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.
Jane Dysart writes a great post about the difficulties of scheduling and planning a conference in response to Walt Crawford's criticism of CIL occurring at the same time as PLA.…
I feel like I've been run over by a train. In addition to being completely exhausted by the conference and waking up with a migraine, I seem to have come…
The Teaching Moment in Virtual Reference – Clara Hudson Clara Hudson is a librarian at the University of Scranton. When doing reference by phone e-mail and chat, we lose the…
How Basic is Basic? - Kathleen Stacy She is talking about one-shot reference sessions. It was nice to see her say that it’s better to have the students come to…
Presenters: Jeanne Holba Puacz (University of Illinois) and Lynn Westbrook (University of Texas) So I’m not sure I understood what this session was going to be about. I thought it…
So I did my wiki presentation and apparently I did not suck. :) For those who attended the talk (or any other interested parties) you want to see the slides…
Participants: Amanda Etches-Johnson, Aaron Schmidt, and Michael Stephens Why are we spending so much money on commercial software when we could just put an IM name online for our patrons?…
talk given by Tom Peters and Lori Bell of OPAL OPAL stands for Online Programming for All Libraries. Lori used to be the head of the Illinois Talking Book Center.…
Note: I’m going to put my own editorializing in italics to keep it separate. Ok, so they said we wouldn't be able to get a signal in the ballrooms, but…
Tomorrow (very very early) morning Adam and I are hopping on a plane and heading to DC for Computers in Libraries. This is my first Computers in Libraries, so I'm…
This has been a crazy few weeks. So many exciting things going on and so many people I want to congratulate. First, I want to congratulate Chris Deweese on the…
In just a couple of weeks, HigherEd BlogCon will be starting! It will be going on all month on the HigherEd BlogCon blog and through several Webcasts. I encourage all…
You've got to give the man credit. It can't be easy to try to explain ALA. I've been embarassed to admit that I understand almost nothing about how ALA and…
ALA 2006 New Orleans Wiki I tried to get out... but they pulled me back in! No, actually I was thrilled to have been contacted by Mary Ghikas, the Senior…
The NextGen Librarian's Survival Guide by Rachel Singer Gordon If you're a nextgen librarian, a new librarian, or someone who now or may one day be supervising nextgen librarians, you…
Other than perhaps being included in a blanket condemnation of "illiterate bloggers," I never would have thought that I'd be so much as acknowledged by an incoming ALA President. Although…
There was some sad ALA-related news this week. Karen Schneider, a passionate supporter of ALA, has had to quit ALA Council as a result of the funding cuts at her…
A little over two months ago I wrote about the issues I have with the ALA. This was in light of Jenny's complaints about the ALA charging her registration for…
OVERDUE!!!! Overdue got 14.3% of the vote, not exactly a landslide, but good enough. In a tie for second place, with 9.5% of the vote were 2, brilliant, and Techno-groovy.