ACRL was ridiculously amazing this year. I feel energized, affirmed, and hopeful (and completely exhausted and sick since it ended). The programming was so high-quality and relevant that, in most cases, I had at least four options in every time slot on my planner that I wanted to attend. Luckily, ACRL records all the sessions …

When my brain was completely full on Thursday at the ACRL Conference, Jad Abumrad’s keynote felt like a spa for my brain. For those who don’t know, he is the co-host of Radiolab, a very cool and innovative show on NPR, and the recipient of one of those fancy schmancy MacArthur genius grants. Good call …

So, I missed writing this for Open Access Week, or Fair Use Week, or Open Education Week, but I think these are topics that we should be focusing on every day of our professional lives; not just 3 weeks of the year. Imagine for a moment that you’re doing an ego search (not that I would ever do …

I’m sure most of you have already heard that the ACRL Board has decided to adopt the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. What I think is more interesting is that they deferred action on the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, choosing instead to take a wait-and-see approach. I think this is a …

So I probably didn’t make a lot of friends at Springshare with my blog post about LibGuides this morning (if you haven’t already, take a look at the update I made to my original post). And I do apologize for lumping them in with EBSCO, because it appears that they have not taken away something …

Update: I’ve been in touch with a Springshare representative who tells me that things like the contextually aware D2L widget from Portland State University will work in LibGuides 2.0 and apparently, the responses we’d received from support were based on hypotheticals (though we’d explicitly sent the link to PSU’s code in our emails to support). …

Teaching is such a solitary thing. Sure, you’re up in front of a bunch of students, and maybe an instructor if you’re doing course-integrated instruction, but the act still feels solitary. We try to make it less so by seeking feedback from instructors and doing assessment, but we rarely get feedback from people who really …

Growing up, I was a voracious reader. What a surprise, right? Gee, a librarian who likes to read. But something happened to me between college and grad school where I lost that zeal to lose myself in a great book. That’s not to suggest that I didn’t read, but I didn’t read much for pleasure. I …

It has been exactly 10 years today since I started Information Wants to be Free. My life has changed in so many ways since then. I’m not sure I really had a vision of where I’d be at 37, but I don’t think it looked quite like this (I certainly never guessed I’d be living on the West …

I know it’s been a while since I last posted. I’ve almost written a few posts on the vitriol I’ve been seeing from librarians on social media over the past couple of months, but in the end, I decided it was better not to. All I’ll say is that I expect a lot more tolerance, charitable …

Update: Lisa Rabey and nina de jesus have issued a retraction and apology regarding their claims about Joe Murphy. I don’t take back or regret anything I said about my personal interaction with Joe, but I was horrified by the way he was tarred and feathered — by people who had no first-hand knowledge of …

“What do I feel deeply inspired by?” and “What am I particularly talented at?” and “What meets a significant need in the world?” ― Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less So I’m reading this book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less and it’s not really that great a book (in fact, I nearly shut the book after …

Just gave a fun whirlwind instructional technology talk and I wanted to provide the slides and links below for the attendees (and anyone else who’s interested). Slides: Links: Tools for Point of Need and/or Mobile Instruction Library DIY ARIS QR Codes QR Codes Video Demo QR Code Generators Kaywa QR Stuff QR Code Readers Kaywa Quickmark …

I wanted to write about the Library Assessment Conference as soon as I returned, but unfortunately, life got in the way. I got barely a week and a half before I was set to leave my job and, not surprisingly, there was a lot of wrapping up of projects and getting things to a good …

Way back in 2005, I wrote a post about tenure for librarians in which I argued against it. Since then, I’ve spent six years as a librarian with faculty rank and no tenure and three years as a librarian on the tenure track, and I can say that my feelings against tenure status for librarians has …

Lisa Hinchliffe and I are currently analyzing data from a survey looking at factors that facilitate the creation of an assessment culture in community college libraries (it’s a sister study to the one we did with Amy Harris Houk on four-year and above schools reported on in C&RL). We’ll be presenting the results at the Library …

We’ve all suspected it. We’ve all talked about it. Some have even written and spoken at conferences about it. But now we have hard evidence that there is incredible variation in terms of the amounts libraries are paying for the same content and that the variation doesn’t come close to relating to FTE or the …

I’ve been thinking a lot about how people choose to define themselves and what happens when things in their world challenge that definition. This is probably because I spent the weekend with someone close to me who pretty much defines himself by his work, and also read a blog post by a friend with a …

I was pleased to see that the latest Ithaka S+R U.S. Library Survey looked at how libraries are conducting assessment and how useful their results have been. Even better, they found that “those respondents whose libraries have taken on evidence gathering and other forms of assessment are more likely to be confident in their strategy …

This semester, I’m teaching I new course I developed for San Jose State’s MLIS program entitled “Embedded Librarians/Embedded Libraries: Embedding the Library into the Fabric of Higher Education.” It’s been a pleasure so far because the students are so ridiculously smart, insightful, and engaged that I can’t help but be excited about the future of …