Category: academia
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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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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…
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Shared Governance Means Delegated Decision Making
Several of my colleagues sent me links to Scott Cowen’s recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Shared Governance Does Not Mean Shared Decision Making,” assuming that I would be appalled and enraged by what I read. I put off reading it because I didn’t want to be appalled and enraged, but eventually I heard…
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Hints for Job Searchers
I’ve been on many library search committees in my eight years as a librarian, and about half of them have been in the last two years. After looking at that many resumes (so. many. resumes.) and going through that many interviews (so. many. interviews.) there are a few things that happen again and again that never…
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Welcoming myself back
It’s been over two years since my last post here. I doubt that anyone really noticed, but I’ve been thinking constantly about how to find the time and motivation to start writing again. It’s not for lack of things to write about, that’s for sure. Two years ago, I was beginning work on the next…
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The Library of the Future?
During the closing keynote speech at LITA National Forum this year, Sara Houghton encouraged us to engage in a little thought exercise. She wanted us to imagine the ideal library of the future, without the limitations of what we believe is possible or what we’re currently doing. We should, she suggested, set aside some time…
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Supporting Librarians
In a re-cap of a Libraries Rebound event put on by OCLC Research Library Partnership, Jim Michalko briefly mentions that the phrase “embedded librarian” might not be a very good one. He argues that the phrase “enshrines ‘other-ness,’” reinforcing that the librarian is somehow separate. He suggest the phrase liaison librarian instead, but I’m not…
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21st-Century Academic Libraries
I just finished reading Checking Out the Future: Perspectives from the Library Community on Information Technology and 21st-Century Libraries, a policy brief from the ALA Office for Information Technology Policy. Yeah, I’m a little late to the game on this one, seeing as it was published over a year ago. There’s not a whole lot…