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.
When I wrote my first post on how excited I was about Google Maps, I had no earthly idea what the broad capabilities of the application were. I don't think…
Neil Gaiman isn't a fan of Michael Gorman either (welcome to the club). I've been really amazed by the reaction of people outside of the library world to Gorman's piece,…
Blog people... Sounds like creatures from a cheesy sci-fi movie you'd see on MST3K. ;) I know this has been talked to death, but as a dues-paying member of the…
Yes, another new Google search tool (it seems like there's been a new one every day over the past few months!). Google Blog reports that Google has come out with…
Sometimes we all need a little reminder why we got into the library field in the first place. When you hear about the lack of a librarian shortage, the low…
This month’s big library RFID news came when the Berkeley Public Library announced that it was spending $650,000 to place RFID tags on 550,000 library items. This is a library…
Starting a blog can be indimidating. I remember when I first started, I'd considered it more of an exercise in writing commentary than something I was writing for an audience.…
In the LA Times yesterday, Bill Maher echoed the sentiments I expressed yesterday about what is going on in our country and how it is reflected in today's high school…
I was more than a little frightened when I saw the survey, sponsored by the James L. Knight Foundation, which found that 35% of the high school students surveyed thought…
The WikiBibliography pulls together articles and commentary on Wikis from a variety of areas. Most of the citations have links to the actual article, so it's a great resource for…
Thanks to digitizationblog, I just found an amazingly cool blog that I wanted to share with you. Digitization 101 is a blog created by Jill Hurst-Wahl for Hurst Associates. Hurst-Wahl…
I just found this very interesting website via TangognaT. John Kupersmith, a reference librarian at UC Berkeley has collected usability survey data from various libraries as well as the library…
Ever since I started this blog, I've made a big effort to post regularly. Unfortunately, I slacked off last week. Well, I don't know if packing, putting our junk into…
I was very excited to hear, via Research Buzz, that Firefox has been downloaded more than 25 million times! That's fabulous! Hopefully we'll see it replacing Internet Explorer more and…
The Linux Librarian has a great post on why open source and blogging are so great: This is why open source works. From my comments, from yesterday, from James Robertson:…
Thank you Librarian Avengers for spelling out what most of us say to ourselves day after day as we navigate library websites and library catalogs: most library websites suck. In…
Michael Stephens and Aaron Schmidt (the Batman and Robin of the library blogging world) will be presenting The Library Blogosphere: Toward a Working Taxonomy at the Online Social Networks Conference,…
I know this article isn't new, but it's new to me and it may be new to you. Jon Udell wrote a concise and tremendously insightful article in InfoWorld entitled…
Feedmelegal is a blog all about RSS and blogging in the legal field. The author has a great list of links to tools for the growing world of RSS. Included…
I've applied and interviewed for jobs that I have not gotten. I've gotten used to rejection letters and all that. Usually I don't get my hopes up, so it's not…