The user experience movement is gaining momentum in libraries, but its adoption and adaptation into an organizational culture may present unexpected challenges. In June 2014, the Michigan State University (MSU) Libraries created a User Experience unit and in a short time, established a solid and reputable team of practitioners. This success,…[Read more]

This article describes an active-learning exercise intended to help teach copyright, fair use, and Creative Commons licenses. In the exercise students use a worksheet to draw original pictures, create derivative pictures on tracing paper, select Creative Commons licenses, and explore commercial usage, fair use, and copyright infringement.…[Read more]

Document written by current and former CLIR postdocs providing insight and advice for applicants to the CLIR postdoctoral fellows program. You can learn more about the program here:

CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

Semantic and syntactical judgments play a central role in the development of classification systems. Syndetic relationships are relationships between indexing terms, sometimes referred to as cross references. Due to the extensiveness of synonyms for different concepts in natural languages, subject indexing has historically focused on developing…[Read more]

The internet immerses us in waves of traumatic information, leaving us desperately crawling through media wreckage to make sense of the world. We are left alienated from a reality that never settles into a cohesive narrative. Media wreckage in my argumentation denotes the fragmentation of reality occasioned by the digital acting as the dominant…[Read more]

Social organizations, institutions, governments, and bureaucracies are all manifestations of power distribution. Many contemporary theories on power are at least partly informed by notions that were introduced in General Systems Theory. Public libraries are open systems. In an average organization, a hierarchy divides tasks, sets rules, and…[Read more]

What Do You Mean?” was an undeniable bop of its era in which Justin Bieber explores the ambiguities of romantic communication. (I pinky promise this will soon make sense for scholarly communication librarians interested in artificial intelligence [AI].) When the single hit airwaves in 2015, there was a meta-debate over what Bieber meant to add t…[Read more]

Poster presentation for 2019 United States Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association annual conference.

Just as dissertations are a requirement for most PhD programs, culminating recitals are a degree requirement for students in the University of Washington (UW) School of Music (SoM) Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) in Performance program.…[Read more]

Although conversations about information literacy have grown substantially since the ACRL Competency Standards (2000) and the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (2016) were introduced, a significant amount of fuzzy concept use remains concerning certain information literacy ideas. Sometimes this fuzziness is the result of…[Read more]

Short review with episode highlights of the New York Times Music Popcast podcast. Written specifically for librarians with an interest in the similarities/disparities between popular digital media content models and scholarly digital media. This includes a short overview of the podcast, its general relation to scholarly communication, a highlight…[Read more]

Inspired by discussions at the 2017 Library Publishing Forum, An Ethical Framework for Library Publishing 1.0 was created by the members of the Ethical Framework for Library Publishing Task Force, with the assistance of many community members who served as peer reviewers and workshop participants, as well as the staff of the Educopia Institute.…[Read more]