Knowledge increases productivity.
Evidence of global warning …
The increase in industrial productivity since the 18th century depended on research and development in the STM fields: science, technology and medicine. Now, in the early 21st century, public and commercial organizations are trying to replicate the process in the social field, where we interact with people rather than with nature.
In January 2009, the next BOBCATSSS conference will be arranged in Portugal.
The Lello bookstore in Porto …
The conference is organized by library students. As their web site shows, they are getting more sophisticated year by year.
I hope to go - and have submitted a workshop proposal, which is registered as paper no. 76. Plugging for LATINA in 2009 is also part of the plan. Top secret, of course.
Resources
If learning and teaching is production rather than reproduction, they turn into research and development.
Ready for exploration.
Academic libraries have always supported research as well as teaching, As the walls go down, libraries and librarians must move deeper into the R&D process - or be bypassed by a new generation of web-oriented students, teachers and scholars.
Institutional repositories don’t work as long as they depend on voluntary participation by scholars.
Cory Doctorow at Harvard.
Harvard will now make IR deposit the default rather than the optional choice. Caveat lector has a very interesting, close-to-the-jugular analysis of Harvard’s new policy- which the big academic journals will hate.
The Greek king Pyrrhus of Epirus was hired by the Greek cities of South Italy to help them in their resistance to the expanding Romans. After a bloody battle - which he won, he exlaimed: One more victory like this - and I am finished.
Resources
List of library R&D publications in English from the Department of Library and Information Science at Oslo University College.
The picture shows a group of library users in Drammen.
The entries below - taken from the publications database Frida on August 9, 2007 - comprise all registered publications in English - academic and popular - from 2004 till the present.
Next week, on May 11-12, a group of about thirty Nordic library researchers will meet in the old university town of Uppsala (north of Stockholm) to discuss, and if possible coordinate, their research on public libraries.
Participants have been asked to provide a summary - in English - of their thinking and interests before the meeting. Mine follows below:
In Bibliotekforskning 2007 (in Norwegian) I argue that librarianship, as a professional field of service, requires a type of research that is tightly coupled to ongoing practice.
Before the seminar on digital reference services we had a small discussion about the future of librarianship.
We all agreed that librarianship needs a stronger theoretical foundation. The central issue we discussed was: must this basis be scientific in the traditional academic sense (library science) - or can we develop alternative ways of integrating theory and practice?
