I had a dream about Rachel Singer Gordon the other night… I told her I was done with my book and she shook her head and told me to keep editing. In spite of this dream and the nagging feeling that I missed 1,000 little things while editing the book, I printed it out and …
My book is due in just over a month. This is a fact that is causing me a fair amount of anxiety. I know I’ll get it done in time, but will it be good? I don’t know. Roy Tennant, trying to be nice and give me advice a while back, told me that I …
It’s been thrilling to see the growth of online educational opportunities for librarians. From OPAL, to SirsiDynix, to HigherEd BlogCon, to WebJunction, to podcasts, screencasts and countless blogs… there’s a lot of great free online educational content out there! Learning to be a tech-savvy, user-centered 21st century librarian doesn’t need to cost money or require …
I know everyone has already written about Internet Librarian, but I took two days off for my birthday, which I ended up spending getting mauled by lambs. Yes, you heard me. Vicious dress-eating lambs. Ok, maybe they weren’t vicious, but they did try to eat my dress! I also had the good fortune to bottle …
Since posting about social networking software almost 2 weeks ago, I have been corresponding with Oceana Wilson of the Crossett Library at Bennington College. They are the library that has been soliciting feedback from students on Facebook about what materials they’d like the library to order. Oceana and I are both curious about the policies …
Doug Geiger, a reader of Information Wants to be Free whom I’ve been IM-ing with since last year, IM-ed and asked if I would post this request my blog. While I don’t usually advertise things on here, I can’t imagine having to deal with medical expenses on top of the physical and psychological pain something …
We all have a story of our life in our heads that informs who we think we are and what we think we are capable of. This story is based on experiences in our lives — successes, failures, traumas, and other people’s expectations. Often we will construct our story based only on certain experiences in …
I’m not sure why I didn’t mention this earlier (probably out of sheer embarassment – I hate my voice), but I recorded my first podcast last week. Jenny Levine and Michael Stephens asked me to do a podcast on Librarian 2.0 for their L2 Bootcamp. I must say that I was a little surprised to …
I’ve been listening and quietly taking in all of the talk about social networking software and the library’s place (if any) in that software. I’ve raised a few questions on e-mail lists about whether or not we are invading our patrons’ space by building presence in MySpace and Facebook (perhaps) and whether it is at …
This morning when I saw Karen’s post that John Iliff had passed away, my first thought was “it has to be some other John Iliff.” The John Iliff I know is too full of energy and enthusiasm to die. John Iliff and I exchanged several e-mails last week. John Iliff was just at NJLA. We …
As I was working on the book and it started getting longer and longer… and longer, it became clear to me that I was going to have to cut some topics that I’d planned to cover. My book proposal included a few things that one may not define as social software but that I thought …
Before I started my job, there were no instructional materials provided to online students on how to use the library resources (there also was no distance learning librarian to create instructional materials). Not surprisingly, there were lots of students e-mailing the library every week with access problems and research questions. Students in certain programs — …
Hey, check out Steve Lawson’s terrific presentation on HigherEd BlogCon today: Know Enough to be Dangerous: Tools for Taking Control of HTML and CSS. There is some very good information for people who want to monkey around in the CSS for their blog to change the look and layout. Nice job, Steve!
For almost a month I’ve been meaning to write about three great new blogs that came on the scene fairly recently, but the post somehow got lost in the suffle of life. Library Garden – I’m really excited to see the growth of collaborative blogs. Not that I don’t like following 155 things in Bloglines, …
Last November, I went to a meeting of Vermont colleges where we discussed doing more consortial activities. We broke up into groups to discuss different ideas and then reported to everyone at the meeting. One of the things we discussed in our group was the idea of skill-sharing. It is often the case in smaller …
In mid-May, I’m giving an hour-long talk at the Vermont Library Association’s Annual Conference about using social software in academic libraries. The majority of the population I’ll be talking to has not used any of these tools, so I’m trying to figure out what would be most valuable to talk about. I’m torn between providing …
After writing my last post, I started thinking that it really would be helpful to have a resource with information on self-promotion for new librarians. So I started one here on the Library Success Wiki. Stop by and add your knowledge to what could be a tremendous resource for new librarians. What do you wish …
I have been reading the discussions regarding “movers and shakers” and the “self-promoting elite” with great interest. See these posts (and many comments on the first two) at The Shifted Librarian, Walt at Random, Caveat Lector and The Liminal Librarian. I find it very interesting how a post about how libraries can keep the people …