This year's ALISE conference has been full of highlights, but if the Dewey blog had to pick one session as a keeper, it would have to be yesterday's set of juried papers on "The relationship between research and education." Lynn Silipigni Connaway (whom readers will remember as one of the team of OCLC boffins responsible for WorldMap) was there with her co-author Marie Radford (Rutgers University) to talk about their analysis of the transcripts of virtual reference chat sessions, identifying the barriers and disconnects faced by librarians and clients when participating in such online conversations. (With her OCLC Research colleagues Brian Lavoie and Lorcan Dempsey, Lynn points to a variety of ways in which OCLC is focusing on "Making data work harder" in the current issue [January 15, 2006] of Library Journal.) Fran Miksa (University of Texas) then presented his paper on "The role of theory in research as one of the components of LIS education." Seeing Fran reminded us how important it is that each and every one of the Dewey blog's readers immediately goes out and buys a copy of his magisterial review of the history of the development of bibliographic classification (in general) and the DDC (in particular): The DDC, the universe of knowledge, and the post-modern library (Forest Press, 1998). It really doesn't get any better than that.
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