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 …
I wanted to let everyone know that we have just open sourced the Drupal-based Library DIY infrastructure. You can find it at https://github.com/pdxlibrary/Library-DIY We have documentation on how to get it installed on a server, how to get started using the system, and how to add/organize content. Unfortunately, we do not have the staff time …
At the end of my last post was a little love letter to the “pocket of wonderful” at my work; a group of librarians I think of as my learning community. At first, when I was the Head of Instruction, these people reported to me and/or were part of my Instructional Design Team. This was …
I don’t have all the answers. There, I said it! I’m a pretty smart person who did well in school and has been relatively successful in her career, but I don’t consider myself an “expert” in anything. However, when you teach, write a column for a major magazine in your profession, or even express yourself …
I don’t really think of myself as a victim. I feel exceptionally lucky when I think of the life I’ve had so far. I grew up in an upper middle class family, got a fantastic private liberal arts college education, and am now living the American dream with a family of my own, a house, …
In September, I went to a lecture given by Allison Head of Project Information Literacy fame at a local university. During the lecture, she offered a preview of the research report that would be coming out soon on first-year students. I hadn’t realized until then that none of the other PIL research had examined this …
Over four years ago, I wrote a post about how EBSCO had shut off my institution’s links to all Harvard Business Review articles after we declined their “generous” offer to let us pay to use articles already available through a database we were paying for. At the time that we were asked about this, we …
