As a student in Dr. Michael Stephen’s Hyperlinked Libraries course at San Jose State University, Beth Harper wrote six reflection blog assignment posts over the course of the semester. Each of those posts has been published on Tame the Web and can each be read here: Where we live – Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 * * * * * Beth Harper is a public services paralibrarian living in historic central Denver and working in the western foothills under the shadow of the Front Range, and an MLIS student at San Jose […]
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Practice Toodling around in the Denver Art Museum between lunch and work yesterday (I work 4-8pm on Thursdays) I realized – right now, I have time. To slow down, to pay attention, to explore. I always feel under such tremendous pressure to use my time well, and right now, this is using my time well – getting to know my new city, getting rested, spending my time on the bus and train getting caught up on all the reading I haven’t done in the last few years. Thinking and processing. Refilling the well. This is important. I’ll cycle back around to the part […]
The pulse and the flow So what do people want from us? They want help doing things, rather than finding things. – Brian Kenney, “Where Reference Fits in the Modern Library” Infinite learning. Infinite learning. This is actually a really hard topic for me to write about, because it’s so personal, so close to my heart. I don’t know where to start. It’s like talking about breathing. Infinite learning is more than lifelong learning. Lifelong learning is where the mainstream core of the profession is now: “….All purposeful learning activity, whether formal or informal, undertaken on an ongoing basis with the […]
Grounded, but with one eye on the horizon “When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings they start… You start to reflect, you start to rethink your assumptions, you start to reimagine what is possible…” And it is not just knowledge that is improved by pausing. So too, is the ability to build trust, “to form deeper and better connections, not just fast ones, with other human beings.” – Thomas Friedman (2017, pp 3-4), quoting Dov Seidman I just finished reading two thought-provoking books, made all […]
To outsiders it may appear that I have risen very quickly to my current role as an administrative director in my academic library, but for me it has seemed a much slower process filled with many failures and personal lessons. Some of these failures were visible to others, but many were only internally known. In reading TTW Contributor Justin Hoenke’s Tales From the Library Trenches Part 4: Within You Without You article in the September 2017 issue of Information Today, I felt an instant connection to him, although I’ve never personally met Justin. So much of this article resonates with […]
Boundaries, Connections, and Transformation [B]oth ends act as anchors and as targets… – from the Wikipedia definition for hyperlink I didn’t set out in this class to keep coming back to a single a cohesive and overarching metaphor in my reflection posts about the deeply personal emotional experience of librarianship within the communities we traverse and occupy; but, always, the themes emerge in the course of the writing. I’m thinking this week about hyperlinked environments, and hyperlinks and environments and where those two concepts intersect and inform each other, which leads to information ecology, which leads to social geography, to GIS and big data in community advocacy, to the […]
How do the ways your brain processes information contribute to the spread of fake news? How can we compensate for the short cuts we often take in processing information? What are the implications for librarians? These are a few of the questions psychologist Laura Lauzen-Collins helps us consider in my interview with her on the Circulating Ideas podcast. This interview is available at: Circulating Ideas episode 116: Laura Lauzen-Collins. This interview is part of a series I am doing on fake news & information literacy. My previous interviews can be found here: Circulating Ideas episode 113: Bill Badke (Fake News […]
Love makes a community When I lived in Seattle right after library school I was an AmeriCorps volunteer at Seattle Public Library and helped start the Wired for Learning program which taught tech skills to folks who needed them. In Seattle that was mostly low income folks, new immigrants and people with cognitive or physical disabilities. My feeling was that I’d do that for a few years, then everyone would have learned the stuff and then we could move on to more sophisticated topics […] Then I moved to the east coast which was a bit behind the west coast and […]
About a week after I got the offer for my current job, and ten days or so before I started, I went to my future workplace and walked in the front door. I did not tell anyone who I was or why I was there. I just puttered around, getting a sense of the place and how it felt to be a patron there, how intuitive it was, how welcoming. Where people clustered, and for what purposes. What self-services were available, and how navigational information was arranged, and how readily staff made themselves visible and available to help. What I saw […]
As libraries anticipate and explore new possibilities for the future, there are three areas that should be focused on for a successful transition; people, places, and objects. Libraries have always desired to reach out to their users, but in the past this involved library buildings that had to be visited in person which were filled with row after row of books and little space left for anything other than reading. With advances in technology libraries have the opportunity to meet user needs in interesting and varied ways. People Technology has and will continue to transform people’s lives. Libraries have a […]