Posted inlibrarianship libraries management
Managing the “whole person”
I've been wanting to write about managing people for a long time. This post has been marinating in my head for years and a few things managed to knock it…
Posted ininstruction librarianship management
Our new model for Freshman instruction and how it went
One year ago, I became our General Education Instruction Coordinator, which meant that I was in charge of our instruction to Freshman Inquiry and Sophomore Inquiry (our first and second…
Posted ininstruction librarianship libraries management MPOW our digital future reference tech trends Work
Library DIY: Unmediated point-of-need support
I recently realized that while I write about a lot of things, I do not often write about the work I'm doing at Portland State and through the Oregon Library…
DIY vs. Startup, or false dichotomies and labels
ACRL was a terrific conference experience for me. Not only did I get to see a lot of good friends and have a lot of deep conversations with other instruction…
Shared vision, transparency, and the high performing organization
As I've mentioned before, Lisa Hinchliffe and I presented on and authored a paper for the Library Assessment Conference in October. The spoke about applying the High Performance Programming Model…
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…
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 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…
Posted inlibrarianship libraries management Work
Having a voice
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…
Posted inabout me assessment instruction management Work
Portlandia
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…
Posted incareer instruction librarianship libraries management Vermont Work
My new job (or why all of my Oregon Trail gaming as a child might finally come in handy)
I'm one of those people who has a hard time waiting for people's birthday to give them presents. Whenever I try to surprise my husband with something, I always end…
Posted inlibrarianship management Work
On devil’s advocates and sausage-making
Karen Schneider published an interesting post yesterday under the pithy title The Devil Needs No Advocate. Other than the title, it's a post that I mostly agree with and it…
Posted ininstruction librarianship libraries management Work
Management, upward mobility and sticking
I was really excited when I saw the title of In the Library With the Lead Pipe's post "Rising through the Ranks: On Upward Mobility in Librarianship" from last month.…
Posted inALA instruction management Work
Immersion reflections
Wow, what can I say about Immersion? First of all, you have to be there to really understand what a profound experience it is. My in-laws were visiting when I…
Numbers vs. meaning
Forgive this less-than-well-thought-out post. I've been thinking a lot about assessment lately and the librarianly love of numbers in assessment, and I'm a troubled by the way that some academic…
Computers in Libraries Recap: Day 3
I took an absolutely obscene amount of notes from Ken Haycock’s keynote, because it was just one pearl of wisdom after another (I’m only including some choice bits here). I’ve…
Posted inlibraries management
Do we need library ombudsmen?
I recently had a not-so-fun experience with our local hospital which reminded me of how important it is to ensure one's front-line staff are empowered to question things. During our…
Posted inmanagement
Turn that org chart upside-down!
A while back, I read an excerpt from Aaron Swartz's blog post about management in the post Upside Down Org Chart: Better Way to Support Employees? by Stewart Mader (his…
