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.
Before I started my job, there were no instructional materials provided to online students on how to use the library resources (there also was no distance learning librarian to create…
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 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…
Last November, I went to a meeting of Vermont colleges where we discussed doing more consortial activities. We broke up into groups to discuss different ideas and then reported to…
In mid-May, I'm giving an hour-long talk at the Vermont Library Association's Annual Conference about using social software in academic libraries. The majority of the population I'll be talking to…
After writing my last post, I started thinking that it really would be helpful to have a resource with information on self-promotion for new librarians. So I started one here…
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…
If you haven't taken a look at this terrific library marketing video from LIS students at the University of Pittsburgh, what are you waiting for? These students could teach experienced…
I've been seeing and reading so much about gaming and its relevance to libraries that there is no way I could summarize it all on this blog (especially since a…
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…
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…
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!…
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…
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.…
Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed for this free online conference about the use of social software and other Web tools in higher education. If you only want…
When I first started Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki in July 2005, I didn't know how people would respond to it. Would they use it? Would they ignore it?…
Google/Ask/Yahoo! is rarely the first place I will look for information when helping a student. If it's a really current topic, I'll try Academic Search Premiere and LexisNexis. If it's…
For one chapter in my book on social software in libraries, I'm discussing how librarians can determine which tools are the best for their library and population. To that end,…