Caught My Eye 6/4/13

• Shared Governance and Library Faculty: Jazzing Academic Community appeared in ACRLog and is a guest post from Sue Wiegand, Periodicals Librarian at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, IN.  Sue recounts her experience as the first librarian to serve as Chair of her Faculty Assembly and in the process touches on issues of shared governance, faculty status, promotion, and librarians getting “to be a full academic citizen.” (Sue has also contributed pieces to Against the Grain including  The Continuing Dilemma of Defining Databases: the New Digital Normal  and Multigrain Discussion: The 12 Planets and the Unidentified Flying Elephant

Anyone interested in catching up with what happened at this year BookExpo America will want to check out the next couple of items.

• A Reading of Relief at Annual Book Show – an article from the New York Times website that relays the overall feeling at the BookExpo that “after a turbulent few years in the book business … the disruption might have calmed.”  Of course author Julie Bosman quotes a number of people and offers other observations but evidently detects a “gigantic sigh of relief.”
• BEA Wrap-Up: Another One Bites the Dust is a short piece by Lynn Rosen posted on the BookBusiness website offering her impressions of the 2013 BEA.  A few takeaways from Lynn: “Fabulous New Books” “Interesting New Authors” and “Smart new technology.”

And here are two more items that might peak your interest:

• Although the focus during this daylong discussion was on public libraries, Collection Development 2020 | Library Journal’s Day of Dialog may ring some bells for academics.  After all, issues like ebooks, self publishing, demographics and platforms are common to all of us.

•  And for the more scholarly types this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Unabridged” by Allan Metcalf will be worth a read.  It discusses “the most shocking event in American lexicographical history … the publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.”  The uproar caused by Webster’s Third may come as  surprise to those brought up in the digital era.  That some people many would be upset or even care about the publication of a print dictionary will seem bizarre.  However, as Metcalf notes “it’s the only dictionary that prompted publication of an anthology of reviews, Dictionaries and That Dictionary, edited by the noted linguist James Sledd with Wilma Ebbitt.” (It’s still available used from Amazon.)