Melody's Blog

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!

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 ...

(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 ...