Archive Fever: Writing and thinking with oceans, memory, and attention.

I have been meaning to post this. Lee Dirks, Director of Microsoft's Education & Scholarly Communication External Research Division, gave an incisive talk a couple of months ago at the OCLC/Frederick G. Kilgour Lecture in Information and Library Science. Dirks provided a pretty solid thinking through of the major paradigms we've got upon us in these times of big (and even chaotic) data. Technically and epistemologically his talk was pretty tight. The video and the presentations (more than one) are available from the UNC SILS website: http://sils.unc.edu/news/releases/2010/04_dirks.htm

Carol Tenopir , professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville's College of Communication and Information and director of the Center for Information and Communication Studies , drove a great panel presentation discussion at the recent annual meeting for the Special Libraries Association . Those familiar with Tenopir's work will recognize her compelling claims. In short, she is drawing attention to the proliferation of science journals over the past few decades and the increasing interdisciplinarity of these journals. This is impacting scholarly communication in profound ways, and this paradigm positions the library as a nexus for this scholarly exchange and curation. In the presentation, Tenopir alerted attendees to the trend of how scientists are now reading a wider swath of journals than ever before. For instance, "in 1977 scientists on average read at least one article in 13 journals per year, in 1995 scientists read 18, in 2003 they read 23, and in 2005 they ...