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Posts from the ‘In the Media’ Category

Nov 11

Henry Glassie Named Haskins Prize Lecturer

Great news for my Department in the form of a ACLS press release circulated today.

 

Henry Glassie, College Professor Emeritus of Folklore at Indiana University, Bloomington, will deliver the 29th Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture at the 2011 ACLS Annual Meeting in Washington D.C.

Named for the first chairman of ACLS (1920-26), the Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture series, entitled “A Life of Learning,” celebrates scholarly careers of distinctive importance. The lectures are published in the ACLS Occasional Paper series. The list of previous lecturers includes John Hope Franklin, Gerda Lerner, Helen Vendler, Peter Brown, Clifford Geertz, and William Labov. Historian of science Nancy Siraisi will deliver the 2010 Haskins Prize Lecture at the ACLS Annual Meeting on May 7th in Philadelphia. Read more

Nov 3

Kindle for Academics

Alex Golub in Inside Higher Education on the Kindle for Academics.

Oct 28

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The University of Illinois Press Signs Agreement with JSTOR

What follows is a press release circulated today.  This is a big deal in that it shows JSTOR continuing to move aggressively into the space occupied by ProjectMUSE. I appreciate the scale work that JSTOR is doing and that it is a not-for-profit effort in support of other not-for-profit efforts, but I am concerned about the ways that JSTOR/ITHAKA represents a growing consolidation of voices and resources. I am not convinced that JSTOR/ITHAKA hegemony is in our collective interests. I certainly think that the ITHAKA-JSTOR merger itself undermined any claim that ITHAKA had been able to make about being a neutral but interested party in scholarly communications research and consulting. This agreement is of special interest to disciplines (like my own) that are represented on the Illinois journal list or journal co-publishing list. One wonders what form the blessing from UI librarians, discussed in the release, took.

The University of Illinois Press signs agreement with JSTOR, joining a new effort to improve access to current scholarship for faculty, students, and librarians.

October 27, 2009 – Champaign, IL and New York, NY –The University of Illinois Press, the not-for-profit publishing division of the University of Illinois, and JSTOR, the preservation archive and research platform that is part of the not-for-profit ITHAKA, announced an agreement today to make leading journals from the Press available worldwide as part of the Current Scholarship Program.

The Current Scholarship Program is a new collaboration initiated by University of California Press and JSTOR and first announced on August 13, 2009. Together, participants in this Program aim to create an improved online work environment for faculty and students by bringing complete journal runs from multiple publishers together in one place, to ease the burden on librarians of negotiating separate license agreements with a multitude of publishers and independent titles, and to promote a more cost-effective publishing environment for the scholarly community.

“For the last several years the University of Illinois Press and JSTOR have worked together through the History Cooperative, building strong ties of respect and trust,” said Willis G. Regier, Director of the University of Illinois Press. “We take this step with the blessings of our colleagues in the University of Illinois Library and with high anticipation for our journals.” Read more

Sep 15

Compact for Open-Access Publishing

I was quoted in today’s issue of Inside Higher Education in an article dealing with the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity. I offer a bit more of my thinking on this new development at Open Access Anthropology, where Stevan Harnad has already left a comment that can also be found here.

Aug 8

Scholarly Society-Library Partnerships Webcast Now Online

The video archive version of the recent Association for Research Libraries (ARL) webcast on “Reaching Out to Leaders of Scholarly Societies at Research Institutions” to which I contributed is now available online.  It can be gotten to for free, all that is required is signing in for ARL headcounting purposes.  Watching it in this way provides the same content experienced when the program was being done live.  The event lasted one hour.  Jennifer Laherty and I were the first of two pairs of speakers.  We present after about five minutes of introduction from the ARL staff organizers who spoke on the general goals of the initiative of which the program was a part.  Q&A follows the second presentation on data projects in astronomy (by Sayeed Choudhury and Robert Hanisch). Find the webcast via a link available here:  http://www.arl.org/sc/faculty/coi/COIwebcast2009.shtml.

Aug 7

Friends at the IU Libraries

I think that today’s ARL webcast went pretty well.  I am frankly unsure because I am not 100% certain of what I said.  Nobody has yet pointed out any gaffes that I (might have) made. It was amazing that we as a group were able to hit the one hour mark exactly.  The ARL staff did a great job organizing the event.  Thanks to all the people who attended/listened in. The presentation will get posted to the web as a video sometime soon and I’ll get to feel self-conscious about it, but for now I am happy about how things seemed to have gone.  The other participants did a wonderful job and I learned not only from them but from the process in general.  While I may not have hit the nail on the head, the technology itself is pretty awesome and I can imagine all sorts of uses for it or similar systems.  Thanks to Jennifer Laherty for being a great partner in the project and to all of my many friends at the IUB libraries for supporting the many projects that we spoke of briefly.  You’re all awesome.

Speaking of the Libraries, I was saddened to learn recently that Library Dean Patricia Steele would be leaving IU for the Deanship at the University of Maryland.  Pat was been an amazing supporter of progressive reform in scholarly communications and has been a real leader in cultivating new roles for the library in this domain.  She has led or supported many general initiatives of great importance to me and she has been a great patron for Museum Anthropology Review.  Maryland is very lucky.

In the great news department, Carolyn Walters was named Interim Dean today.  Carolyn shares Pat’s commitments and enthusiasms for scholarly communications issues and I look forward to supporting her own efforts in the months ahead.

Three cheers for libraries and librarians (especially those at IU).

Jul 26

My First Webcast

I have been honored with an invitation to participate in a webcast being organized by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). The hour-long event is focused on the ways that librarians at research libraries can assist and partner with faculty members who play leadership roles in scholarly societies, particularly in the areas of scholarly communications and large-scale discipline-wide data curation projects. The story of my work partnering with my friends at the IUB libraries is intended to explicate the first of these two foci. Astronomy-related projects at Johns Hopkins will relate to the second emphasis. My conversation partner Jennifer Laherty (IUScholarWorks Librarian) and I will chat for about 20 minutes followed by the team from Johns Hopkins.  There will be questions from the “audience” at the end.  Beyond the significance of the key issues the event aims to address, the technology to be used is really interesting to me.  I’ll be on the phone, but those who sign up (its free) to participate, will experience the event through their web browsers.  Questions can be asked online and will be presented by the moderator from ARL.  When it is all over, the webcast may get repackaged as a video and made available via ARL’s (or SPARC’s?) video offerings online.

Information on the event, including sign up information, can be found here:
http://www.arl.org/sc/faculty/coi/COIwebcast2009.shtml

This link will also lead you to related materials that ARL has developed as part of its Campus Outreach Intiative.

Thanks to Jennifer and the good people at ARL for this opportunity. I hope that I can say some things of wider value.

Apr 4

Anthropological Linguist Mary Linn Named DaVinci Fellow

I am so pleased to note that my friend and collaborator Mary Linn (Associate Curator of Native American Languages at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History) has been named as one of five 2009 DaVinci Fellows by the DaVinci Institute. Mary is the founding curator of the museum’s Native American Languages program and has done amazing outreach work with American Indian communities across Oklahoma and the whole of the United States. Among the innovative efforts that she has stewarded is the museum’s annual Native American Youth Language Fair, which, each spring, attracts close to 1,000 American Indian students to the museum for two days of programs in which they make public presentations in the languages of their home communities.

Thanks to Indian Country Today for getting out the news of this well-deserved award. Find their story here. Congratulations Mary! An honor well bestowed.

Apr 3

Latrinalia Revisited

My IU folklore colleague John McDowell was featured prominently in a recent April Fools Day news feature on NPR affiliate WFIU exploring the nature of latrinalia, more commonly known as bathroom graffiti.  John did a great job as a consultant to the station’s news staff.  If you missed it, you can see, hear, and read the story online here:

http://www.newsmatters.org/the-writing-on-the-bathroom-wall/

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