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'm out here in Lansing Michigan at The Library Rebooted conference, offered by the Michigan Library Consortium. I just talked about wikis and Jessamyn West is now talking about blogs.…
After we teach our students how to distinguish between authoritative and unauthoritative resources, we need to actually show them how to find such authoritative resources. While our databases are great,…
While at Internet Librarian, I learned about the Maintain IT Project. This three-year Bill and Melinda Gates funded initiative is designed to identify best practices for maintaining public access computers.…
Last year, I was very nervous about pushing the idea of IM Reference at my library. If anything, I totally over-prepared before even broaching the subject. I actually created a…
About a week before I left for my vacation, Paul Pival, Ken Varnum and David Rothman had an interesting distributed discussion about how students are perceiving the research literature and…
Michelle Boule by Etches-Johnson I want to wish a hearty congratulations to my good friend (and "wing man") Michelle Boule, for being chosen by LITA to represent them in the…
Ever since I first started screencasting almost two years ago, I've been really surprised how few people are talking about how cool it is. It can be so hard to…
Jennifer Macaulay mentioned today (at least I think it was today -- though by the time you see it, it could be three days from now) that she's noticed her…
Ken Varnum, of RSS4LIB, and I were both speaking at the Dartmouth Biomedical Library's Fall Conference on Friday, and we were talking about Feed2JS (which I talked about with Paul…
Wow! What an amazing conference! I can honestly say that I didn't go to a single bad/boring/irrelevant talk and, although I was sick and sidelined on Day 3, I got…
October Conference Wrap-up - Roy Tennant Roy discusses the salient points from each talk. Wikis: Creating Collaboration in Libraries Wikis are a low-threshold way to collaborate. Doesn't need to be…
Staying Informed by Bill Garrity, Dartmouth University "Being geeky doesn't make us losers." We all have personal requirements for how we get information. Bill doesn't want to have to go…
by Gabriel Rios, University of Alabama, Birmingham Mobile devices are another way to get content into the hands of our patrons. Types of mobile devices - PDAs/Smart Phones, Cell phones,…
Our Content, Their Device: Three Uses of the iPod - Sarah G. Wenzel, Columbia University The librarians at Columbia University have developed library content that can be used on an…
Using RSS to Promote Scholarly Publications - Ken Varnum, Tufts University RSS stands for real simple syndication. It's an xml-based data format for syndicating content. Way to send a title,…
I just got home last night from California around 8:30 PM and am now, at what was 6:10 am for me yesterday, sitting at Dartmouth at a terrific conference they…
Tom Ipri, La Salle University At Computers in Libraries in March, I had told Tom how excited I was about going to his talk and then I promptly went and…