is Ebsco the New Evil Empire? " I think this week, Sage Publications has maybe topped Ebsco for this prize position for theological librarians. A thread on the ATLANTIS listserv, which is comprised of theological librarians, has lamented the takeover (note: the Sage envelope containing the bad news to each of us actually says "takeover letter") of two journals this week by Sage resulting in prices being raised--double for one and triple for another. I not only lament the raising of prices, but a certain lack of understanding of mission. (This is not Sage's fault--their mission is to make money.) In my paper at ATLA (which, btw, is available if you are a member as a pre-print on the ATLA Sharepoint site) I said that journal prices rising in all disciplines is unsustainable, but for theology and religion there is another dimension--if we are supposed to be bringing the reign of God (and I think scho

(The first half of a blog post that was written as a guest post for my friend Anthony's blog, On Books and Biblios .) What does a theological librarian and book lover do when spending a few days in London? Obviously, Charing Cross Road would be a good choice, but not this trip, so make a plan to see some interesting libraries AND find some astonishing places where books are hiding out! As a Catholic theological librarian, I was interested in seeing three Catholic libraries in or near London—the library at Heythrop College, the library at Allen Hall, and the Catholic National Library. As I am hoping to soon publish an article on these libraries and their collections, I will just mention how these fit on my tour. Heythrop College, the specialist philosophy and theological school of the University of London is just off Kensington High Street on Kensington Square. It started life in the 1600s as a Jesuit school and has moved several times due to Jesuit suppressions. Its fascinating

Today I received a notice from a journal asking me to subscribe. Here is my response: I received your notice of the journal XXXX . I would love to subscribe to it, but I will not be doing so. Currently, I have NO plans for adding subscriptions with models of pricing which I believe are not sustainable. I do not believe that scholarly societies that have sold their journals to for-profit publishers are generally operating in a model which supports their own mission. If you do truly believe that no minister or theologian “can be adequately educated who is not acquainted with the debates this journal compasses,” you would charge a price for it that was sustainable for theological schools like my own and most of the other small seminaries that cannot afford to add journals at this price. I notice from the publisher's website that most of your board comes from large institutions that may be able to support prices such as these, but the large majority of seminaries are like my own that h

A few days ago, Lorcan Dempsey posted about the decision of JISC to stop funding Intute . I don't regularly use Intute myself, but now that I have looked at it again, I wish I thought of it more often! I have never been quite sure what I think about "subject gateways" to the web. I maintained a Reference Resources page at a Jesuit college for many years and we have a few things on our website here at CTU (but haven't developed any kind of massive lists of resources--instead usually pointing our students to the Wabash guide and a couple of other selected resources). I've always been intrigued by the ATSRW project of ATLA; not a subject gateway, it is designed to get bib records for websites into the catalog. I thought this might be a better way to curate the web, but it hasn't gathered huge momentum. All this to say, the FAQ at the Intute website is really a mini-primer on scholarly sustainability--it outlines some of the funding problems they have and vari

Barbara Fister has a great post   on why libraries are sometimes loath to embrace open access; why they keep deepening the hole by continuing to go for Big Deals in periodical subscriptions. I am starting this blog because I want to keep preaching the gospel of open access, but I also think there are other sustainable models. I attended the JSTOR/Portico Forum this past Tuesday and I am really excited by the possibilities which seem to be coming along with JSTOR. With the Current Scholarship Program , a library will be able to purchase one (1) title. It seems likely that by purchasing that one title, the library will gain search capability of the entire JSTOR archive--delivering lots of discoverability to their users. I am sold on the JSTOR collections as a way to gain access to multi-and interdisciplinary journals (and other material) and have no plans to discontinue any collections, but the ability to add specific journals in addition to the collections is an awesome idea. Theologica

From description of blog: An eclectic blog on sustainable scholarship and libraries, book jaunts and research, and odd interests like vocation, children's lit, and ??? So, why? And why these topics? OK, lots of reasons. I've been thinking about it for quite a while. I wrote a couple of guest blogs for my good friend Anthony's blog, On Books and Biblios , which I highly recommend, and it began to become clear that Anthony would NEVER run out of ideas on his own and publish mine! My daughter started a blog. I gave a presentation at the American Theological Library Association conference in June and some colleagues asked if I had plans for continuing the conversation I had started there on scholarly sustainability, then one emailed to ask if I blog. I had been feeling the need to figure out a way to keep track of some of my research and ongoing thoughts about my work. I don't consider myself an expert and I am always hoping to learn. So I decided to go for it. So, why th