Sean Burns

I work as an Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky's College of Communication and Information, within the School of Information Science.

My About page contains more details.

Research

My research topics broadly cover areas in scholarly communication, open science, open access, information retrieval, and academic libraries.

Recently I've partnering with others on topics related to open educational resources (OER) and on topics related to ungrading and universal design for learning (UDL).

See my research summary page or my CV.

Teaching

I teach in the Library Science (LS) and in the Information, Communication, Technology (ICT) programs.

Books

I've written and made available several of my textbooks for the courses that I teach. These textbooks cover systems librarianship, electronic resource management, Linux systems administration, and personal knowledge management. I'm presently writing a new textbook on semantic web development.

Software

I teach a couple of courses that involve using the Bash shell on Linux. I wrote several open source software applications to help students learn how to use Linux command line utitilies and to navigate the Linux filesystem.

The Text

The Text is a single page that contains hundreds of short posts on a variety of topics. I started the page on April 23, 2019, and have been adding to it ever since.

Why is it a single page? It's a single page because a single, long page on random topics really confuses search engines, which I think is funny (because I know why it confuses them).

To add new posts to the page, I write a single markdown file, and then process that file with a bash script, which converts it to HTML, adds a bunch of extra tags, creates a RSS entry, etc, etc. The script uses a lot of sed and ed commands, which I also think is funny.

Bookshelf

Reading books is important. Here's my virtual bookshelf.

Notes

I've been keeping some Notes.