Information Wants To Be Free – A librarian, writer and educator reflecting on the profession and the tools we use to serve our patrons

Tiny mushrooms covering a tree stump in the forest surrounded by Fall leaves

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Community Time and Enoughness: The heart of slow librarianship

Photo credit: Mushrooms surrounded by trees by Valentin S. This is the sixth and final essay in a series of essays I've written on time. You can view a list…

Painting of three workers harvesting wheat and others lying or sitting down and eating

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Queer Time, Crip Time, and Subverting Temporal Norms

Photo credit: The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder This is the fifth in a series of essays I've written on time. You can view a list of all of…

Dolce Far Niente painting, woman in a dress lying outside on a bed of animal skins

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Meredith’s Slow Productivity (not to be mistaken for Cal Newport’s Faux Slow Productivity)

Image credit: Dolce Far Niente by John William Godward This is the fifth in a series of essays I've written on time. You can view a list of all of…

Impressionist painting of four people in flowing clothes resting on the bank of a river

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Slow productivity is a team sport: A critique of Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity

Image credit: Dolce far Niente by John Singer Sargent This is the fourth in a series of essays I've written on time. You can view a list of all of…

Two men in suits record the actions of women doing sewing work in a factory

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The Productivity Trap

Photo source This is the third in a series of essays I've written on time. You can view a list of all of them on the first essay. In my…

Old photo of two women in a field gathering wheat

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With Work Time at the Center

This is the second in a series of essays I've written on time. You can view a list of all of them on the first essay. Once upon a time,…

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Time: It doesn’t have to be this way

“What we think time is, how we think it is shaped, affects how we are able to move through it.” -Jenny Odell Saving Time, p. 270 This is the first…

White flowers hanging loosely off their stems

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Slowness, disability, and the art of losing

A few weeks ago, I had what honestly felt like a perfect day. It was a bright sunny day in December that felt almost stolen from the jaws of our…

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Open Offices are Neither More Open nor More Equitable

I can’t properly describe the level of annoyance I felt when I read Steven Bell’s latest piece in College and Research Libraries News about open offices entitled “We’re all about…

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Out of sight, out of mind? prioritizing support of online learners

It’s been eighteen years and I can’t believe this is still an issue. In 2005, I started my first professional library job as a distance learning librarian. At the time,…

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Slow librarianship and prioritizing life over work

I recently wrote an essay for CHOICE's LibTech Insights blog entitled "Building a Better Library Tech Future with Slow Librarianship." It provides a brief introduction to slow librarianship, how it…

Image of a gnarled dead tree in a field of tall grass

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The power of shame and belonging

In my last post, I wrote about the absolutely monstrous difficulty I was having getting off the migraine prevention medication (that wasn't actually preventing migraines) I had been taking for…

Clouds and sun in the background with a phone in the foreground that says God Calls.

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Vocational awe is always harmful

A friend of mine wrote a tweet that really made me think the other day: I understand arguments against a default "vocational awe," but much of the discourse denies the…

Tall pink flowers and fluffy greenery in the foreground and an old white farmhouse in the background

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Valuing maintenance

My town maintains an old dairy farm from the turn of the 20th century that now contains public gardens, a CSA, and community garden plots. In the Summer and Fall,…

Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey book cover

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Stop normalizing overwork

In the years that I have been trying my best to avoid overwork, I've become more attuned to the signs that I am indeed overworking. I usually notice one of…

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Cultures of care and solidarity

I had a dream the other night about my high school history teacher Mr. Farina who I haven't seen since I graduated and he retired. I was ridiculously happy to…

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Universal design for work?

I've had migraines for over 20 years. I didn't seek workplace accommodations for them until this year. The biggest barrier to getting accommodations at work was my own internalized ableism,…

Conspiracy theory meme from the show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

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So I’m a conspiracy theorist now? A call for retraction

I know a lot of librarians get mad about poorly informed articles about libraries all the time. It's rare that I ever really get truly angry about an article. I…