Category: Random Thoughts

By sheer coincidence, one vendor demonstrated the fallacy of another vendor’s beliefs in the space of the last few days. I give you two vignettes:

The American Chemical Society dismissed Jenica’s report about SUNY Potsdam dropping their subscription to ACS by calling out blogs as unbalanced, discourteous things.

A spokesman for the American Chemical Society said that the group would not offer a response to Ms. Rogers’s blog post or the conversation that’s sprung up around it. “We find little constructive dialogue can be had on blogs and other listservs where logic, balance, and common courtesy are not practiced and observed,” Glenn S. Ruskin, the group’s director of public affairs, said in an e-mail message. “As a matter of practice, ACS finds that direct engagement via telephone or face-to-face with individuals expressing concern over pricing or other related matters is the most productive means to finding common ground and resolution.” (from this morning’s Chronicle of Higher Education, with apologies for their paywall)

So public discussions on blogs and email lists lack civility, but private one-on-one communication is good for finding common ground. Got it.

Meanwhile, the JoVE sales force have taken that to heart and prefer to sell their product to individual faculty members rather than to librarians (actually a fairly typical practice), getting the faculty to request their product from the library. And apparently this one-on-one communication between individuals can also be unbalanced and discourteous. Here is the email one JoVE salesman sent to a faculty member who wasn’t really interested in the JoVE product in the first place.

—— Forwarded Message
From: Max Radbill <max.radbill@jove.com>
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2012 10:18:24 -0700
To: 
Subject: Completion

Tom-

I am writing not to ask if you ever evaluated JoVE, but to question your integrity. By asking me to set up a trial for what I am assuming you wanted only to use a protocol from JoVE and then be done with JoVE. This is the reason I am questioning your integrity. Before the trial you said,you would be able to evaluate JoVE in the time given and if useful for you and your student you would endorse JoVE highly. This, of course, never happened.

For me this is a completion of the transaction that has been lingering. My conclusion is that you lied to get what you want and you lack integrity.

Max

Max Radbill
Account Manager
Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) <http://www.jove.com/>
17 Sellers St., Cambridge, MA 02139
tel. 617.765.4362 (office) | tel. 774.254.3451 (mobile) | max.radbill@jove.com

You’ll want to read the full email string on that one, and JoVE’s apology is here.

I bet we’d have universally civil discourse if we took the humans out of the equation. Short of that, it seems that it’s possible to be a complete jerk in any format.

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So… I got kind of stuck in the middle of a 4-part series when life and work swallowed all the time and energy I had for blogging. But the new school year has started, and there’s no way I’m going to let myself stretch out that series forever, so consider this throat-clearing and hello and happy fall term, everyone!

What we’ve worked on or implemented this summer, in no particular order, and only the things I can remember right this minute:

• LibAnswers, including our first ever general chat reference service (we’ve had individual widgets on our guides for forever, but never a general service)
• LibAnalytics
• a Twitter account @GouldLibrary
• an honest-to-goodness print center in the library
• a new library director!
• a new link resolver (SerialSolutions 360 Link, replacing SFX)
• Summon (not yet live)
• eBrary
• a new staff member in the campus IT department that will work closely with the joint Research/IT service and whom I helped hire
• a chapter for an edited volume co-authored with Steve Lawson and sent off to the editors
• a new print management system
• rethinking the statistics we keep
• working on an article about our Information Literacy in Student Writing project
• iPads for librarians! As part of a joint iPad Learning Community with St Olaf
• reading hundreds of student papers for the Information Literacy in Student Writing project
• And, of course, preparing for all the New Student Week activities and the extra services we run during the first portion of Fall term.
• We joined in a Mellon grant for Digital Humanities and are helping organize a conference on the same
• several of us are involved in organizing a conference on visuality in the curriculum
• I helped pull together a workshop for faculty who would be teaching our first year seminars
• and we redesigned our trading cards!

So yeah. It was a busy summer! And our summers don’t even start till mid-June!

Next up, finishing that four-part series (I swear I will), and maybe some musings on memory in a digital age, and probably updates about the iPad Learning Communities.

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This is from the department of Probably Everyone Knew This But Me. I’d been aware that ProQuest had taken over the Statistical Abstract, but I hadn’t realized that they were also producing a print version of the work. So for those of you who are looking at options for your 2013 edition, here they are:

• ProQuest Statistical Abstract of the United States 2013, in print with a prepublication price of $161.00 (publication date of November 2012)
• ProQuest Statistical Abstract of the United States 2013 Online, which, according to their earlier press release, is scheduled to be available in fall of 20113. No word on pricing, of course. [Update: If you’re in the Minitex area, they’re negotiating consortial pricing.]

So there you have it.

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