tech trends

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Mobile Learning: The Teacher in Your Pocket

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013

There’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 [...]

Gender, “thought leaders”, ego, and subversion

Wednesday, January 16th, 2013

Lots of people have been writing about Ask Miss Julie’s post Ego, thy name is librarianship. Julie is a talented and humorous writer and a hard-working and innovative children’s librarian. She feels like she and many of her friends and colleagues who blog and are doing amazing and useful things for their patrons and wonder [...]

Up to my neck in… well, everything.

Monday, April 9th, 2012

You know you’re a real blogger when, no matter how absurdly busy the rest of your life is, the thing you can’t do that you miss the most is blogging. It’s been a crazy almost two months and isn’t looking to get any better in the near future. Isn’t it funny when you look back [...]

Interview on mobile technologies at ALA TechSource Blog

Monday, July 11th, 2011

In 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 [...]

New Webinar: Delivering Innovative Mobile Services through Your Library

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

When 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 [...]

Ebooks and Libraries: A Stream of Concerns

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

I 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, 2010

A 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, 2010

I’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. [...]

Inspiring stuff to read, Take 2

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

I was thinking about writing a post reflecting on recent posts about the myth of the graying of the profession (and the coming librarian shortage) and Peter Brantley’s post about involving young’uns in discussing the future of libraries, but Colleen Harris beat me to the punch. And because she really knows how to tell-it-like-it-is, I [...]

Inspiring stuff to read, Take 1

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Between 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 [...]

A skeptic gets a Kindle

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

I never in a million years thought I’d get an eBook reader from the current batch of options. They were so not on my radar. I didn’t get all excited and jealous when I saw people with them. I never even thought I’d want to read a book that way. Heck, I hate reading articles [...]

Shuffling off to Buffalo

Monday, April 26th, 2010

For library folks near the Buffalo area, I wanted to let you know that I’ll be participating in an all-day conference on “Gadgets and Gear” for the Western New York Library Resources Council on May 7th. I’ll be speaking all morning about mobile trends in libraries (QR codes, augmented reality, mobile library websites and apps, [...]

Computers in Libraries Recap: Day 3

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

I 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, 2010

Day 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, 2010

Since 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, 2010

I’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, 2010

In 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 [...]

Teaching Web 2.0 with Web 2.0

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

After a year off from teaching to take care of baby Reed, I’m getting back up on the horse. I’ll be teaching a class on Web 2.0 and Social Networking Software for San Jose State University’s SLIS program starting this Tuesday. As usual, I’ll be using Drupal for my online classroom (rather than Angel, which [...]

Constructive criticism

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Let this be a lesson to you — never write a comment on a blog post while you have a baby on your lap who is simultaneously grabbing at your laptop and spitting up on your pants (yes, this really happened, I have the stained jeans to prove it). Trust me, what you write will [...]

Shades of gray

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

Ever since the news of LibLime’s enterprise version of Koha and whether or not their actions consisted a fork of the code, I’ve been thinking about how black and white some of us (me included, at times) tend to see library products and library vendors. Stephen Abram’s “position paper” on open source ILSes got me [...]

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