Or something like that. (It’s a possible mis-quote of my department head. He was trying to make me feel better with this statement, and it was surprisingly effective.) This is the story of Librarians Build Communities (LBC) in Alaska. To jog your memory: LBC is an advocacy program, where librarians…
“STEM” is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. We have a shortage of STEM majors of any gender in the US right now, but the shortage of women in STEM is particularly damaging. Although librarianship isn’t really a STEM field (at least the way most people practice it), I come to…
I’ve been writing a lot of serious business kinds of posts lately (and I have another queued up), so let’s take a bit of a break, shall we? I just spent several hours playing a tabletop roleplaying game called Fiasco with some friends. If you’re not familiar with tabletop roleplaying…
While I’m not the first to tackle librarianship and identity, by a [very very] long shot, it’s on my mind right now. Earlier this week I was told to train a new part-time reference librarian (<grumpy>with not a lot of warning</grumpy>). Training someone to do reference in this library is…
There’s been a ton of discussion, all over the place, about ALA Council and ALA voting turnout and the membership feeling invested in their representatives. I’d kind of like to approach this from a different angle, though. Rather than talking about the size of Council, maybe we should talk about…
Anyone I talked to at ALA Midwinter (and probably anyone who reads my social media accounts closely—which I suspect is no one :)) has caught on that I’m thinking about next steps in my career. I’ve passed the magical “three years of experience,” after which many more jobs seem to…
Questions 3 and 4 didn’t require tons of discussion, so I didn’t end up blogging them. You can see all of our answers on the ALA Think Tank Caucus for Council Facebook Page. Question #5: What are 3 reasons people should vote for you? 1) I’m accessible – I’m easy…
