A welcome return to the NEC (formerly Rave) Conference in London. There was a smaller attendance than in previous years, but as before, the quality of presentations …
Sounds unlikely, but that was the basis for a remarkable talk by Bob Kasenchak (co-authored by Ahren Lehnert) at an ISKO Meetup (14 June 2022). The talk began in uncompromising fashion with the cover of a famous work by French postmodernist …
Reading Time: 6minutesNational Library of Greece, Athens (photo by Georgios Liakopoulos)
What are libraries for? If you are going to have a public discussion, why not start with the big questions, and that question came up repeatedly at the 2022 Fiesole Retreat, the …
Reading Time: 4minutesVincenzo Foppa, Young Cicero reading (Wallace Collection)
Behind this talk (by Jeffrey Johnson, author of several books on UX design) was one great idea: that reading is unnatural. What Johnson meant by this seeming paradox is simply: any infant (unless handicapped) …
I started fondly reminiscing (as one does) as I listened to Martin White and Sandra Ward last week at this year’s UKeiG’s annual conference, talking about their collaboration on a history of the Institution for Information Science (IIS), until I thought: …
Reading Time: 3minutesA screenshot created using Miro
This was never going to be a pale imitation of earlier iterations of this conference. Mark Carden has always set his stall out to provide more interactivity than in other conferences. The standard format of workshops, …
Reading Time: 2minutesThe STM Frankfurt Conference 2019. In case you’ve forgotten what real (non-virtual) conferences were like: small screens, big heads in front of you.
Simon Inger, in an interesting post on Scholarly Kitchen (July 7, 2020), makes a tantalising suggestion: an online …
Reading Time: 5minutesOne of the peer review workshop activities
Yes, it’s workshop time! This was my first Researcher to Reader conference, and I found the event very enjoyable (even if I had to participate in a workshop, which prevented me from falling asleep, …
What were the innovations that emerged from the STM Innovations Day? Well, there weren’t any robots on display. This annual event is an excellent opportunity to take stock of academic publishing and its current concerns, although as we shall see below, …
Reading Time: 3minutesWe all know what confession means: the Catholic ritual by which sinners gain absolution for their sins, by confessing to a priest. John Cornwell’s recent history of Confession, The Dark Box (Basic Books, 2014) contains three key dates, very helpfully extracted …
