Hi. My name is Meredith. And I'm a librarian.

Well... perhaps that's not the whole story.

I currently live in central Vermont and am the Distance Learning Librarian at Norwich University. It's a small library, so I basically get to do a little bit of everything in my job, from being the library Webmaster to teaching information literacy classes to troubleshooting database access problems. Every day is definitely different and a new challenge, which I enjoy.

In the Spring of 2007, my book Social Software in Libraries: Building Collaboration, Communication and Community Online was published by Information Today. It's a really nuts-and-bolts book that introduces social technologies, shows how they're being implemented in libraries, and explains how you can implement them in your library. I'm also a columnist for American Libraries magazine. I write a column called "Technology in Practice" that focuses on successful uses of technology by libraries that would be easy for any library to replicate.

One of the things I am most passionate about is providing affordable continuing education for librarians. I really like teaching, but so many people don't have access to conferences and continuing education classes. As a result, I came up with the idea for a course called Five Weeks to a Social Library and put it together with five other wonderful librarians. The course was the first free, grassroots, completely online course devoted to teaching librarians about social software and how to use it in their libraries. It was developed to provide a free, comprehensive, and social online learning opportunity for librarians who do not otherwise have access to conferences or continuing education and who would benefit greatly from learning about social software. It was a great success and we hope that other libraries and organizations will replicate the model (please contact me if you're interested in doing so).

I am known to some people as the Queen of Wikis because I've created a few (Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki, ALA Chicago 2005 Wiki, ALA New Orleans 2006 Wiki and Internet Librarian 2007 Wiki among others). It's not really that I'm wiki crazy, just that I happen to have found a lot of good uses for them in my life. I'm all about librarians collaborating and sharing ideas to benefit the profession.

In March, 2006, I was named a Library Journal Mover and Shaker for my passion for playing with technology and sharing what I've learned with others. Who would've ever thought I'd get an award for playing?

Before getting my library degree from Florida State University, I worked as a child and family therapist. In this work, I learned a great deal about building rapport and developing collaborative relationships among agencies with common goals. A lot of the skills I learned as a therapist have served me well as a librarian.

I think this is a really exciting time to be involved in the library field, and I look forward to being part of the wonderful technological and philosophical changes that libraries will go through over the next few decades.