Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton

Amanda Etches-Johnson announced last month that her university, McMaster University, is offering faculty at the university (not just library faculty, all faculty) a 2.0 Toolbox consisting of hosted blogs and multi-user wikis.  What a lovely idea – to use the library’s tech-savvy-ness to move the parent institution forward technologically.  Excellent, wonderful, library goodness.  And why would the library do that?  Well, they’ve answered that on the project’s FAQ page:

It’s the library’s core mission to provide and manage access to the university’s academic resources and scholarly information. In a world where web technologies are changing the face of scholarly communication and the creation of the scholarly artifact, we feel that providing a platform for faculty to harness new technologies to facilitate their teaching & research makes a lot of sense for the library. It allows us to continue our role as stewards of that scholarly content. In addition, we see our provision of these tools as an extension of our role in upholding and advocating for intellectual and academic freedom.