In one of my classes this semester, we’re learning about Research Data Management. We’re exploring policies, funding requirements, best practices, history, theory, and practical details for the research data management life cycle. I’m having a great time and learning a lot. One of the things we’re learning about is how to define a good organizational … Read more
I’m going to school to be a librarian. Librarians are trained to be experts in the organization and management of information. This doesn’t make librarians experts in every subject contained within their libraries. The public library is often called the university for the common man, but librarians are not its professors. In Adler and Doren’s … Read more
One of my tasks this semester is to plan for a reading course. A reading course is a student-designed course, consisting of identifying a topic, creating a list of learning objectives, creating assignments that demonstrate and reinforce those objectives, finding source materials that will teach the objectives along with modalities to import the information from … Read more
This has been a rewarding and challenging semester. In many ways, I expected that changing universities would be straightforward. Even moving to another country, the same organization still accredits the program of study here. The academic and social cultures are relatively similar. I had already taken some courses towards the degree, and so by starting … Read more
I’m Autistic. One of the things that has changed for me when I switched universities is that now I attend most of my classes in person instead of online. This change has materialized in many ways, but one of the most interesting to me has been the impact on discussions that I have with my … Read more
Digital publishing has some major advantages. Digital copies of articles can be produced at essentially zero cost. As many copies can be made as needed by readers. Readers can access materials over great physical distances. Digital text has advantages in search and accessibility. Web links make it easy to follow citations. One of the biggest … Read more
So I’m starting grad school again, this time at an in-person program rather than online. Now that I’ve spent a week back in the classroom, I wanted to talk about some of the differences I see between these two approaches. This is a different university with different faculty, and as such there will be inherent … Read more
Starship Librarians is a recently published collection of short stories where authors explore what the future of librarianship might look like when humans have pursued the stars. Science fiction has long been a genre for exploring contemporary social issues through a futuristic lens, allowing us to examine difficult problems and uncertain futures with enough distance … Read more
I’ve been a contributor to many open source projects since I was in high school. I wrote a driver for a network card that’s still included in the Linux kernel, contributed code to big projects with lots of developers like Zotero and Mastodon, and to tiny projects like Loomio. I am even the primary maintainer … Read more
One of my assignments this semester was to examine HTML and XML, two markup languages written by humans and processed by computers to codify information. The assignment was to explain how XML is better than HTML. That’s a loaded question, as we’ll see. HTML, hypertext markup language, is a markup language specifically designed for the … Read more
