Some great opportunities have popped up at the St. Joseph County Public Library in South Bend, Indiana. If it wasn’t enough that Michael used to work there, these listings show great potential for some digitally minded, sense-of-humor carrying and industrious librarians. 🙂 Check them out below… Branch Manager, Western Branch (Full-time) Education/Experience: ALA/MLIS degree Pay Range: $1,595.20-$2,392.80, biweekly Description: Under the direct supervision of the Coordinator of Branch Services, the Branch Manager will, amongst other things, manage employees and volunteers for Branch Services, hire, train, and enforce library policies, resolve difficulties, recommend changes to employment status, establish performance standards and evaluate employee performance. Branch Manager […]
Categories Library Jobs & Careers
285 posts
You gotta see me change See me change, Yeah I’m leavin’ town On a midnight train, Gotta see me change Change, change, change, Change, change, change Change, change, change, Change, change, change Woa, change, change, change ~ “The Changeling” by The Doors (Rocking out to The Doors while reading this is encouraged) Change is supposed to be temporary. We know change as that transitional, unsettling state between more reassuring times. In our imagination, and as it plays out in life, change happens but then things stabilize. Or at least that’s how it used to be. As the foundational readings underscore, […]
Check out the newest infographic from Project Information Literacy’s Lifelong Learning Study that is entitled, “What happens after college?” The infographic features preliminary findings from the 2014 survey and a sample of recent grads (n=1,651) from 10 US colleges and universities. Click to view the full size image.
I have been keeping tabs on the state of journalism over the last decade. I do this because it is part of my job as someone who helps build information literacy skills in students, but I also do this because the disruptive forces ripping apart journalism are related to forces impacting libraries. Journalism is at the epicenter of the earthquake, and we’re a bit more removed (so far at least). As media companies implode, merge, vanish, and reappear in new forms, I think it would do libraries well to sit up and take some notes. One of these opportunities caught […]
In 2013, ALA Annual was in Chicago, and all of librarianship celebrated the greatness of the Chicago Blackhawks. It was a special time, and it was at this conference where I attended LITA’s Top Tech Trends panel. This panel was made up of smart folks all of whom I greatly respect (Gary Price, Aimee Fifarek, Sarah Houghton, Clifford Lynch, Char Booth and Brewster Kahle moderated by Loran Dempsey). The conversation covered many topics that have faded in my memory, but there was a part of it that has remained. Several panelists held up the benefits of free content and the […]
When people ask me why I became a librarian, I offer them a two-part story. First, it’s so I could get married to my wife Haley. Her mom (who is an amazing librarian doing great things) told me that I would make a great librarian. Being that I really wanted to get married to her daughter, I took her recommendation and here I am today. The second part of the story was simply because of the fact that being a librarian allowed me to combine everything that I wanted in my life into a career: the opportunity to do really awesome […]
And my last column of 2014 – for got to post! http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2014/11/opinion/michael-stephens/its-about-time-office-hours/ Have you said this in a meeting or a discussion with a colleague? Has this rolled off the tongue when confronted with an unexpected change, a new technology, or another initiative? Many of us are stretched to our limits. I applaud the folks I meet who have absorbed more and more duties as staffing patterns have changed. Just recently, at a meeting of the Council of State Library Agencies in the Northeast in Cape May, NJ, I dined with librarians who were wearing many hats in their evolving […]
My new column is up at Library Journal: http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2015/01/opinion/michael-stephens/actions-and-answers-office-hours/ The attitudes or reflective action, highlighted in an article by Grant and Zeichner (2001), includes open-mindedness, responsibility, and wholeheartedness. All are important and resonate deeply with me and my philosophy of what librarianship should be about. Approaching something with a sense of wholeheartedness means we are all in all the time, not just when it’s convenient. It means bucking the status quo to do the right thing at the right moment. It means owning our actions as professionals. I am most excited about this evolution of who we are and what we do […]
New column! http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2014/10/opinion/michael-stephens/always-doesnt-live-here-anymore-office-hours/ That said, I must comment on some threads of conversation I had at the American Library Association (ALA) annual conference in Las Vegas. In 2006, I wrote a post at Tame the Web (TTW) entitled “Five Phrases I Hope I Never Hear in Libraries Again.” It got a lot of traction back then, during the heyday of LIS blogging, and I used a slide of the phrases for many years in presentations. One of the phrases was: We’ve always done it this way. Back then I wrote, “I think it’s time to red flag any utterance of that […]
It seems like I’ve been here forever, but as of this month I’ve been at the Chattanooga Public Library for 1 year, 4 months. In that time, we’ve accomplished a lot of great things for the Chattanooga community. At the same time, I haven’t been able to share as much because….well, things just got really busy in a good way! So this post is my Chattanooga catch up post….a way to share all of the positive things that have been happening around Chattanooga over the past few months. Management One of the big new things in my world is library […]