Subscribe to this blog
libraries
« Previous EntriesMobile 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 [...]
My critique of Value of Academic Libraries and a happy update
Sunday, April 21st, 2013My critique of the Value of Academic Libraries initiative has just been published in OLA Quarterly (it’s the first article in the PDF). I wrote it on the fly after a desperate request for content from the Oregon Library Association President, so it’s not my most thoughtful work, but I’m pretty happy with how it [...]
Stratification and losing faculty status
Monday, March 25th, 2013I was surprised when I read a couple of weeks ago that the University of Virginia was taking faculty status away from its librarians. Even more surprising was the fact that it was at the behest of the University Librarian (it seems like these challenges come, more often, from outside of the library). It appears [...]
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 [...]
Self-efficacy in retention and how we can help build it
Tuesday, December 18th, 2012A little while back, I wrote a post about the role of narratives in our lives. The stories we tell about our lives that inform the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Those stories impact everything. Including our willingness to persist when challenged in an academic environment. And in a time where [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Broad vs. deep in information literacy instruction
Saturday, June 30th, 2012When I was at Norwich, my focus was often on increasing our instruction stats. My Director wanted to see us doing more instruction and being in at least two classes in every department (in addition to reaching every student through EN 101). Not bad goals at all, but over time, I realized that the focus [...]
Reflections on year one at PSU
Thursday, April 26th, 2012Yesterday was my one-year anniversary of working at Portland State. I’d wanted to write a post yesterday reflecting on it, but I was driving three hours (to Bend, OR) to give a four-hour preconference. Since the whole experience was accompanied by a migraine that just wouldn’t die, I crawled into bed as soon as the [...]
Classic Blunder #2 – Assuming resistance is a bad thing
Tuesday, February 14th, 2012I remember when I was in library school, a lot of people talked about librarians who were resistant to change and would try to derail your exciting and innovative projects. Often, this discussion was couched in ageist “us” (young, innovative librarians) vs. “them” (old, set-in-their-ways librarians) terms, but even when it wasn’t, the assumption was [...]
Invisible goalposts, support and having a plan
Monday, October 17th, 2011This summer, I was engaged with quite a few projects (several of which I was in charge of), but was able to make time to focus on scholarship just about every Friday. Part of that, in my opinion, is this blog. This is how I engage with the profession, share my ideas, and have professional [...]
Be the change you want to see
Wednesday, August 10th, 2011Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. A librarian comes into a new job full of enthusiasm. He volunteers for lots of projects and is a generally good citizen at his library. Over time, he notices that a lot of colleagues are not so willing to volunteer to do things. Maybe they don’t seem [...]
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 [...]
Interview on mobile technologies at ALA TechSource Blog
Monday, July 11th, 2011In anticipation of my upcoming two-part workshop on mobile technologies for libraries, Dan Freeman of ALA TechSource interviewed me, asking me about my thoughts on the present and future challenges and possibilities for mobile tech in libraries. The interview is now up on the ALA TechSource blog and I’m just pleased that I didn’t say [...]
Having a voice
Wednesday, June 29th, 2011At my previous place of work, we had weekly “council meetings” which was basically all of the professional librarians meeting to discuss issues, make big decisions about the library and manage the budget. It was a great experience to be involved in high-level discussions straight out of library school and really nice to feel in-the-loop [...]
New Webinar: Delivering Innovative Mobile Services through Your Library
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011When I wrote my book Social Software in Libraries five years ago, I decided to include a chapter on mobile technologies. As I started researching the topic, I was disappointed to find that very few libraries were doing anything to make their services (including their website) accessible via a mobile device. I’d written a paper [...]
The crisis optimist
Sunday, June 5th, 2011I’ve never felt like a particularly optimistic person. When we were getting ready to move to Portland, I fully expected that we’d lose furniture on the way or that much of it would arrive severely damaged. It didn’t happen. I expected my son to scream and cry the entire way from my parents’ house in [...]
My new job (or why all of my Oregon Trail gaming as a child might finally come in handy)
Tuesday, February 1st, 2011I’m one of those people who has a hard time waiting for people’s birthday to give them presents. Whenever I try to surprise my husband with something, I always end up telling him about it early. I can keep other people’s secrets, but I’m terrible at keeping my own. So I’ve felt like the cork [...]
Ebooks and Libraries: A Stream of Concerns
Tuesday, January 18th, 2011I really like eBooks, which is something that surprised me when I won my Kindle last Spring in a raffle. In fact, just about every book I’ve read since then has been on my Kindle or occasionally on my husband’s iPad (I greatly prefer reading on the Kindle). When I first assumed I would hate [...]
Transliteracy from the perspective of an information literacy advocate
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010A colleague of mine and I have been talking about transliteracy for some time and came to very similar conclusions as David Rothman did in his smart and respectful critique. I’d thought about writing about it myself for months but two things stopped me. The first was that I thought perhaps there was something I [...]
« Previous Entries