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 remember when I was in library school, a lot of people talked about librarians who were resistant to change and would try to derail your exciting and innovative projects.…
There are a lot of popular assumptions people make in this profession that lead us to make classic blunders. These can be assumptions about the change process, assumptions about our…
I have been wanting to write a post on work-life balance for a while, especially after spending a week at ACRL Assessment Immersion with a bunch of people who are…
I am a huge fan of research log and research process reflection assignments. Because research is a means to an end (the paper) and because people are often doing it…
For the past six and a half years, I have been teaching Freshman about peer-review and how to find peer-reviewed articles through the library (or Google Scholar). I've developed all…
This summer, I was engaged with quite a few projects (several of which I was in charge of), but was able to make time to focus on scholarship just about…
It's been extremely challenging to post here regularly (though I'm getting better about it!), not because of a lack of ideas, but because of a lack of down-time. Summer came…
I have had some great discussions on Twitter. Professional discussions, discussions about parenting, conversations with friends. I've been pleasantly surprised that you can have a quality professional discussion with multiple…
Tell me if you've heard this one before. A librarian comes into a new job full of enthusiasm. He volunteers for lots of projects and is a generally good citizen…
I loved Barbara Fister’s recent post, "Breaking News: Academic Journals are Really Expensive!", about faculty who seem surprised that journals cost the library a lot. Kind of amazing to think…
I figured that since I've changed jobs from the last time I did Library Day in the Life, I'd participate this time around to give people a sense of what…
Since having my son, I have not been the best blogger in the world, but that doesn't meant that I'm not thinking about blogging. I probably have a year's worth…
In anticipation of my upcoming two-part workshop on mobile technologies for libraries, Dan Freeman of ALA TechSource interviewed me, asking me about my thoughts on the present and future challenges…
At my previous place of work, we had weekly "council meetings" which was basically all of the professional librarians meeting to discuss issues, make big decisions about the library and…
When I wrote my book Social Software in Libraries five years ago, I decided to include a chapter on mobile technologies. As I started researching the topic, I was disappointed…
I've never felt like a particularly optimistic person. When we were getting ready to move to Portland, I fully expected that we'd lose furniture on the way or that much…
Greetings from Portland, Oregon! I've been wanting to post about so many things in the past two months (especially just about everything Barbara Fister has been writing over at Library…
Roy Tennant wrote a terrific post recently about his work habits and personality the other day that got me thinking (see "Living the Just in Time Life"). My first thought…
The library world is abuzz about Harper Collins changing the terms by which libraries can license their books on Overdrive. If you haven't read about it already, here's some background…