Blaise Cronin – författare

Cathedrals of Learning: Great and Ancient Universities of Western Europe provides a conspectus of the great Western European universities, pithily tells their life stories, showcases their architectural heritage, and describes the art, literary, and natural history collections they have accumulated over the centuries.

This book profiles the ancient universities and their distinctive organizational cultures, reveals their customs, ceremonies, and traditions, their quirks and quiddities, recounts their complicated histories, describes their architectural wonders (libraries, museums, anatomy theaters, botanical gardens) and treasures (rare manuscripts, antiquities, paintings, and objects d'art of all kinds), and introduces their famous alumni, distinguished scholars, Nobel Prize-winning scientists, and famously eccentric personalities.

It is a book for scholars, researchers, and anyone interested in these ancient institutions that remain centers of learning in the contemporary world.

Contains a collection of mini biographies, pen portraits of some of the world's most venerable universities Offers twelve institutional biographies that can be used to compare universities and their complex histories Written in an easy and rigorous style, with accessible coverage Compiled by a leading figure in information science, with a wide experience of great universities and the trends with which they are associated

The collaborative character of science and scholarship, whether formal or informal in nature, is the focus of this discussion by a master of the subject. The world of scholarly communication is evolving with exponential speed. Propelled by the Web and the rapid transition from paper to electronic journals, the scale of the research effort is moving from the individual to research conducted by dozens of scientists scattered all over the globe.These changes evoke many questions: What does it mean to be an author in an age of collective effort? How are responsibility and credit allocated in collaborative endeavors? What is the relationship between reading, referencing and reputation - the political economy of citation? How are social relations inscribed in intellectual space? Will the move to online and open access publishing provide new measures of authorial salience and intellectual impact? Cronin answers these questions as he captures the complex relationship between authorship and the reward system of science.