Posted inlibrarianship Work
Getting out of your own story
When I was a psychotherapist, I was drawn to narrative therapy and cognitive therapy in my own work with clients. Both support the idea that the way people view and…
Living our values
I have wanted to write about so many things that have come across my desktop lately, but work and getting ready for a major trip to New Zealand with my…
Posted inassessment instruction management
The devil you know in first-year instruction
It's pretty clear from the comments on my recent posts that many of us have a sense that the sort of information literacy instruction we're providing is not having the…
Posted inassessment free the information! Inspiring Stuff instruction librarianship libraries management social software speaking
Behavior vs. belief and changing culture
At LOEX of the West this summer (a fantastic conference, btw), Joan Kaplowitz did a session where she started by asking attendees what words they associate with assessment. I won't…
Posted ininstruction librarianship libraries
Broad vs. deep in information literacy instruction
When I was at Norwich, my focus was often on increasing our instruction stats. My Director wanted to see us doing more instruction and being in at least two classes…
Posted ininstruction librarianship
Setting priorities
In academic libraries, there are usually so many levels of priorities. There are the priorities of the university. There are the priorities of the library. Each unit probably has its…
Posted ininstruction librarianship
No, we can’t do it all
So many of us struggle with determining priorities in teaching. Few of us have a workload that would allow us to do everything we would like to do. We hear…
Up to my neck in… well, everything.
You know you're a real blogger when, no matter how absurdly busy the rest of your life is, the thing you can't do that you miss the most is blogging.…
Classic Blunder #2 – Assuming resistance is a bad thing
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.…
Classic blunder #1 – Let’s just try it and see what happens!
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…
Posted inabout me career librarianship tenure track Work
The elusive dream of work-life balance
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…
Posted inabout me research tenure track writing
Lifting the veil on my “system”
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…
Posted ininstruction reference
“I need three peer reviewed articles” or the Freshman research paper
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…
Invisible goalposts, support and having a plan
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…
Posted ininstruction librarianship management
Becoming Zen in the face of criticism
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…
The changing professional conversation
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…
Posted inlibrarianship libraries
Be the change you want to see
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…
Faculty inertia and change in scholarly publishing
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…
Posted inlibrarydayinthelife
Library Day in the Life – Monday
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…
Tips for being a great blogger (and good person)
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…
