Melody's Blog

This sounds pretty high-falutin':  "In accordance with Section 103(b)(6) of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 (ACRA; Pub. L. 111-358), this Request forInformation (RFI) offers the opportunity for interested individuals and organizations to provide recommendations on approaches for ensuring long-term stewardship and broad public access to the peer-reviewed scholarly publications that result from federally funded scientific research. The public input provided through this Notice will inform deliberations of the National Science and Technology Council's Task Force on Public Access to Scholarly Publications." However, this is something all Americans, especially taxpayers , should care about. Notice that individuals are asked to provide input to the government. How often does that happen? This is of great importance to families and individuals who suffer from rare diseases anddisorders . The research that can be aggregated because of open access h

Here are a few photos of my baby! Yep, at least that is how it feels. My library baby, the new library at the American Islamic College . I have been helping to bring this library to some sort of reality and now here it is looking like a real library! It is, it just needs some more work. Everything needs to be cataloged, for example. But now, the books are on the donated shelving and sorted by categories—Arabic books on one side for now, and English on the other. The library is applying for membership in the local Illinois library regional group and hopes to be able to apply to CARLI soon. I think they need book ends. But more seriously, they really have no current scholarship in English about Islam and once cataloging starts, it will be interesting to find out what kind of primary source material they are missing. Really any Islamica would be greatly appreciated. 

So I gave my students an assignment to read Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert and to write a short theological reflection as a blog post. Here are a couple of good ones--the first from Paul, an Aussie priest, and the second from Nhien, a Vietnamese SVD student.  WIKIPEDIA AND FIRE In ten seconds or less, think of 5 THINGS ABOUT FIRE…. I bet you included something good and something dire! Hold that thought. Names like Gutenberg , Edison and Armstrong … and labels like Industrial, Renaissance and Modern all mark human unfolding. But fire , just think of IT . Making IT unleashed technology , movement and the SHARING OF STORY, like never before. Humans now lived out of caves and over mountain and plain, safe from beasts amidst barriers of fire. No more sent to bed by the sun; no more confined by the day. AND SO let story tellers tell in the night ‘round the glow; let the children ask and jostle to know; let newfound dreams such doings sow.   To glow and

This weekend I am working on plans for a course for MA and DMin students in Researching and Writing for Theology. I will begin teaching the course this fall--two hours each week. We did have a PhD student from the Univ. of Chicago teaching, but now that she has gone on her way, I am taking it over. So I started out working from her syllabus, but quickly realized that while I do want to work with the students on these topics and research/writing will be the major part of the course, I also want to cover topics of scholarly (and pastoral) communication. So my current thought is each week to assign a short reading, say from a current blog post (not mine) or article in IHE or Chronicle about issues of scholarly communication. Then we will have spirited (I hope) discussion of the topic in class. Indoctrinate them early, I say! Any other librarians or theological educators having ideas on this, let me know!

You might remember that back sometime I posted about three unique Catholic libraries in or near London. My article which provides more in depth info has been published in the recent issue of Theological Librarianship , along with several other interesting articles about international theological librarianship. I hope you will let me know if the article was informative and helpful!

Here is a photo of the Library itself--the whole thing, residence and all is called the Library, but this is the Library proper! Not very good, I recommend looking all around the website for information and photos, but this page describes the wonderful collections. I have been keeping my nose to the grindstone and working away on Fr. Simeon project, but today I took a few minutes to take note of journals that CTU doesn't purchase, and the reference book collection. I am hoping to get time to take a very close look at the Moorman Collection of Franciscan Books.  What would be fun would be to come here with only a bit of work, be able to go for rambles in the village, and just sit in the common room reading most of the day. Besides the wonderful collection in the Common Room, there is also the Tom West Fiction collection up on the landing, mostly Brit Lit, but very enticing.    The food and company are marvelous! I highly recommend it for a place for scholarly retreat!

Borges would think this place filled the bill for paradise! About 15 years ago, some colleague handed me a photocopy of a paper that read St. Deiniol's (pronounced Dean-ee-uls--all pronunciations thanks to my fabulous Welsh cabbie who gave me Welsh 101 in about 15 minutes) Library and I have carried it around with me all these years and now I am here, in Wales, at the residential library built by Gladstone with his personal library and added to all these years since. Built in 1906 to house the collection and provide temporary residence for scholars studying or writing here, it is quite lovely and comfy, in a small village where the Gladstone ancestral home is located, Hawarden (pronounced Harden). I am here to write an article which I started planning many years ago about a colleague librarian, Fr. Simeon Daly, and to take a look at the Moorman Franciscan collection here, which is said to be the best in Northern Europe. (We--CTU--say we have the second best in the U.S., so I want

Most readers of my blog know that in early March I spent three days in the hospital wondering why I had no platelets! Doctor made a really good guess and put me on a really high dose of steroids which made it difficult for me to focus and write. I had a couple of projects that had hard deadlines, so I abandoned my blog for a while and now I am hoping to pick it up again.  One project was a paper on scholarly sustainability and lifelong learning which I presented in May at the  Kent State University Conference on Information and Religion. This paper is posted on my Academia.edu site along with a pre-print of my paper on Scholarly Sustainability and Theological Librarianship which was presented at the 2010 ATLA conference. The other project was Never Enough Singing: Essays in Honor of Seth Kasten , a festschrift I edited for the ATLA choirmaster who recently retired. I also manged to finish an article on "Three London Catholic Libraries" which will be published in July in

Really interesting post Sunday on The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics which I recommend to all librarians and teaching faculty--especially my faculty colleagues who so patiently listened to me and asked terrific questions at last months faculty seminar. The question is how do you assess new open access journals. I answered this at faculty seminar, but this blog post does so more thoroughly and eloquently than I did! Just as said though, very important--who are the journals editors, board of advisors; would you allow your name to be used if you didn't think the journal promoted the kind of quality you desire in an academic publication. This article should definitely be read by all faculty serving on tenure and promotion committees. YES, open access journals can be just as scholarly as those that are not open access. In my presentation I mentioned Sopher Press--if you are a theological librarian colleague and do not know about these journals, you must take a look. Take a look

Saturday I was catching up on Friday’s Inside Higher Ed (IHE) after a wonderful time at faculty retreat on Thursday and Friday. Lots to think about for a librarian interested in sustainability. A blog post on sustainability, another on tools of the research trade, one on marketing books, and   one on why to blog for higher eduction. Each of these had some really helpful comments. I started off with the “Getting to Green” blog on sustainability and had to laugh. I am always quoting “moderation in all things,” which was a motto in our family while I was growing up—shorthand, for “no, you don’t need it and we cannot afford it.” But the blogger points out how if we would just live in moderation, we would be doing a lot toward achieving sustainability. I had just seen a bit of one of those addictive house-hunting shows on HGTV —I had walked away because I felt distressed and I was unsure why, but seeing the last two minutes when the homebuyers announce their choice, I got it. These f

Puzzle on his way to redemption This post clearly falls under the “odd posts” of my blog title. No real bearing on anything important, just random musing from a rather serendipitous experience this long weekend. I was on my comfy sofa finishing Platero and I , a book that had been on my to read list for a long time and I suddenly realized that this was the fourth book I had read in the past couple of weeks with donkeys making a major appearance! The others were Patricia Lynch’s Strangers at the Fair and Other Stories (selected stories from her Turf-Cutter’s Donkey series), May Sarton’s Joanna and Ulysses , and a re-read of Rumer Godden’s Operation Sippacik . Immediately, several other books with donkeys came to mind—one of my favorite Stevenson’s, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes and Maureen Daly’s The Private War of Sgt. Donkey . And a couple of donkey characters—Eeyore and Puzzle, the donkey who finds redemption in The Last Battle . And how could I forget Modestine/Nedd

I recently started a new gig as volunteer library advisor for the American Islamic College . When my former student worker, Romana, called up and asked if I could talk with them about their library, I thought I'd go over, check it out, give them some ideas, and call it a day. But I really like their mission, I liked the folks who are working hard to get this going, and so now I am deep in dirty work of sorting books to make a decent library for them. It's all unclear to me how they happen to have thousands and thousands of old books, but 99% of them are not appropriate for their collection, so it is weeding and boxing time. Yesterday I had a couple of volunteers, my friend, Beth and a AIC volunteer. That was so helpful! This exercise is forcing me to think about how important it is to have a collection development policy and stick to it! Since I need to revise the CTU collection development policy, this is useful. It also has provided the reminder of how valued books are. When