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Wednesday, April 24th, 2013ACRL was a terrific conference experience for me. Not only did I get to see a lot of good friends and have a lot of deep conversations with other instruction coordinators, but I got so much out of the vast majority of sessions I went to. I will freely admit that the conference was overly [...]
Mobile Learning: The Teacher in Your Pocket
Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013There’s a great new book out on mobile technologies in libraries and I was fortunate to have been asked to contribute a chapter on mobile learning and mobile instruction in libraries. The book is called The Handheld Library: Mobile Technology and the Librarian and it was edited by the undeniably awesome Tom Peters and Lori [...]
Shared vision, transparency, and the high performing organization
Tuesday, March 12th, 2013As I’ve mentioned before, Lisa Hinchliffe and I presented on and authored a paper for the Library Assessment Conference in October. The spoke about applying the High Performance Programming Model of organizational transformation to building a culture of instructional assessment in libraries (and then applied that to our own libraries!). One of the major characteristics [...]
The entrepreneurial library
Thursday, November 29th, 2012Years ago, I visited the libraries at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. After lots of conversations, the one word that stuck with me was entrepreneurial. The library faculty there were a truly entrepreneurial bunch, creatively finding opportunities to improve services and raise the profile of the library through collaboration, experimentation, partnerships, grants, etc. When [...]
Living our values
Thursday, September 13th, 2012I have wanted to write about so many things that have come across my desktop lately, but work and getting ready for a major trip to New Zealand with my husband and a three year old have kept me from getting my thoughts out of my brain and onto the blog. Today was my last [...]
Behavior vs. belief and changing culture
Monday, July 23rd, 2012At LOEX of the West this summer (a fantastic conference, btw), Joan Kaplowitz did a session where she started by asking attendees what words they associate with assessment. I won’t list the litany of negative terms that came from the audience, but I will say that the most positive word used to describe assessment was [...]
The changing professional conversation
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011I have had some great discussions on Twitter. Professional discussions, discussions about parenting, conversations with friends. I’ve been pleasantly surprised that you can have a quality professional discussion with multiple people (some of whom you may not normally follow) in that medium. I have also gotten great information and advice in response to “querying the [...]
Faculty inertia and change in scholarly publishing
Monday, August 1st, 2011I loved Barbara Fister’s recent post, “Breaking News: Academic Journals are Really Expensive!”, about faculty who seem surprised that journals cost the library a lot. Kind of amazing to think that these are people who produce and review content for these journals. And the quote from Peter Murray-Rust’s blog stating that “[librarians] should have altered [...]
My thoughts on the Harper Collins/Overdrive controversy
Tuesday, March 1st, 2011The library world is abuzz about Harper Collins changing the terms by which libraries can license their books on Overdrive. If you haven’t read about it already, here’s some background info. I’m not particularly up-in-arms about what Harper Collins did; I’m far more concerned with the e-content licensing models so many libraries have been blithely [...]
Collaborative tech, virtual participation, and what is an “open meeting” anyways?
Wednesday, January 12th, 2011Let me say this first. I am not an expert in ALA or LITA (or even ACRL) bylaws regarding participation, open meetings, etc. I’m sure a lot of very experienced and awesome people like Jason Griffey, Aaron Dobbs and Cindi Trainor could speak to these issues from the standpoint of someone who is immersed in [...]
Inspiring stuff to read, Take 3
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010When I looked at the list of items I wanted to share with you and saw the number that were from one blog, I realized that I really should just say READ MUSINGS ABOUT LIBRARIANSHIP!!! Nearly every post Aaron Tay has written has been insanely useful for me either in sharing with my LIS students, [...]
Inspiring stuff to read, Take 1
Friday, August 13th, 2010Between work, my son and the class I’m teaching at SJSU (which is about to start), I rarely have time these days to blog. It’s certainly not that I’m uninspired to do so, as I’m constantly reading things that inspire me, provoke me, or just plain interest me. But anyone who has read my blog [...]
Old media really doesn’t “get” new media
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010Last semester, one of my students linked to this great conversation between Teresa Nielsen Hayden (community manager for Boing Boing) and John Scalzi about community-building through comments and moderation. It’s a fantastic read — check it out. Nielsen Hayden made a comment about the need for moderation to promote good behavior in a community and [...]
Rethinking online learning
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010This was another amazing semester teaching at San Jose State University. I had significantly more students in my class this semester than in the past (more than double), which at first made me nervous about the workload I’d have to take on. But it actually ended up leading to an even better class experience, IMHO. [...]
Tips for library job applicants in a tight market
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010Another semester of teaching at San Jose State’s SLIS program has ended. Many of my students are graduating and others are starting to think about applying for jobs so they’ll have one when they do graduate. For so many of them, the job search is going to be a struggle. It wasn’t an easy job [...]
Computers in Libraries Recap: Day 3
Thursday, April 15th, 2010I took an absolutely obscene amount of notes from Ken Haycock’s keynote, because it was just one pearl of wisdom after another (I’m only including some choice bits here). I’ve seen Ken speak once before, and he is someone I would go out of my way to hear speak because he has such deep knowledge [...]
Computers in Libraries Recap: Day 2
Thursday, April 15th, 2010Day 2 was just as full and wonderful as Day 1. I continued my mostly staying offline during the conference and I think it really helped me to keep focused on what was going on in front of me. While I do like Twitter in a lot of ways and think it’s great for conferences, [...]
Computers in Libraries Recap: Day 1
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010Since it had been two years since I’d been to an Information Today Conference, I was really excited to attend Computers in Libraries and it did not disappoint. It was a fantastic learning and social experience with a much more diverse array of sessions than in previous years. I was really happy to see a [...]
Coming to terms with Twitter
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010I’ve been teaching a class on Web 2.0 since 2007, and this semester is the first time that I’ve actually had a full week on Twitter (well, microblogging and lifestreaming to be specific). Before, I treated it sort of as an afterthought, including some information on Twitter during the two weeks that I covered blogging. [...]
A lot of Davids make one heck of a Goliath
Monday, April 5th, 2010In response to my post a few days ago about EBSCO, Sarah Houghton-Jan just wrote an impassioned post about unethical vendor practices, suggesting that we let our vendors know when we are not happy with what they’re doing. While I do agree that libraries should make their dissatisfaction with specific vendors or vendor practices known [...]
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