open source spirituality: turning the world upside down

Sermon preached at Boston University School of Theology during Wednesday Chapel on October 24, 200

Jam To-morrow and Jam Yesterday, but Never Jam To-day: The of Theology Libraries Planning the Twenty-first Century

The future of theology libraries is far from clear. Since the nineteenth century, theology libraries have evolved to support the work of theological education. This article briefly reviews the development of theology libraries in North America and examines the contextual changes impacting theology libraries today. Three significant factors that will shape theology libraries in the coming decade are collaborative models of pedagogy and scholarship, globalization and rapid changes in information technology, and changes in the nature of scholarly publishing including the digitization of information. A large body of research is available to assist those responsible for guiding the direction of theology libraries in the next decade, but there are significant gaps in what we know about the impact of technology on how people use information that must be filled in order to provide a solid foundation for planning

Reading in the 21st century; reading at scale

Essay from a festshrift that was originally published in: Reading for faith and learning : essays on scripture, community, and libraries in honor of M. Patrick Graham / edited by John B. Weaver and Douglas L. Gragg. Abilene : Abilene Christian University Press, 2017

Library Technology Services at Boston University: an un-roadmap

A working paper for discussionThis document attempts to identify user needs and expectations along with trends in scholarship, scholarly communication, and technologies that are the context in which decisions about library technologies are made. It also attempts to develop at least a sense of direction to guide decisions about library technologies at BU

Collection Development and the Value of the Library

This is a draft 2 of a discussion paper written for Boston University LibrariesDiscusses recent trends in scholarly communication and library collection developmen

Discovery, access and use of information in a “digital ecosystem”

This was a response to the presentations of a panel titled: “Setting Directions for Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age” at the Humanities Forum sponsored by the Boston University Humanities Center, October 5-7, 201

Services to support BU Authors with Open Access Issues

A working paper written for Boston University Libraries to foster discussion about how to provide better support for BU faculty authors.Discusses options for Boston University Libraries for supporting faculty authors in their efforts to make their articles available through open access publishing models

Library as Agent of [Re]Contextualization

Paper presented at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference in College Park, Maryland

Evolutionary Subject Tagging in the Humanities

Interdisciplinary research in the humanities requires indexing that represents multiple disciplinary perspectives. Most literature has been indexed using traditional models for subject analysis that are either too broad to be helpful or represent a single disciplinary perspective. We question whether traditional print models of subject analysis serve humanistic researchers' needs in working with digital content. It is beyond the capacity of libraries to re-index this body of literature relying on human indexers. We need to develop scalable tools to both re-index extant bodies of literature and newly created literature. Web-scale searching, computational text analysis, and automated indexing each hold promise for addressing various aspects of the problem, but none seem to fully address the problem. This project will gather a group of scholars with expertise in the humanities, computational analysis of texts, and library and information science, to design an approach to the problem

Library as Agent of [Re]Contextualization

Paper presented at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference in College Park, Maryland