Meredith Farkas is a faculty librarian at Portland Community College in Oregon. From 2007-2021, she wrote the monthly column “Technology in Practice” for American Libraries. Meredith was honored in 2014 with the ACRL Instruction Section Innovation Award, in 2008 and 2011 with the WISE Excellence in Online Education Award and in 2009 with the LITA/Library Hi Tech award for Outstanding Communication in Library and Information Technology. She has been writing the blog Information Wants to be Free since 2004.
I haven’t written anything in a while because it’s been a really hard few months. My health has taken a turn for the worse with a new condition – also…
Photo credit: Statue Atlas by PeterKraayvanger on Pixabay This isn’t the essay I was planning to publish next. I’ve been working on an essay about the lack of solidarity around…
Image credit: Willet on the Beach by Korall inWikimedia Commons I’ve been doing so much thinking, reading, and writing on social media about COVID that I was honestly surprised to…
Santamaria, M., & Pfannenstiel, N. (2024). Information literacy and social media : empowered student engagement with the ACRL framework. Association of College and Research Libraries. When I started writing my book…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
The tl:dr is in whatever online communities you frequent, do you ever ask yourself "who isn't here? Who doesn't feel welcome here? What barriers are there to participation?" If not,…