My dad (Jody Gorran) is a crazy entrepreneur. He has had more businesses (and business ideas) since I was born than years that I’ve been alive. From a hair salon, to treasure hunting, to water beds and gel matresses, to solar panels, to a housing development, to home security kits, to online scrapbooks and many, …
Let me preface this by saying that when I first started my job over a year ago, I was a big fan of EBSCO. Students found their interface easy to use, they were always improving their interface and offerings, and our local Rep was really responsive to our e-mails and questions. But something has changed. …
Library Journal is looking for nominations for their 2007 Movers and Shakers issue. They have an online nomination form that makes it wicked easy to nominate someone whom you think is an emerging leader in the profession. I was really touched to have been chosen last year (still not quite sure who nominated me and …
I’m so pleased and excited to see how Five Weeks to a Social Library is shaping up! We have a terrific group of presenters involved in the course who will help to teach participants all about social software and how to successfully implement social technologies in their library. You can see a very preliminary preliminary …
I had really wanted to go to Library Camp East since some of my favorite people would be there as well as people I have been dying to meet for ages. It also sounded like a great opportunity to share ideas with other folks who are passionate about innovation and libraries. However, in early September, …
Friday was the deadline for proposals from content creators for Five Weeks to a Social Library. At the beginning of the week, some of the planning committee was beginning to sweat because we only had 8 proposals total. After having planned HigherEd BlogCon, I knew that most would come in over that last week (and …
I got my library a trial of RefWorks this summer (with the way our distance learners do school work — often at home and work — it makes much more sense for us to make a Web-based citation manager available to them), but it didn’t really meet with an enthusiastic response by the students and …
I’m starting to get excited! Internet Librarian is coming in one month!!! Ok, maybe I’m a little bit more excited about the week before that which I will be spending in the Wine Country with Adam. But I am really excited to see my librarian friends, meet some people I’ve been dying to meet, go …
Friday is the deadline to submit a proposal to provide content for the Five Weeks to a Social Library course. While we have gotten a lot of proposals on certain topics, there are others on which we have not gotten any (or have gotten very few). If you have experience using or know a lot …
I know it’s been a while since I posted anything here. It’s been a tough few weeks. For the past week, I’ve been in Florida at my Abuelo’s bedside (Abuelo is Spanish for grandfather). After a long and incredibly painful battle with Alzheimers, Abuelo was moved to a Hospice last week. He was suffering from …
Today, I got an e-mail from a reader of this blog. She told me that she reads my blog through Bloglines and that every time she clicks on a link, she gets pop-ups for adult entertainment. Very weird, huh? So I went and looked at the feeds (there are like 6 or 7!) available for …
Today is Blog Day, ostensibly because the date sort of looks like the word blog (3108) if you squint or perhaps are a really creative-minded person. It’s a day where lots of bloggers will will highlight five blogs that they think we should know about. I was thinking of highlighting some of the new blogs …
This is why. You’ve got to check out the actual ad; it had me half laughing half furious. I don’t write much about politics on this blog, but I have to admit that this has gotten me kind of riled up. Vermont just isn’t the sort of place where people have really vile, manipulative, negative …
There’s been a whole lot of hubbub about those crazy articles on Forbes.com about wives being compared to whores and the appeal to Forbes’ male readers to not marry a career woman. Honestly, how they allowed this insecure misogynist to publish this garbage, much less to become an editor at their magazine, is beyond me. …
Remember way back when I was talking about wanting to do some sort of a free online educational extravaganza? Well, the wheels have been turning behind the scenes, but I didn’t want to announce anything until I had something concrete. This summer, I asked five other amazing women to partner with me in creating Five …
While we’re on the subject of wikis, here are some wiki-related links I’ve found recently that I thought you might want to know about: LIS753wiki – Even though they got my name wrong (grrrr…) [update: thanks for fixing it, Laura], the students who developed this class project in Michael Stephens’ GSLIS class created a very …
Karen Coombs beat me to the punch with an excellent post on a Web4Lib comment I had noticed recently as well: “I am repeatedly impressed by how often, when librarians consider wikis, their first thought seems to be of access control. The idea of “just anybody being able to edit our Web pages” seems somehow …
I must apologize for not writing much lately. I really believed that when I finished my book I would have lots and lots of spare time, but then the speaking engagements came rolling in and the professors in the graduate programs at Norwich suddenly “got religion” regarding information literacy. All good things, but they take …
I got an interesting question from a reader that I really wanted to open up to the community on my blog rather than pretending that I’m knowledgeable enough to answer this question by myself: I have been reading your blog and since you have expertise with wikis I am seeking your advice. I am applying …
Brion Vibber is the CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation. OMG, there is a serious lack of women in this room! This talk was about improvements in the pipeline for MediaWiki, so I didn’t want to miss it since most of my wikis are MediaWiki wikis. User accounts: The problem is that there are too many …