Free Range Librarian

Trying to reach me? Email or AIM me at kgs@freerangelibrarian.com. I’m also on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Flickr.

Free Range Librarian comprises the public, oft-daily mumblings and grumblings of one K.G. Schneider, a writer and librarian who has published over 100 articles and 2 books.

Her less technical writing includes essays, portraits, travelogues, video reviews, and a historically dubious account of Washington crossing the Delaware. She has been published in Gastronomica, White Crane, Nerve, Linux.com, IT Managers Journal, American Libraries, Library Journal, The Bottom Line, the dear departed Wilson Library Bulletin, a few other places she can’t remember, and has articles forthcoming elsewhere, but chooses not to jinx the process by naming the lucky publications.

Schneider’s technology writing has been recognized in a variety of venues for being both lively and learned (”venues” in this case meaning “homes of close friends or relatives”). From 2005 through 2007 she wrote at ALA Techsource, where readers showered her with compliments such as “Stop using the work ’suck’, you tramp!” and “My cataloger can beat up your metadata specialist!” From 1995 to 2001, as the Internet Librarian columnist for American Libraries (circulation 66,000), Schneider consistently ranked in magazine surveys as AL’s most popular author. In 1998, her article “The Tao of Internet Costs,” one of the first discussions within librarianship about sustainable technology funding, was selected as an article of the year for The Bottom Line, a journal of library finances. In 1998, as author of A Practical Guide to Internet Filters, Schneider provided expert testimony for Mainstream Loudoun vs. Board of Trustees, a pivotal First Amendment case about free speech on the Internet. She also co-moderates PUBLIB, a discussion list for public librarians, and enjoys goading them into their annual “Should we have Christmas trees in the library?” argument.

Schneider is also an enthusiastic speaker, presenter, and educator who in 2000 was named by the PUBLIB as one of the top ten speakers in librarianship. She bought a few votes to get there, but still! Many of these speeches were delivered on the floor of the Council of the American Library Association, a body to which she was inexplicably elected three times. She is currently taking a break from LibraryLand politics, and is rumored to be producing a major motion picture about global warming.

An Air Force veteran (1983-1991), graduate of Barnard College, University of Illinois, and University of San Francisco, and skilled treadmiller, Schneider now divides her free time somewhat unevenly between housework and watching television when she is not working on her collage of rejection letters she receives for those depressing little belles-lettres she insists on begging editors of fine journals to read.

By day, Schneider is a technocrat who gleefully perpetuates the decline of reading. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida, which requires no punchline.

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