On Friday, I had a meeting with the Dean of the School of Graduate Studies to discuss future plans for integrating information literacy instruction into the curriculum. On several occasions I brought up issues that involved communication problems between the programs and the library. In response, he discussed the internal communication problems he’s seen. He …
We all have a story of our life in our heads that informs who we think we are and what we think we are capable of. This story is based on experiences in our lives — successes, failures, traumas, and other people’s expectations. Often we will construct our story based only on certain experiences in …
Hey, check out Steve Lawson’s terrific presentation on HigherEd BlogCon today: Know Enough to be Dangerous: Tools for Taking Control of HTML and CSS. There is some very good information for people who want to monkey around in the CSS for their blog to change the look and layout. Nice job, Steve!
For almost a month I’ve been meaning to write about three great new blogs that came on the scene fairly recently, but the post somehow got lost in the suffle of life. Library Garden – I’m really excited to see the growth of collaborative blogs. Not that I don’t like following 155 things in Bloglines, …
I have been reading the discussions regarding “movers and shakers” and the “self-promoting elite” with great interest. See these posts (and many comments on the first two) at The Shifted Librarian, Walt at Random, Caveat Lector and The Liminal Librarian. I find it very interesting how a post about how libraries can keep the people …
I have been working since November to make HigherEd BlogCon a success. And whatdayaknow? I get the flu, just as the Library and Information Resources week begins. I have been feeling hella-bad since Monday and although I’m definitely a lot better, I’m still only at the level of having a really bad cold. So as …
I just wanted to let you all know that today is the first day of the Library and Information Resources track of HigherEd BlogCon. We’ve got a great schedule of presentations this week that cover a wide range of topics dealing with technology in libraries. If you’d like to take part in the conference, all …
Dorothea asks TechEssence readers what you’d like us all to write about. We’ve really got a really diverse range of tech expertise in this bunch, so take advantage of it! Let us know what tech topics you’d like to hear from us about.
There’s another new blog on the block this week! The Liminal Librarian is written by the inimitable and indomitable Rachel Singer Gordon, one of the best writers in the profession today. For those with limited vocabularies (like me! I didn’t have a clue.) liminality is the state of being “in between,” which pretty accurately describes …
I’m a nuts and bolts kinda gal. I like books, articles and conference sessions that give me real, concrete ideas for how I can do good things in my library. I think a lot of librarians are like that. We’re all busy people and many of us only have time for professional development outside of …
I feel like I’ve been run over by a train. In addition to being completely exhausted by the conference and waking up with a migraine, I seem to have come down with a bad cold on top of it all. But I’ll take feeling like this any day for the amazing time I had at …
talk given by Tom Peters and Lori Bell of OPAL OPAL stands for Online Programming for All Libraries. Lori used to be the head of the Illinois Talking Book Center. Hard to get people with limited mobility together for a book discussion, so they were looking for a way to do this online. Tom Peters …
Note: I’m going to put my own editorializing in italics to keep it separate. Ok, so they said we wouldn’t be able to get a signal in the ballrooms, but low and behold I seem to be getting a good signal! Rock on! Update: Ok, nevermind. Once they closed the doors I lost it. Well, …
Tomorrow (very very early) morning Adam and I are hopping on a plane and heading to DC for Computers in Libraries. This is my first Computers in Libraries, so I’m really excited! It’s also my very first time doing any sort of speaking at a conference. I’m not too nervous, since if I can’t talk …
In just a couple of weeks, HigherEd BlogCon will be starting! It will be going on all month on the HigherEd BlogCon blog and through several Webcasts. I encourage all of you to visit the HigherEd BlogCon blog and to subscribe to our RSS feed so you won’t miss any of the terrific presentations that …
OVERDUE!!!! Overdue got 14.3% of the vote, not exactly a landslide, but good enough. In a tie for second place, with 9.5% of the vote were 2, brilliant, and Techno-groovy.
Update: I am going to keep this survey open the rest of today (Tuesday) and then will close it when I get up Wednesday morning. I’ll announce the results then. I know Michael is big on surveys and on user-centered change. So I thought, what better way to decide Michael’s new catch phrase than to …
For those of you who don’t read Tame the Web and have no idea who Michael Stephens is, you may just want to ignore this post. For those who do know Michael, I’m sure you know what word frequently comes out of his mouth (or on his blog or on IM) when he’s excited about …
This has been a rockin’ week for reading — I wish I actually had more time to do it. Rachel Singer Gordon wrote an amazing column for Library Journal entitled “Secure Our Professional Future”. In it, she makes some very good points about the reality of the current job market and how important it is …
I just started a blog at work to communicate with my distance students and faculty. For a long time people kept telling me “we have a really old version of WebCT so you can’t have blogs in it.” And realistically I knew I wouldn’t be able to get the distance learners to leave WebCT just …