Baylor Central Libraries

"Although today's academic library users may feel that browsing is an ancient scholarly right, the practice is in fact no older than the baby-boomer faculty who so often lead the charge to keep books on campus."

pondering the ways this applies to libraries and liaison services

"In the current financial climate where every penny counts, raising our internal profile has never been more vital. There are people making decisions on what jobs are vital to the institution's goals and they are not necessarily aware of what librarians contribute, making our posts vulnerable to redundancy. It has therefore never been more essential to make non-library colleagues sit up and take notice of the excellent work we do."

what the humanities could learn from computer programmers

citation metrics

Valuable study of senior researchers' practices

Thought provoking piece on the message our services send

"The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship"

Nice review of Ohio State University's renovation of the main library

"a community of faculty, academic technologists, librarians, administrators, and other academic professionals interested in two interlocking questions: how do creative uses of new technology and networked information support the current project of liberal education, and, perhaps more interestingly, how do they force us to re-think what it means to be liberally educated?"

"What does the "classroom of the future" look like? In contrast to the traditional lecture-oriented room, this increasingly popular kind of space, known as a "studio classroom," emphasizes group learning and collaboration. But designers might not always get it right. AV expert Michael Leiboff shares 14 distinct characteristics of a successful studio classroom design."

Nothing earth-shatteringly original here, but a good summary of basic ideas for a studio learning environment.

Engaging commentary on the pricing policies of academic publishers

Some similarities, some differences in what McMaster is doing and possible futures we have discussed.

wondering what we can learn from this area and apply in our current (or future?) student engagement?

The accumulation of feeds becomes one more thing to check, one more inbox to process. Nobody likes seeing their unread items count spiral out of control, and quickly skimming headlines to catch up doesn't feel like engaged reading. Brett Kelly has recently described why he quit RSS in an effort to read more intentionally: I realized that, for some reason I couldn't quite recall, I felt obligated to stay abreast of new developments in technology and such. That fabricated obligation led me to routinely scan big lists of headlines and, more often than not, mark the whole mess as "read" and go on to something else. Imagine this happening 2-4 times per day and I was spending between 10-30 minutes per day skimming or ignoring stuff that, for the most part, wasn't what I wanted to read. Instead of obsessively checking his RSS feeds, Brett has committed to reading longer material (in his Kindle) and to using Instapaper for managing blog and news posts that he'd like to read. How does he discover those posts, if he's not subscribed to hundreds of feeds every day? Twitter:

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