about me

Finding the work/family/fun balance and identity as a librarian/parent

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

This is a post mainly for those professionals who are passionate about their careers and are considering having children but wonder/worry what impact it might have on their life and their career. I’m going to talk about my own experience finding an identity as a working mother over the past year. Remember that your mileage [...]

Big things I’ve learned 2000-2009

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

Going into a new decade (I know technically it’s not a new decade until 2011, but don’t be such a kill-joy!) is a good time for reflection. After seeing all of the #10yearsago posts on Twitter, I started to think about where I was 10 years ago vs. where I am today. My life could [...]

Day 1 in the life of a head of instructional initiatives

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

This is part of the Library Day in the Life meme going on this week. What an awesome idea!
I cheated on this a little — I wrote this up on Thursday since I’m not working until Wednesday. Until mid-August, I’m only working 2 days per week so that Reed can wait until he’s 4 [...]

Reed Javier Farkas

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

I realize that while there have been little blurbs about this on FriendFeed, Facebook, Flickr, etc., I haven’t actually blogged anything about the new man in my life. Probably has something to do with the fact that the only opportunities to go online have been when I’m nursing him and it’s difficult to write an [...]

On leave

Saturday, April 4th, 2009

Friday was my very last day at work and I’m now officially on maternity leave. Our little boy is due April 7th, so hopefully I’ll have a few days to relax and catch up on sleep before baby time (sleep has become more difficult in the last few weeks of my pregnancy, but I’ve been [...]

A sight I haven’t seen in years

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

I’ve been trying to clean up my email, aggregator and life to some extent before the baby arrives, and it’s kind of pathetic how liberated I feel looking at this message:
Now, if you all can just stop posting things for the next month or so, that would be great. K thx!

Why not?

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

I have been so touched by the kind words people have written about me with respect to my winning the LITA/Library Hi Tech Award for Outstanding Communication in Library and Information Technology (or as my father-in-law started calling it to everyone he saw last weekend “tech librarian of the year” — lol). I always feel [...]

Making progress on library instruction

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

Last April, I started in my new position as Head of Instructional Initiatives, though for the first four months, I was also still doing the job of Distance Learning Librarian. Since taking this on at the end of July as my only job, it’s been a wild ride. I took a lot of risks, tried [...]

My next big project

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

I often tease my husband about his need to always be involved in a project. He’s always got to be working on something outside of his “day job”, whether it’s cleaning out his storage room (better known as the troll room), digitizing his parents’ slides, digitizing all of our documents, or creating the most awesome [...]

How I got started blogging

Monday, September 8th, 2008

A student in the class I’m teaching for San Jose State University asked me the following the other day:
How did people first learn about your blog? Do you have a previous blog post on how it became popular? It would be an interesting read!
It’s a good question and one I thought I’d post here [...]

Me in a cloud

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

Wordle is a fun little tool! You can put in your del.icio.us username or paste in some text and get a pretty neat-looking word cloud.
Here’s my CV as a cloud:

Here’s a list of the titles of my presentations over the past 2 1/2 years as a cloud:

Passion Quilt – Share

Monday, April 28th, 2008

While I didn’t get tagged yet, the passion quilt meme really spoke to me. For this meme, you’re supposed to post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about.
Here’s mine:

Original image

[...]

Getting out of a rut

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

Since our Coordinator of Public Services left, I’ve been the liaison to the social sciences along with being the liaison to the School of Graduate Studies (whose programs are all online). That means that I’m basically the liaison to over 2/3 of the Norwich population, but it made good sense because of my strong background [...]

My FAQ and the expert versus the hive

Sunday, February 10th, 2008

In the past two weeks, I’ve received around 10 emails asking for my advice on various topics. Sometimes these are questions that have easy answers. Some are asking for more involved advice that I’m happy to offer. Others are asking for things that would require an unreasonable amount of time and effort on my part. [...]

Flu trumps blogging (and pretty much everything else)

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

I probably owe a lot of people emails and I’ve been wanting to write up my tech trends and talk about some of the cool things I learned at the OLA Superconference last week. Unfortunately, I’ve come down with the worst case of the flu I’ve ever had, which has turned me into a coughing, [...]

Casual Conversations

Friday, November 30th, 2007

A week from today, I’ll be taking part in a new project Tom Peters (of OPAL fame) has put together called Casual Conversations. From what he’s told me, it sounds like it will be a Charlie Rose-style interview (in a web conference format) where we chat about our work, stuff that we’re seeing in the [...]

Building Academic Library 2.0 video

Monday, November 26th, 2007

I’ve been offline for a while, so I didn’t notice that UC Berkeley put the webcast of my keynote online! WOW! It’s available on YouTube, but you can also download the podcast from UC Berkeley’s site if you’re not into the whole video thing. I’m embedding the YouTube video here. I start talking about 12 [...]

Asking for help from the hive (on mobile devices)

Sunday, November 18th, 2007

I often have people asking me questions about mobile devices. They assume that because I’m tech-savvy about social software, I must also have one of those PDA Smart Phones and do lots of text messaging and whatnot. This could not be further from the truth. I’ve had the same junky, no-frills phone for over four [...]

I am NOT the Annoyed Librarian

Friday, November 9th, 2007

There’s been some speculation in the comments of this blog, her blog, and even at some dinners that I write the Annoyed Librarian . I want to state emphatically that this isn’t the case. I have no connection to the Annoyed Librarian, and that should be obvious to anyone who reads both of our blogs.
Just [...]