At the heart of Betty Smith's 1943 novel A tree grows in Brooklyn is the image of a Tree of Heaven growing in harsh urban surroundings. The tree's survival in the heart of a grom part of the city is a metaphor for people's ability to flourish in the most difficult environments. [EcoBrookyn say the… Continue reading A tree grows in Southwark
Blog
Documentation and the museum object
A rather sad post for the first one after a break. CityLIS PhD student Christopher Serbutt sadly died last year, after a long period of ill-health, so that there was a posthumous award. Titled The changing place of information: an examination and evaluation of how the context in which an object is set affects the… Continue reading Documentation and the museum object
And just like that
And just like that ... activity started again on this blog. One might have thought that a series of lockdowns, working from home for a year, and an unprecedented emphasis on digital communication, might have inspired more blog-writing effort. Clearly it was like that for some people; not for me, alas. At least I had… Continue reading And just like that
The distant thing imagined
The title of this post comes from a 2016 item on Paul Gilster Centauri Dreams blog, in which he discusses some of the unexpected discoveries about the former planet Pluto coming from NASA's New Horizons probe, particularly its atmosphere and its geological activity. Gilster writes of "that interesting interplay between the distant thing imagined and… Continue reading The distant thing imagined
Overload in the time of Covid
My colleague Lyn Robinson and I have been writing about issues of information overload for many years now, our latest output being a review article forthcoming from Oxford University Press. The Covid-19 situation, and the amount of information (and misinformation and disinformation) that has accompanied it, has created a new public interest in overload. We… Continue reading Overload in the time of Covid
In further praise of dissertations
In a post of five years ago, I noted the academic quality and professional relevance of the dissertations produced by CityLIS Masters students, and the wide range of topics and approaches they include. Since then we have developed a series of virtual collections of dissertations in particular subject areas: art and artists, history, science and… Continue reading In further praise of dissertations
Remembering Mr. Kemp: Gardening in a ‘book-making age’
I have a long-standing interest in the Victorian information environment, which is many ways still influences our own. In particular, I have been fascinated by how information-rich was the world of botany, horticulture and the design of parks and gardens in that period. Several of the leading garden designers were also prolific authors and editors,… Continue reading Remembering Mr. Kemp: Gardening in a ‘book-making age’
Both a borrower and a lender be? Is LIS research used outside the discipline?
Library/information science academics have been troubled for a long while as to whether anyone outside our discipline takes any notice of our research, since the issue was first thoroughly discussed in a paper by Blaise Cronin and Stephen Pearson. It is well-known that much of LIS's toolkit of theories and concepts, and the data to… Continue reading Both a borrower and a lender be? Is LIS research used outside the discipline?
Google’s Global Media Literacy Summit
A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to attend Google's Global Media Literacy Summit for 2019, in the shiny new surroundings the of Google's London headquarters at King's Cross. Introducing the day, Ramya Raghavan, head of civics and news outreach at Google, made a point that I often try to emphasise: that our… Continue reading Google’s Global Media Literacy Summit
CoLIS10 Ljubljana
The 10th CoLIS (Conceptions of Library and Information Science) conference was held earlier this month (16-19 June 2019) in Ljubljana, Slovenia, organised by the Department of Librarianship, Information Science and Book Studies at the University of Ljubljana. (It really doesn't seem three years since the last CoLIS conference.) The conference chairs were Polona Vilar and… Continue reading CoLIS10 Ljubljana
The Occasional Informationist 