It’s Christmas morning and I have some quality blogging time for the first time since returning to California late October and starting my new job. I pick up Sandy in four hours, and between now and then, I will drink hot chocolate, go for a nice walk, and write about strategic plans. I have been [...]
(Note, I am alone Christmas Eve, but Sandy joins me tomorrow–so excuse the holiday post!) Though I hate the slog of air travel per se, I do love flight, and my favorite moment is when the plane lifts above cloud level, with the sky above us and the cloud stretched out underneath in an infinite [...]
If you can make time for reading just one professional report over the holidays, please make it Project Information Literacy’s (PIL’s) latest research report, “Lessons Learned: How College Students Find Information in the Digital Age” released on Tuesday, Dec. 1 (42 pages, PDF, 3 MB). (Note that I didn’t narrow “you” to those of us [...]
So as is the case with any new job, I inherited some unfinished business. One piece of business that’s hard to ignore is that over 30,000 records have yet to be converted to the online catalog. They are in the card catalog, which for you non-library folk, means that they are essentially hidden from sight. [...]
There were some great additions to the trends, including the emphasis on mobile computing, though in running over the list, I’d add the blurring of public/private personae. But Michael Golrick honed in on the challenge of my presentation: not to point out problems, but to point out responses to those problems (avoiding the pat term, [...]
I admit that when I start reading a journal called “Information Technology and Libraries” at 3 a.m., I’m not really looking to have my mind blown. Not that ITAL hasn’t published many excellent articles, but the sheer wonkyness of even the best writing in ITAL can usually help my mind cycle back down enough to [...]
Have you taught as an adjunct? Please do take this thoughtfully-composed survey. I only found one question ambiguous: “6. Due to the low numbers of PhD faculty, have you considered full time teaching as an alternative to your career as a practitioner?” If that means have I considered working full-time as a contractor without benefits [...]
Once upon a time there was a church parishioner who kept complaining to his pastor that he wasn’t being “spiritually fed.” On and on he went at every church meeting. Nothing would help: not new sermon styles, not different music, not a change in the worship order. Finally another parishioner turned to the unhappy guy [...]
Need a funny icebreaker for your next “info literacy” workshop, class, or discussion? I laughed with recognition at PIL InfoLit Monologue #2, which is about what students say about procrastination, course-related work, and conducting research in the digital age (2:10). This two-minute video comes from Project Information Literacy (PIL), a national research study led by [...]
In the last week I have been immersed in a writing project I am thoroughly enjoying, so I’ve had just enough personal time to exercise, fiddle around with homebrewing, and do a little reading (finally almost done with The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing — which is nothing less than astonishing). But I keep meaning [...]
