Melody's Blog

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. The...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...