Day Eight

I awoke at 4:22 am with yesterday's group discussion failure still tormenting me. As I lay there, without any memory of the readings, I decided to get up and force myself to review each one and try to determine what we should have taken away from the discussion group exercise.

The six hours of sleep must have helped, because it worked. The essence of the three authors points of view came back to me and then suddenly it made sense why we read these three articles about scholarly publishing. The process is broken, according to them. It requires some fixing and these three authors each have a unique take on what can be done to improve the process of scholarly research and publishing. Well, that made my day (that I overcame being brain dead, I guess) and I got over the "torment" and went back to work. I also learned a lesson about preparation for group discussions.

Our lecture (picture) of the day set the foundation for copyright and intellectual freedom discussions. If I had known I would be blogging, I would have brought a camera, but I'll just have to settle on an over abundance of text in this blog. That's more me anyway.

For group discussion this afternoon the three of us in my small group went down to ground level in GSLIS and found some cushy chairs and a sofa in the Children's Book Center. Besides the extra comfort, I enjoyed my discussion partners and their insights. Doug, Carla and I discussed the readings about the ways librarians are sometimes put in the position of dealing with social issues, when patrons are homeless or mentally ill . The articles were great and several ideas came out of our discussion that could develop into concrete ideas on solving some of the challenges facing libraries in dealing with these communities.

In particular, I will remember the idea to involve the community itself in addressing the issues. Thanks Doug and Carla for an enjoyable and insightful conversation, which I intend to put to use someday.