Riot Librarian

The revolution will be organized.

  • Scholarly Communication and Librarians

    Convincing faculty of the benefits of publishing through open access sources, or contributing to an institutional repository, is one of the many new challenges facing academic librarians. Faculty outreach has always been a bit of a struggle, but now we’re trying to change a long-standing tradition of scholarly communication, and insert ourselves more visibly into…

  • Post-graduation, post-Boston

    It’s hard to believe that the last two years went by so fast, but yes, I’m now an official, bona fide librarian. Not only have I graduated and received my MSLIS (yes, I’m a master of science), but I got a real librarian job, to boot. I will be the new Systems/Metadata Librarian at Whitman…

  • A new librarian’s on-the-job guide

    Today is my last day of graduate school. As of May 11, I will be an official, bona fide librarian! The perfect time to read an excellent bit of advice from the blog Info Career Trends: Ask Permission Later. Rachel gives some excellent advice for new librarians, encouraging us not to be fearful in our…

  • My Tweets

    Sean came up with a way to output your Tweet stream and input it into Wordle. It’s pretty fun. I love visualizations.

  • 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…

  • Banned Books Podcast

    The podcast for the Banned Books panel we held last fall if finally up on the GSLISCast website. Ellen Giroud, Robie Harris, Penelope Johnson and Anne L. Moore, authors and librarians, spoke about their experiences with book challenges, the history of book challenges, and what you can do if you’re faced with a challenge in…

  • I don’t want to be a slow adopter

    Yesterday, in my management class, one of the campus librarians came in to talk about managing and keeping up to date with technologies in libraries. And she mentioned repeatedly that librarians “are always a few years behind the newest trends.” She mentioned this as through there is nothing to be done about, as though it’s…

  • 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…

  • Twitter for Good or for Evil?

    To those who complain that Twitter is just a growing forum for navel-gazers with nothing significant to say, I offer this post from the Columbia Journalism Review: At the TimesOPEN conference it was easy to assume that the audience of Twitterers (Tweeters?) wasn’t paying attention, but what was really going on was a broader, more…

  • Library Websites, redux

    I read a great article this morning about the future of library websites, and thought it more than worth sharing. Steven Bell writes in Inside Higher Ed that we need to re-think the purpose and role of library web portals. He points out that most scholars (and students) are no longer using library web sites…