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.
Note: 95% of this was written on a flight from San Juan to Philadelphia, so please excuse any spelling/grammatical errors or anything that just doesn't make sense. I haven't had…
I need to ask a favor of you, my kind and generous readers. I recently offered to redesign the website for the Brown Public Library in Northfield, VT, which is…
Day 19: Respond to a Commenter on Your Own Blog This activity is supposed to be about responding to people who comment on your posts. The person who created the…
I've been reading and experiencing things lately that have really gotten me thinking about blogging, social media, and why people share so much of themselves online. If you're looking for…
Day 15: Give a Comment Award I'm supposed to recognize one or a few commenters on my blog today, and for whatever parameters I choose (they write good comments, they…
Day 12: Make Sure Your Blog Technology is "Comment Friendly" Last week, I examined the comment-friendliness of my posts. Today, I'm supposed to examine the comment-friendliness of the technologies I…
I've been thinking a lot about the discussion last week about speaking, being compensated for speaking, transparency, the profession and it's (perhaps?) inferiority complex, and so much more. Everyone contributed…
Rather than boring you to death with 31 Comment Challenge posts, I'm trying to condense a bunch of the activities into each post so if you're bored, you can easily…
In case you were wondering, I haven't given up on the comment challenge! I've just been rather involved in the comment storm that's taking place on my blog right now.…
A person I'm friendly with in California wrote me last night asking for advice about a speaking gig he just got. He's pretty new to the speaking thing (though he…
The first activity in the comment challenge is to do a comment self-audit. Here's mine: How often do you comment on other blogs during a typical week? It is so…
One of my favorite blogs is the Bamboo Project Blog by the brilliant Michelle Martin. Michelle writes about social software in the non-profit sector, e-learning, workplace learning and more, so…
I got this email about LOEX 2008 Encore from Catherine Pellegrino at Saint Mary's College and wanted to spread the word: The annual LOEX conference is trying something new as…
While I didn't get tagged yet, the passion quilt meme really spoke to me. For this meme, you're supposed to post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr…
Every few months, I get an email from someone in library school or a new librarian basically asking me how I've accomplished all that I have in this profession in…
My father-in-law -- who was big on the lecture circuit before he retired from optometry -- always says that you are valued as a speaker in direct proportion to the…
I just got back to work this evening and was pleased to find that the job ad for the Distance Learning Librarian position at Norwich has been posted. If you're…
I went to the discussion about the SWIFT conference platform, which I haven't discussed publicly on this blog (though many others have on theirs -- and many of them offer…
the group - for Connie Originally uploaded by cindiann I had a really wonderful time at Computers in Libraries, as always. While there are always certain talks where the delivery…