Welcome to my personal website. I work as as an associate professor of information science in the School of Information Science at the University of Kentucky's College of Communication and Information.
In this role, I teach in the library science graduate program and in the information, communication, and technology undergraduate program. Read on for more details.I am presently working on three
research projects. The first project is a study of tacit knowledge and open
science. In particular, my thesis is that tacit knowing, Michael Polanyi's idea
that we can know more than we can tell,
challenges the idea that an open
science can be fully open. If true, this has ramifications for what we can
learn from science done more openly and for what can be replicated based on
a more open science.
The second project is a study on document credibility. Here I am interested in what aspects of a document, in particular, news documents and articles, influence how people judge its credibility.
The third project is about article titles. More details later.
The curriculum vitae is a helpful device because it documents (hopefully) all the work that a scholar achieves. However, it falls short in contextualizing those achievements. In that vein, I have organized some of my publications by theme. These themes include bias in peer review, health information retrieval, reference librarianship and qualitative methodology, fake news, tacit knowledge and open science, history of automation, and electronic resources.
Visit my selected research page to learn more.
I enjoy a Plain Text Way To Do Plain Text Social Science.
I used the plain text research approach described at the link above to write a paper for an upcoming conference. It was fun to write, even though the paper was rejected (2022-05-24), and I describe the process on The Text. See the output: Ungrade to Learn.
I wrote the following two books for courses in my program. These works are based on lectures and demonstrations that I had created for these courses. Although I no longer regularly teach Personal Knowledge Management (it's in good hands, though), I created the course and have long desired to write a cohesive work for this course.
I consider these works to be live documents. They will be regularly revised for clarity and updated, especially during the months before and while they are taught, to include new content.
Burns, C. S. (2022). Linux systems administration. https://cseanburns.net/WWW/linux-systems-admin/.
Burns, C. S. (2022). Personal knowledge management handbook. https://cseanburns.net/WWW/pkm/.
The following book on Electronic Resource Management is a work in progress, but I am teaching this course during the Fall 2022 semester and plan to complete the final version as I teach the course.
Burns, C. S. (2022). Electronic resource management. https://cseanburns.net/WWW/ERM-book
I developed and regularly teach the following two undergraduate courses in my School's information, communication, and technology (ICT) program.
I developed and regularly teach the following two graduate courses in my School's library science (LIS) and information, communication, and technology (ICT) programs.
As of Spring 2023, I will be teaching a new course on system's librarianship, which means someone else will take over the knowledge management course that I have taught since spring 2014.
I developed and regularly taught the following undergraduate course, but now teach it mainly when I take on summer teaching.
I keep a journal of short posts on a variety of topics called The Text.
I keep a log of books that I read for personal enjoyment and enrichment on my Bookshelf page.