Eira Tansey @archivist@scholar.social

i don't know who needs to hear this, but if you're a faculty member and you have your students do interesting projects and *then* you ask the archivist if they can preserve the projects.... this is the wrong order of steps. if you want us to preserve your class's projects, please ask us before you commence the project so we can give you advice about our capacity and designing it well.

for example, it used to be pretty easy to find other librarian faculty tenure and promotion docs on university library websites. That's rarely the case today.

Has anyone written smart stuff about how university websites all now look alike because the marketing has taken them over? The enclosure of university websites has really irritated me as an academic librarian who always used to look for "how other libraries do it" and get useful documents off their websites. Now all their stuff is also under intranets.

Attending a highly interdisciplinary conference only 2 hours away with a mix of academic & community practitioners. The moderators have not contacted me & the chair has not answered my question about presentation logistics or getting the moderator's info. I come from a field that usually uses basic PPT slide decks for conference talks. My topic is highly technical but also very interesting to a broad audience if presented well (which I am capable of). Reader, what would you do in my situation?

i'm happy to report the piece eventually got published elsewhere and got far better exposure as a result

lololololololol just got cited in a "review of recent literature from the field" from a journal that killed one of my submissions after a new editor came on and decided they would no longer stand by previous R&R rounds. "Living well is the best revenge" etc etc

Isn't there any temporary high better than checking Google Scholar and seeing new citations of your work, or is this just a Capricorn thing

Hey academic librarians, my IRB's website is worse than useless in terms of educating people who are not pulling in massive NIH/NSF grants on what they are required to do WRT social science research methods. I'm going to their office hours soon to ask Q's, what kinds of questions should I ask? I'm in the *very* early stages of designing an interview-based study

Reviewing something in my field that is well-written, novel, and totally compelling (where you ask yourself, this is such an obvious and important topic, how has no one tackled this before?!) is such a profound joy.

I have gotten 3 desk rejections in a row for an article that I think is one of the best things I've ever written. This is the first time I'm trying to introduce some core aspects of my discipline into other journals, and this experience has been incredibly demoralizing. Any words of advice from other interdisciplinary folks?

This weatherlore as a form of folklore is such an incredible sounding CFP! Can't wait to read more about it http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2019/09/17/wait-five-minutes-weatherlore-in-the-twenty-first-century-edited-collection

i think there is a cogent argument to make that aside from institutions specifically created to serve populations traditionally excluded from higher ed (like HBCUs or work colleges like Berea), the US private higher ed landscape specifically drains off money and enrollment that could be used to stabilize public higher ed.

*far fewer private institutions compared with the US, that is

After spending several days at a mostly academic library conference in Canada where the college and university landscape has far fewer private players, it's fascinating to read this. You treat education like a commodity and not a public good, and you end up with only market-influenced answers https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20191006-A-Crisis-in-Enrollment?cid=wsinglestory_hp_1a

Utterly thrilled to see my work on archives & climate change so respectfully and wonderfully profiled (in VICE of all places!) https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j5yg3g/climate-change-could-erase-human-history-these-archivists-are-trying-to-save-it

I haven't read anything by Vandana Shiva and think I probably need to start. Suggestions of where to begin with her many works?

Happy Birthday to Ursula Franklin, who is shockingly underappreciated but whose work is eternally relevant and prophetic. Start with "Every Tool Shapes The Task" and work your way up to her 1989 Massey lectures https://lazarapress.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Every-Tool-Shapes-the-Task-Communities-and-the-Info-Highway.pdf.pdf

On the down side I just got a third rejection for one of the best articles I've ever written, on the upside I start my sabbatical next week

Like, I understand that the transition from feudalism to enclosing the commons is a large part of it. But what am I missing is why some capitalist economies' legal systems seem to be so deferential to private business interests while other capitalist economies seem to adhere more towards ideas of public protection.