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« Previous Entries Next Entries »The elusive dream of work-life balance
Monday, December 19th, 2011I have been wanting to write a post on work-life balance for a while, especially after spending a week at ACRL Assessment Immersion with a bunch of people who are deeply committed to their work and all define balance in their lives differently. Some of the people there are so active in the profession, so [...]
“I need three peer reviewed articles” or the Freshman research paper
Thursday, October 27th, 2011For the past six and a half years, I have been teaching Freshman about peer-review and how to find peer-reviewed articles through the library (or Google Scholar). I’ve developed all sorts of activities in different disciplines to get students thinking about audience, writing style, and the format of the articles they find. And every year, [...]
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 [...]
Becoming Zen in the face of criticism
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011It’s been extremely challenging to post here regularly (though I’m getting better about it!), not because of a lack of ideas, but because of a lack of down-time. Summer came late (like mid-July!) to Portland and we’re trying to make the most of it before the days of endless gray descend. I’m lucky that I [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Library Day in the Life – Monday
Tuesday, July 26th, 2011I figured that since I’ve changed jobs from the last time I did Library Day in the Life, I’d participate this time around to give people a sense of what a Head of Instructional Services does at a large urban university. After writing this up, I realize that this day was no more typical for [...]
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 [...]
Portlandia
Sunday, May 22nd, 2011Greetings from Portland, Oregon! I’ve been wanting to post about so many things in the past two months (especially just about everything Barbara Fister has been writing over at Library Babel Fish — gosh she is insightful!), but it’s been difficult to find the time. The learning curve at my new place of work has [...]
Making “you” work for you
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011Roy Tennant wrote a terrific post recently about his work habits and personality the other day that got me thinking (see “Living the Just in Time Life”). My first thought was “wow, it’s amazing how much Roy and I like each other given how completely differently we operate.” My second thought was how important it [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
On devil’s advocates and sausage-making
Thursday, December 30th, 2010Karen Schneider published an interesting post yesterday under the pithy title The Devil Needs No Advocate. Other than the title, it’s a post that I mostly agree with and it got me thinking about where it’s useful to play the role of critic or devil’s advocate and where it’s not. Because I do think the [...]
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 [...]
What do they really need?
Monday, December 13th, 2010I’m not sure if I’ve become more cynical or just more observant, but lately I feel like I’ve been seeing things through new eyes. We make so many assumptions in this profession, often based on the idea that we know what students need and want. Time and again, research has shown that we’re usually wrong. [...]
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