After a bit of a silence due to a rather busy term, a bit of a reminder about why we all do this kind of thing. And I don't mean just for tenure, although since I'm tenure stream I can't pretend to say it doesn't influence my desire to maintain this blog. I know I do this also to be able to share my ideas and concerns with other academic (science) librarians who are in a similar position. And if doing this helps my tenure chances, well, I have to say that that's great too. The blog that most influenced me to start this up was the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog, which I think is by far the best current awareness site on the web for librarians interested in the future of scholarly publishing.

And while I'm pointing to Ex Libris and talking about the future of scholarly publishing, take a look at this article from a couple of years ago. It really highlights for me the challenge of reference service these days. We're straddling two worlds, one print and one electronic. Our students want to be 100% electronic but we know that so much of what is useful for them is still in print and it can be a bit of a struggle to get them to look at print resources. But, how to get to that 100% electronic world, and who will pay for it. It should be very interesting to see where we end up in even 10 years from now.