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've had many interviews, both in the social work and library fields. Some have gone great and some have been disasters. But the disasters haven't always been mine. I've read…
If you haven't already, go check out A9.com, a yellow pages for the future. More a reference work than simply a "phone book", A9 allows users to not only search…
Are you torn between using furl, del.icio.us, and the growing number of similar sites? Well worry no longer friends! Steven Cohen just posted about one of the cooler bookmarklet tools…
Right now, my hubby, Adam, and I live right near his parents and, like many people in our generation, Adam is their tech-support guy. Since we're moving to Chicago in…
For those interested in developing open source software based on the patents offered for free by IBM and others, PatentCafe has come out with OSS Patent Search Engine, a natural…
NPR this morning had a great story about how Brazil is switching 300,000 government computers from Windows to Linux. Not only are they switching to Linux, but they are dropping…
Steph at TechnoBiblio wrote about an interesting observation at a recent panel discussion she attended: The final panelist came forth with a statement that seemed to take the audience by…
So many great library related things to listen to online! Libraries of the Future From WBEZ (soon to be my public radio station -- woo hoo!) a fabulous discussion about…
TangognaT turned me on to Cheap Eats at the Semantic Web Café from Burningbird. It's mega meta-post on folksonomies and the Semantic Web. Technorati tags, controlled vocabulary versus folksonomies, the…
I've been reading a lot of great articles and posts about the viability of virtual reference and how we can make it better for our patrons. The Library Journal article,…
Michael McGrorty is an ALA Councilor and a man of conscience. He is one of the few people who has made more than a mention about the Salinas libraries and…
Curious about what a library web manager does in an average day? Dave King offers us a glimpse into his work at the Kansas City Public Library: Checked email, bloglines,…
During one of my interviews this week, I asked the interviewers what some of their biggest challenges were at their library. One of the challenges they mentioned was keeping all…
In light of IBM's offer to allow use of 500 of their software patents for open source applications, Sun is now freely offering 1600 of its own patents for open…
We all know what networking is, but as an MLS student or a new librarian with few connections, it is difficult to know where to begin. It can be particularly…
People have been up in arms about the news that the Philadelphia Free Library system is running 20 of its 49 libraries without professional librarians. I think it's awful too,…
I'm back from Chicago with two more interviews under my belt. It's lovely to see that Illinois really seems to value their libraries -- or at the very least, the…
There are a few bloggers who have spent a lot of time questioning the library shortage due to their own experiences in library school and on the job hunt. Dorothea…
From the PLA Blog, I learned that the ALA is planning to launch a recruitment website to attract more future librarians to the profession. I’ve written a whole bunch about…