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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 [...]
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 devil you know in first-year instruction
Friday, August 10th, 2012It’s pretty clear from the comments on my recent posts that many of us have a sense that the sort of information literacy instruction we’re providing is not having the impact we’d like. But even when we know that what we are doing isn’t a right fit, it can be difficult to try something new. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Classic blunder #1 – Let’s just try it and see what happens!
Saturday, January 28th, 2012There are a lot of popular assumptions people make in this profession that lead us to make classic blunders. These can be assumptions about the change process, assumptions about our colleagues, and assumptions about our patrons. We can go into developing a new service or technology with the best of intentions and fail spectacularly because [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Management, upward mobility and sticking
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010I was really excited when I saw the title of In the Library With the Lead Pipe’s post “Rising through the Ranks: On Upward Mobility in Librarianship” from last month. They always provide a comprehensive and thoughtful treatment of the issues they choose to write about. And this is an issue I think about quite [...]
Immersion reflections
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010Wow, what can I say about Immersion? First of all, you have to be there to really understand what a profound experience it is. My in-laws were visiting when I got back from Immersion and I found it very difficult to explain the experience. What I told them is that it was an intensive program [...]
Numbers vs. meaning
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010Forgive this less-than-well-thought-out post. I’ve been thinking a lot about assessment lately and the librarianly love of numbers in assessment, and I’m a troubled by the way that some academic libraries tend to measure how well they are supporting the academic mission of the institution. Librarians keep a lot of statistics and measure a lot [...]
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 [...]
Do we need library ombudsmen?
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009I recently had a not-so-fun experience with our local hospital which reminded me of how important it is to ensure one’s front-line staff are empowered to question things. During our childbirth class – which was sponsored by the hospital where I was going to be giving birth – we were told by our childbirth educator [...]
Turn that org chart upside-down!
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009A while back, I read an excerpt from Aaron Swartz’s blog post about management in the post Upside Down Org Chart: Better Way to Support Employees? by Stewart Mader (his is a great blog to read if you have any interest in wikis). It took me a while to finally read Aaron’s original post, and [...]
Congrats to the 2009 Movers and Shakers!
Monday, March 16th, 2009Take a look at this truly amazing group of people that Library Journal chose to recognize this year. I’ve never known more folks on the list and so many are folks I absolutely adore: Sarah Houghton-Jan – it’s kind of amazing that she had not been recognized as a Mover and Shaker before this given [...]
It’s not all about the tech – why 2.0 tech fails
Saturday, March 14th, 2009Yesterday, I gave a talk for the ACRL Virtual Conference entitled Can’t Get There From Here: Achieving Organization 2.0. If you’re registered for the Virtual Conference or the regular ACRL Conference, you can access the archive of the talk, and if not, my slides and links to what I discussed are provided on my presentation [...]
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