Editor’s Note: This new series features a weekly round-up of interesting articles, blog posts, tweets, news, thoughts, and other tidbits related to the world of library school. Enjoy!

Anna-Sophia

There was a really epic Twitter conversation (and a number of side conversations and comments) on Wednesday about the character of LIS literature. The thread stemmed from Meredith Farkas’ excellent post that challenged some of my own assumptions and internalized values about tenure and went in a ton of very interesting directions. I was particularly interested in the side thread about peer review, which led me to Paul Courant’s 2008 post on formal and informal modes of peer review (hat tip to the perennially well-read Chris Bourg for the link). From my perspective as a sometime formal peer reviewer and frequent informal peer reviewer of both library and disciplinary literature, discussions in my open access class, and even conversations we’ve had on our HLS editorial email chain, peer review will continue to be a thorny and important subject for anyone involved in the development and circulation of scholarship.

On a lighter note, a lot of us loved the Lifehacker “How I Work” interview with Ira Glass. Ira and I share great taste in office supplies, apparently, and as Stephanie said,

Last but not least, another of my favorite Twitter library folks, Erin Leach, posted a fantastic piece at Letters to a Young Librarian, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Technical Services.” If you liked my interview with Jason and Elliot (or even if you didn’t), please read Erin’s discussion of stereotypes and the need for a “Unified Library Scene.” Break down those silos, kiddos!

Speaking of LtaYL… in last week’s roundup we missed a fantastic guest post there from HLS OG Lauren Dodd Hall: “So, You Want to be an Academic Military Librarian?“

Courtney

This week my independent study on art and visual resources librarianship focused heavily on digital images and visual resources. It’s been an opportune time to review the major literature, especially since I’m researching various collection management systems in preparation for our move to a new database at my new job. The image database we currently use in the Visual Resources Center at UGA is incredibly outdated and has not been using standardized metadata. So, I was interested to come across Edward Woodwards’ article “Inverse Proportions: The Quantity Vs. Quality Conundrum” from the June 2014 issue of American Libraries. Woodward explores the difficult scenario of prioritizing the quantity of images versus the quality of metadata attached to those images. As I’ve come to learn, digitizing and making images accessible means nothing if you or your users can’t locate what you’ve uploaded into an image database! However, it’s a disservice to users to take so long uploading material, due to extensive metadata input, that they can’t access what they need at all! Balance is key. I try to implement at least the minimal descriptive metadata in each record and I find that this is best course of action for digitizing a large collection. VRA Core, the descriptive metadata standard for visual resources, has suggestions for minimal records and this is what I strive to include for each image.

Becky

This week was the 2nd of the 3 conferences I’m attending this summer: Digital Preservation 2014. Despite spotty-at-best wifi and data, many attendees were able to live-tweet at #digpres14. Ruth compiled the tweets in a handy-dandy Storify.

One of the speakers at the conference shared a tumblr that he is involved in: One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Photo Op, which as a name means very little, but is screenshots of old geocities pages, so is a fabulous throwback to 1990’s web design.

And inspired by the conference, a slice of my life 16 years ago.