Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How To Rate A Book: Goodreads, Taste, And Reading In The 21st Century, Dylan Burns

Library Faculty & Staff Presentations

“What shall the individual who still desires to read attempt to read this late in history?” asks Harold Bloom. Writing at the end of the 20^th century, Bloom’s quote anticipates the information explosion that the age of the internet brought to the reader (even if his emphasis is on the unpopularity of reading rather than the explosion in options). Social media sites like Goodreads prove that reading is still popular, yet Bloom’s question of what does someone read is still salient. More than ever, reading is a social activity, to be shared, debated, and justified between millions of would …

More Than A Mausoleum: The Library At The Forefront Of Digital Pedagogy, Dylan Burns

Library Faculty & Staff Presentations

Some of the more nostalgic set have opined about the “death” of the traditional library and how universities need to “Save the stacks.” Are we losing the traditional library to chase digital trends?

This paper will argue that the incorporation of Digital Humanities into the library is leading to an explosion of new collections adventures. If we take one definition of Digital Humanities as the presentation of humanities research through digital means as Josh Honn suggests ("Never Neutral: Critical Approaches to Digital Tools & Culture in the Humanities" [2013], 6), a shift in focus toward the Digital is providing new …