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Oct 1

Presenting at an Information Technology Conference Tomorrow!

It would have seemed unimaginable a few years ago, but these days weird stuff happens more and more often. Tomorrow I will be presenting at the Statewide IT Conference put on by Indiana University.  The conference will be held at our campus in Indianapolis (IUPUI). I will be speaking about my experiences using Open Journal Systems to publish Museum Anthropology Review in partnership with the wonderful folks at the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries. I love every aspect of my experiences getting MAR up and running.  My friends and colleagues in the fields of museum and material culture studies have really done wonderful work with, and for, the journal.  As important are all of the great folks at the library’s IUScholarWorks and Digital Library Programs who have have done so much to make it happen behind the scenes. And a great piece of open source software–OJS–is also crucial to the effort.  I am so thankful for the hard work of so many people in the open source and open access movements. In this case, I am particularly thankful for the Public Knowledge Project and its funders. Thanks go as well to community of open access anthropology advocates and pioneers.

I learned a lot trying to speak to the CIC librarians last May. I am guessing the IT community will teach me a great deal tomorrow as well.

Sep 25

Tragic Foolishness at the Penn Museum

On her new blog, Dr. Louise Krasniewicz provides a massively discouraging account of the foolishness that has been going on at one of the country’s great university anthropology museums, the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania.  Its ETHNOGRAPHIC collections are priceless and it has a very long and very distinguished history of scholarship in ETHNOGRAPHY and ETHNOLOGY (even in LINGUISTICS–see Sapir’s work there), not just old world archaeology.  Dr. Krasniewicz describes the liquidation of cultural anthropology by the museum’s director, a move that is not only out of sync with good sense but out of sync with cutting edge archaeology, even cutting edge classical archaeology (as evidenced by the renewal of multi-method, multi-disciplinary material culture studies). The only hope that I can find is in the history of the museum’s names.  Deleting “anthropology” from the name need not last for ever. Of all the museums that I know, the Penn Museum has carried the most different names at different points in time. It could easily be renamed again two years from now.

I hope that the ethnographic collections will be stewarded responsibly. Ugh.

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.

Sep 7

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Museum Anthropology 32(2) and IU Folklore and Ethnomusicology

This past summer, my editorship of Museum Anthropology slowly wound to a stop. I saw tonight that the final issue of my term has now been posted online (behind a toll wall) in Wiley InterScience. It should thus appear in AnthroSource very soon and then it will show up in mailboxes. One of the consistent pleasures of the editorship has been publishing the work of smart and talented colleagues with whom I work here at Indiana University. The final issue 32(2) contains reviews or review essays by several of these friends.

Arle Lommel provided a review essay titled “From Galleries and Catalogues to Websites: Three Online Musical Instrument Exhibitions” (pp. 111-113).

Gabrielle A. Berliner authored two reviews for the issue.  One of the digital exhibition “Keeping the Faith: Judaica from the Aron Museum” (pp. 117-118) and one is of the book Jews and Shoes edited by Edna Nahshon (pp. 152-154).

Teri Klassen reviewed the book Texas Quilts and Quilters: A Lone Star Legacy by Marcia Kaylakie with Janice Whittington (pp. 134-135), while a second quilt book–Contemporary Quilt Art: An Introduction and Guide by Kate Lenkowsky (pp. 160-161) was reviewed by Janice E. Frisch.

Michael Dylan Foster’s contribution to the issue is a review of How to Wrap Five Eggs: Traditional Japanese Packaging by Hideyuki Oka and Michikazu Sakai (pp. 154-155).

An alumnus of our department, Katherine Roberts (now on the faculty of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) reviewed the book Sacred and Profane: Voice and Vision in Southern Self-Taught Art edited by Carol Crown and Charles Russell (pp. 122-124).

Finally, a DVD produced by our colleague Jon Kay (who is the director of Traditional Arts Indiana) was reviewed by Chris Goertzen of the University of Southern Mississippi. The film is Crafting Sound: Indiana Instrument Builders and it appear on page 119-120 in the new issue.

Thanks to everyone in (and of) the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology who worked so hard to help Museum Anthropology thrive over the past several years.

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.

Jul 20

Teri Klassen in JAF

Congratulations to Teri Klassen on the appearance of her latest research article “Representations of African American Quiltmaking: From Omission to High Art” in the new issue of our field’s flagship journal, The Journal of American Folklore.  The article can be found online in ProjectMuse and in the paper issue, which should be hitting mailboxes soon.

Jul 20

Don’t Miss Kim Christen’s Account of Returning to Tennant Creek

Don’t miss Kim Christen’s account of returning to Tennant Creek. Its a beautiful account of an important moment. Find it on her website here.

Jul 18

Gilcrease Museum’s New Chief Conservator!

Congratulations to Victoria Book on her triumphant return to the Gilcrease Museum as its new Chief Conservator.  Victoria’s museum career began in Tulsa when she was a student at the University of Tulsa (of which the museum is now a part) and a student intern and employee at Gilcrease.  When we were both at the Gilcrease, Victoria, among many other things, helped me (ca. 1999) curate (what I thought was) a really nice exhibition of Inuit prints and sculpture–Inuit Art of Land and Sea

I love the Gilcrease and its amazing collections, thus I am thrilled that Victoria is back in such an important role.  Congratulations!

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