Behavior vs. belief and changing cultureassessment, free the information!, Inspiring Stuff, instruction, librarianship, libraries, management, social software, speaking

by Meredith Farkas on 7/23/2012 with 1 comment

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 list the litany of negative terms that came from the audience, but I will say that the most positive word used to describe assessment was …

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Setting prioritiesinstruction, librarianship

by Meredith Farkas on 5/18/2012 with 5 comments

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 own priorities, as does each individual. Ideally, these all sync up nicely, where an individual can show how their priorities mesh with library’s and university’s …

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No, we can’t do it allinstruction, librarianship

by Meredith Farkas on 5/2/2012 with 5 comments

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 stories about embedded librarian programs, librarians who were able to co-grade student papers with a disciplinary faculty member, libraries that have co-taught entire classes, etc. …

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Classic Blunder #2 – Assuming resistance is a bad thingassessment, classic blunders, instruction, librarianship, libraries, management, Work

by Meredith Farkas on 2/14/2012 with 7 comments

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. Often, this discussion was couched in ageist “us” (young, innovative librarians) vs. “them” (old, set-in-their-ways librarians) terms, but even when it wasn’t, the assumption was …

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Classic blunder #1 – Let’s just try it and see what happens!classic blunders, instruction, librarianship, management

by Meredith Farkas on 1/28/2012 with 17 comments

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 colleagues, and assumptions about our patrons. We can go into developing a new service or technology with the best of intentions and fail spectacularly because …

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“I need three peer reviewed articles” or the Freshman research paperinstruction, reference

by Meredith Farkas on 10/27/2011 with 33 comments

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 sorts of activities in different disciplines to get students thinking about audience, writing style, and the format of the articles they find. And every year, …

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Invisible goalposts, support and having a planinstruction, librarianship, libraries, reference, speaking, tenure track, Work, writing

by Meredith Farkas on 10/17/2011 with 12 comments

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 every Friday. Part of that, in my opinion, is this blog. This is how I engage with the profession, share my ideas, and have professional …

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The changing professional conversationblogging, free the information!, librarianship, our digital future, social software

by Meredith Farkas on 8/23/2011 with 14 comments

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 people (some of whom you may not normally follow) in that medium. I have also gotten great information and advice in response to “querying the …

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Faculty inertia and change in scholarly publishingfree the information!, librarianship, libraries, open access, our digital future

by Meredith Farkas on 8/1/2011 with 8 comments

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 that these are people who produce and review content for these journals. And the quote from Peter Murray-Rust’s blog stating that “[librarians] should have altered …

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Interview on mobile technologies at ALA TechSource Bloglibraries, our digital future, tech trends

by Meredith Farkas on 7/11/2011 with Comments Off on Interview on mobile technologies at ALA TechSource Blog

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 and possibilities for mobile tech in libraries. The interview is now up on the ALA TechSource blog and I’m just pleased that I didn’t say …

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Having a voicelibrarianship, libraries, management, Work

by Meredith Farkas on 6/29/2011 with 11 comments

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 manage the budget. It was a great experience to be involved in high-level discussions straight out of library school and really nice to feel in-the-loop …

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New Webinar: Delivering Innovative Mobile Services through Your Librarylibraries, our digital future, tech trends

by Meredith Farkas on 6/22/2011 with 2 comments

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 to find that very few libraries were doing anything to make their services (including their website) accessible via a mobile device. I’d written a paper …

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