Riot Librarian

Category: education

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • LITA National Forum

    Last week I attended the LITA National Forum in Columbus, Ohio. This was by far one of the best conferences I’ve attended. It reminded me of the regional library conferences in the Northwest area that I loved so much: small scale, and very practical. I love the smaller setting of events like this, because you…

  • 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…

  • Standards for Social Reading

    On Wednesday, I had the privilege of attending a NISO working meeting on creating a standard for Open Ebook Annotations. The meeting was held the day before the Books in Browsers conference, and was the third such working meeting, after meetings held in New York and Frankfurt. The purpose was to brainstorm around what the…

  • My long and winding road to the library

    I’m guest blogging over at The Desk Set this month, and I’m pretty excited to have the chance to write about my work. My first post is up this morning, in which I recount the long and winding professional path that brought me eventually to the library. Throughout the rest of September, I’ll be talking…

  • Personal Librarians

    I have been toying with the idea of assigning college students a personal librarian for a few months now. And then I read that Yale already does this. I think this is a terrific idea and I’m happy to find that it wasn’t impossible to implement at all. This is an idea well worth sharing.

  • Institutional Repositories and Gardening

    I love it when my varied interests collide, as they just did when I found these great For the Gardener papers in the University of California’s institutional repository, eScholarship. These papers were created by the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz, my alma mater. They produce a ton of great…

  • Innovative Education

    When funding for education is being cut mercilessly and learning seems to be more about testing than anything else, it’s great to read about a school that’s doing something unique, and achieving real results. High Tech High is a charter school system in San Diego, and a recent article in Voice of San Diego highlights…

  • Nerd videos

    Josh Porter at Bokardo pointed out a great collection of videos released by Peachpit on such fascinating topics as search engine optimization, social networking, and web standards by big names in the field (at least, I assume they’re big names. Being new to all this, I’m not so sure). Interesting stuff, if you’re into that…