I have just started reading Donna Haraway’s Staying with The Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Haraway uses the term “Chthulucene” to describe our current era: “Chthulucene is a simple word. It is a compound of two Greek roots (khthôn and kainos) that together name a kind of timeplace for learning to stay with the...
—By Charles Henry My first impression of Pat Battin: how extraordinary her writing. Elegant and candid, weaving apt metaphors and at times colloquial interjections that enlivened an otherwise formal expression, she was for me instantly persuasive. Working within an academic culture that valued sharp articulation but often succumbed to clausal pile-ons and obscure phrasing...
By Erin Connelly Antimicrobial resistance is an increasingly serious global challenge. Calls for new drug development have been issued by governing bodies and public health organizations around the world. Some historians and scientists believe that novel routes to antimicrobial discovery may be found in the medicinal plants used in premodern medicine. As a result,...
This is the fifth and final post in the “Five Years of Listening” series, which focuses on the evolution of the Digitizing Hidden Collections program. —By Nicole Kang Ferraiolo The title of this series, “Five Years of Listening,” is a bit of a misnomer. While our grants team spent the last five years listening...
—By Emily Beagle As a PhD in mechanical engineering, I never imagined that my postdoc position would bring me into an academic library, but by good fortune I learned about the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship program from a faculty member at UT and was selected as one of four postdocs in the new Data Curation...
This is the fourth post in a five-part series called “Five Years of Listening” on the evolution of the Digitizing Hidden Collections program. —By Nicole Kang Ferraiolo Most people know what they mean when they talk about inclusion, yet it remains one of the trickiest words to define. It can be understood in the...
By Christa Williford When the editors first applied to CLIR for support for the project that resulted in 3D/VR in the Academic Library: Emerging Practices and Trends, I was delighted. As a program officer charged with facilitating brighter futures for access and preservation in libraries and archives, I appreciate the need to focus more...
This is the third post in a five-part series called “Five Years of Listening” on the evolution of the Digitizing Hidden Collections program. —By Nicole Kang Ferraiolo “What I don’t understand is where did all the money go? We were partners on a grant of more than a million dollars and we saw none...
—By Nicole Kang Ferraiolo This is the second post in a five-part series called “Five Years of Listening” on the evolution of the Digitizing Hidden Collections program. At its best, digitization is about equity. It’s the dream of breaking down the financial barriers to original-source research so that it’s no longer the exclusive domain...
—By Nicole Kang Ferraiolo Editor’s note: This is the first post in a five-part series on the evolution of CLIR’s Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives Program. The year was 2014 and CLIR had big news: it would be winding down its longstanding cataloging grant program and replacing it with a new program supporting...
The appearance of makerspaces in academic libraries is a growing trend, reflecting the use of new technologies and more collaborative approaches in active learning. In August, the heads of two makerspaces at university libraries—former CLIR postdoc fellow Justin Schell, who now runs the Shapiro Design Lab at the University of Michigan Library, and...
—Charles Henry This is an introduction to a series of blogs meant to clarify CLIR’s working principles and goals for the next five years. The title is a metaphor for the general nature of this focus. Ambient light refers to illumination that is encircling, encompassing, and diffuse. In present usage, ambient also conveys motion....