Cultural Research

Just Had Another Grad Student Remind Me of Why I Can No Longer Help Random Academic Strangers

It's sad that graduate students studying with tenured faculty cannot get the help they need but I can no longer make up for the gaps in a system which has no room for me except to take knowledge on an as needed basis.

In the past, I've often helped grad students who needed some advice or guidance.  But, for whatever reason, the majority never thank me or share copies of the work resulting from, in part, my consultation.

I hadn't had a request in a while but someone recently wrote asking for my advice, I gave it and, as has become the norm, they didn't bother to thank me or acknowledge the note.

This has been so consistent that at one time I brought it up with some people in an online dance historian discussion group.  I was trying to decide how best to handle requests from students given that I wasn't in the academic system and didn't really appreciate having them take me for granted!

The sad result was someone saying that she "sensed" some negativity about my lack of academic employment and that's about all the pros had to offer.

So, if you write me for help, I will send you a link to this post as an explanation of why I will no longer help fill gaps in a system seemingly comprised of individuals who want my opinions but won't treat me with any of the respect due a professional, whether or not I'm currently working in their field.  And that goes for students and faculty.

Note:  This is a sad decision for me.  I've always been very generous with my time and energy for folks who wanted to understand things that I spent a great deal of time learning.  In part, that's because I was treated with great generosity by certain academics.  To those individuals, and those individuals only, I apologize for not being able to continue to follow your examples.

Reboot: All World Dance & Flux Research

Currently my two main projects are:

All World Dance: Dance News

Flux Research: Web Business

All World Dance is my primary focus but I've decided to maintain Flux Research as a hub for my business writing including my music industry posts at Hypebot.

Hip Hop Research Domain Change

Hip Hop Research can now be found at hiphopresearch.org.

Reboot: Cultural Research, Disruptive Innovation & Higher Education

Just a quick note to let you know I'm thinking about how best to focus at Cultural Research.  Going forward I'm going to be using the blog as a place to connect my academic research background and library training to the topic of disruptive innovation in higher education.  That will include libraries but more so the forces affecting libraries and radical changes at libraries as opposed to a more general focus on innovation in academic libraries.

More soon!

Where I've Been: Selling, Relaunching, Planning Ahead

Though I think about posting here on a fairly regular basis, other projects are consuming my time at the moment.

I've been negotiating the sale of a couple of entertainment websites and I'm hoping that will be wrapped up soon.  Meanwhile, I have to keep running them!

I've also been relaunching College Textbook News and getting it ready for a promotional drive so that people know it exists.  I need to be blogging there more as well but everything else involved in running the site, from posting press releases to making sure all systems are functioning smoothly, seems to be falling into place.

Look for an official launch announcement next week accompanied by a bit more posting here since the two projects cause me to follow related news.

On Vacation

Must shovel snow.

Upcoming at Cultural Research: Library Innovation Blog

Dude, You've Got a Mac!

Wow, this has been a tough year to get going. I feel like I'm having to force my way into the New Year. For example, I received a brand new iMac today but it's still sitting in its box about 12 feet from me. I've got too much work to do until tomorrow later today when I'll get to clean off my desk and kick it into high gear.

But I do have some posts in progress (never trust a blogger when s/he tells you that!) as well as some topics I hope to soon address. Here's what I have planned:

I'm currently reviewing the Proquest Entrepreneurship database with a twist, I'm approaching it as an actual entrepreneur might. That should be done soon after I get some questions answered about pricing and related details.

I've also got some great pics of and thoughts about Black Dog Books, a haunted popup bookstore that I find interesting as a brainstorming device for library marketing.

More about library marketing will follow with a book review of Marketing Today's Academic Library by Brian Mathews. I have to admit, I got sidetracked by Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which is an amazing yet devastating read.

I'm man enough to admit I've gotten teary eyed more than once. What can I say? I'm a sucker for a kid in pain.

Also in the near future, if luck is with me, I will be digging into the concept of disruptive innovation beginning with Clayton M. Christensen's Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. However, if you want to get going with that on your own, I'd suggest going straight to The Innovator's Dilemma. It's an awesome book and it will help you to see how disruptive innovation raises challenges to established organizations that are often difficult to spot before it's too late.

Disruptive innovation is something that folks in academic settings and those who provide them with services should be seriously getting up to speed on though I fear that many will be playing a rearguard holding action. Sadly, some will disregard Christensen's insight because they come in the form of business books and doubt such volumes could be relevant to their world.

I've also started checking out online book clubs and related social networks. I should have some examples of various widgets and some thoughts on why libraries would benefit from connecting with those companies. I'll also have at least one tale of a local public library whose attempt to provide a simple booklist service for their patrons has been radically undermined by their IT department.

Super Special Bonus Content:
It is high time I started sharing stories from my current experiences at Cleveland Library, a volunteer run community library housed in a thrift shop that is around 70k volumes and still growing. The collection is surprisingly good and has some great books that you won't find in any public library in Raleigh cause they got rid of as many as they could a while back.

But those tales will have to wait until I clear it with the boss man.

Ok, you get the idea. Time for me to follow through!

Cultural Research: Library Innovation Blog (CR:LIB) Added to Newstex Blogs On Demand

I'm really happy to report that this modest blog of mine has been accepted for indexing and content distribution by Newstex Blogs On Demand.

That should mean that, before too long, CR:LIB will be available on such hallowed digital ground as LexisNexis and I think that's really cool!

I actually am quite familiar with Newstex because my pop culture/music industry blog, ProHipHop, was accepted into their program in the early days and, out of the various databases in which the blog's content can be found, LexisNexis provides the most traffic.

I'm looking forward to seeing how database users respond to the inclusion of CR:LIB since, in the long run, I believe this blog is a better fit for users' needs. But we'll see what happens.

On that note, I am planning to review commercial products, especially reference databases and the like, and those reviews will be included in the Newstex feed. If you'd like your products considered for review, please send info to:
culres(at)gmail(dot)com

Onwards and upwards!

Update: Just received news that CR:LIB is now fully integrated with Newstex.  Now I'm just waiting on ProQuest's marketing people for Entrepreneurship review access!

Clyde, Where Are Your Library Innovation Posts?

I haven't been asked the headline question yet but I wanted to take a moment and clarify what I'm doing with this blog and how it relates to library innovation.

Two things are currently happening:

1) I'm writing my way into the topic which is how I typically work when blogging. If I was doing academic writing, my focus in public papers would be much clearer because a lot of this process would not be visible. But since I'm a blogger, you, dear reader, get a look at my process whether you want to or not!

2) Library innovation does not occur in a vacuum. I'm ultimately most interested in library innovation in higher education but that focus means that not only do I need to take into consideration the many factors affecting higher education as a whole, since a library serves a whole institutation, but also such areas as public and school libraries, because students come to college having already experienced such settings.

So I will bring up issues that may not seem to directly connect to higher ed but are actually quite influential in establishing the context for academic library usage [or non-usage, as the case might be].

That means that I'll also be discussing what I've learned on the open web over the last nine years during which much of my time has been spent as an online traveler and web publisher. I'll also be referring to my many years working in bookstores, where I learned much about customer service and about human navigation of information resources.

I would like to be able to say that whatever I blog about will therefore be connected to library innovation but that's a bit too easy. So I will do my best to at least make brief references regarding the relationship between a particular post and the topic of innovation, if that connection does not seem obvious, while occassionally allowing myself the blogger's perogative to go off-topic.

If you have any special interests related to library innovation that you would like me to dig into it, please let me know in the comments or at:
clydesmith(at)culturalresearch(dot)org

On that note, if you have any large files, commercial email, promo material or a newsletter you're hoping to sign me up for without permission, please uset:
culres(at)gmail(dot)com

It's the smart thing to do!

More About Cultural Research: History and Future Directions

Cultural Research, the website, was created as a personal scholarly archive, a building block in the open access movement and a way to make my research and related writing on dance, cultural studies, gender studies and education freely available. Much of that work was created in the late 90's and so the Archive of Research Papers now also represents an earlier phase of my academic activity though I hope to return to related themes in future writing projects.

Since earning my PhD in Cultural Studies in Education (OSU, 2000), my focus has shifted to web publishing, Internet studies and library science. The initial subtitle of this blog, "Disruptive Innovation, Libraries & Education," indicates the range of interests I am attempting to tie together but is clearly a bit too broad for the long term.

Moving forward I intend to develop a special focus on innovation in academic libraries while continuing to point to related areas that indicate future challenges and opportunities. I will also be sharing my experiences in the field, whether as a part-time librarian at Cleveland Library, as a job seeker in search of a position in higher ed or as a web publisher with an entrepreneurial bug.

We'll see how this mix shakes out over the next few weeks and update accordingly!