The revolution will be organized.
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Who We Are
If I said I was feeling defeated last week, that feeling has multiplied by 1,000 after the results of this week’s election. US voters elected Trump to another four years in office, an action which, while not surprising, still leaves me reeling. there are so many thoughts connected to this election that I’m trying to…
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Feeling Defeated
I’ve been struggling lately, friends. Who isn’t? My sense that we have created a broken society grows stronger every day. The problems feel so overwhelming, so systemic that they can’t be resolved. I think those of us who work in professions focused on creating a better society (which I believe librarianship very much is) are…
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Rank, Title, Position, and Power
One of higher education’s greatest weaknesses, operationally, is our continued fixation on rank and title. For all of the vaunted progressiveness of higher education, we are deeply conservative in our organizational structures and our relationship to and framing of power within our organizations. Institutions of higher ed are primarily very hierarchical, and despite structures of…
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The Cell Phone Generation
Well, today I feel like an old lady because I was in our campus coffee shop, waiting in line, and as I looked around, almost every single student I saw was just staring at their phones, even when they were sitting with someone else, and, one case, even when that other person was actively talking…
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Blog Archives
I’ve been blogging since before the word blogging existed. In the late 1990s and early 2000s I learned HTML and created a website where I regularly wrote about what was going on in my life. I found a wonderful network of other women who did the same thing and we all linked to each other’s…
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On Getting Older
I’m turning 44 this week. Most of the people I tell that to say, “Oh, you’re so young, you’re still just a baby!” But I gotta tell ya, it really snuck up on me. It seems impossible to be 44. I know it’s no big revelation or anything, but time is a weird, weird thing.…
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Starting Over
In the chaos of the last three years, my blog got very neglected. So much so that my hosting contract lapsed and all of my content was deleted. At one point, I had four different blogs, most of which were inactive, but had years worth of content, so it was a bit of a shock…
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Leadership and Listening
Over the last few years I’ve spent a good amount of time studying leadership, both formally, through classes and reading, and informally, by observing the leaders around me, both good and…less good. I think there are a lot of different ways to be a good leader, and many different kinds of people can lead well,…
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First-year students and research papers: A Manifesto
When I was an undergraduate, in the late 1990s, I wrote A LOT of papers. I was a literature and women’s studies double major, and I currently work with students who are almost all majoring in various fields in the humanities, so all of the opinions I’m about share are very deeply entrenched in a…
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Just Write
One of my goals for this year is to start blogging again, and to start writing more regularly in general. I set a target in April to write two blog posts, and here it is, with only 10 days left in the month, and all I have are the beginnings of drafts of posts. I’ve…