News, inspirations, and thoughts.
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Clinging to Outdated Library Models Stifles Small Campus Innovation
For too long, academic libraries have determined their value by what they control: catalogs, subscriptions, and systems replicating those of the largest institutions. For as long as anyone remembers, academic…
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Are Smaller Academic Libraries OA Free Riders?
I regularly attend and present at the Charleston Conference each year in November. It’s a fantastic conference dominated by some of the brightest and most agile thinkers in scholarly publishing…
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Smaller Academic Libraries, Chess, and the Endgame
I used to be a student of chess. While I was never very good, I appreciated the various ways of conceiving of the structure of the game. From myriad openings…
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Serendipity & Happenstance vs Certainty & Control
Last fall I found myself driving to Cincinnati from Pittsburgh listening to a fantastic talk from way back in the 1980s by Marion Woodman. I was on my way to…
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The Power of Openness
I mentioned in my inaugural blog post that I struggled to extract myself from a reliance on a professional position that no longer served me. I’ve thought a lot about…
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My Wheelbarrow of Uncertainty
At 45, I found myself face-to-face with an impossible situation: I couldn’t quit the academic affairs administrative post that was becoming intolerable in its tedium and repetition and yet I…