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I can’t say that 2013 was a great year for me and those close to me. And a couple of the low points were the passing of two great colleagues whom I have long admired. Both in the last several weeks of the year. Steve Puglia died on December 10, 2013 after a year-long battle […]
I and others on The Digital Shift have written about the efforts of Unglue.it to “unglue” books and make them openly available. The basic model is taken from crowdsourcing funding efforts. People pledge what they can, and if enough pledges are gathered before the time runs out the book is “unglued” and made openly available […]
Jeffrey Beall has been on my radar for quite some time. Partly due to comments he has posted on blog posts of mine, but more importantly this piece that he wrote as a contribution to Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front. I’m into criticism as much as the next person, but character assassination? Really? K. R. Roberto […]
I was late to college. It’s a bit of a long story, but suffice to say I graduated with a B.A. approximately six years later than my peers. And that made all of the difference. If I had followed the normal path of graduating from high school and going directly into college, I would have […]
Librarianship is undeniably a service profession. Given that, you would think that our literature would be filled with advice on how to provide astonishing customer service. Instead, it isn’t. Perhaps this is because it can be difficult and expensive to provide surprisingly excellent customer service. But I don’t think it necessarily should be if we […]
Certainly I’ve written about this issue before, and I will keep writing about it until there are no more reasons to do so. But the reason why I’m writing about the issue of gender imbalance in library tech is because I was recently at the Internet Librarian Conference in Monterey, CA, where my esteemed professional […]
Today the Code4Lib 2014 Conference Keynote Speakers Committee announced the keynote speakers for the upcoming conference in March 2014: Valerie Aurora is the founder of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization that seeks to increase women’s participation in the free culture movement, open source technology, and open source culture. Aurora is also known within the […]
I recently spoke at the Information Today “Library Leaders Digital Strategy Summit”, a mini-conference held in conjunction with the Internet Librarian Conference in Monterey, California. I was signed up to be on a library technology panel, and to focus on what library managers needed to know about technology. In the execution it was less formal, […]
Recently, at a colleague’s urging, I tackled creating a page in Wikipedia for a significant female librarian. I chose Mary Wright Plummer, who was the second female president of the American Library Association, and who also served as President of the New York State Library Association, the New York Library Club, and the Long Island Library […]
I was 20 when I learned to guide. It was on my 21st birthday, in fact, when I was approved to run commercial whitewater rafting trips in California. So perhaps I could be forgiven for being surprised that the best river guides were small women. Being surrounded by larger and more muscled men than I, […]
