I am starting a new project, and I am super excited about it! So excited, in fact, that I’m writing all about it in my blog before I’ve even gone anywhere with it. :) There’s an organization in Anchorage that serves as a free veterinarian for wild birds. Part of…
(Perhaps someone with more humanities background will tell me whether this title is right, or whether I should have gone with “empathic,” instead. On the other hand, I read too much Anne McCaffrey at too young an age to use the word “empathic,” when another option is available.) I have…
I talked (for what seems like the millionth time, though it’s not) about Librarians Build Communities at the Pacific Northwest Library Association conference, yesterday. This is what I gave as the description of the talk: Librarians have a set of very useful skills, which could benefit our local communities enormously.…
Because I’m working on my “fourth year”* tenure and retention** file, I’ve been reflecting, lately, on the progress I’ve made while here. And, in particular—unsurprisingly—I wanted to see what kinds of changes the website has undergone. I didn’t do a great job of grabbing screen captures, early on, so this…
I’ve been very fortunate, in my nearly three years as a librarian, to have had the opportunity to participate in two library leadership programs: PNLA Leads and ALA Emerging Leaders. The programs have different methodologies and different goals, so, unsurprisingly, my experiences and takeaways were very different. I should acknowledge,…
(Numbering the day is no promise to write one of these every evening.) I’m on an iPad, so this will run brief (and choppy) for a post in a CoralBlog. It isn’t so bad to type on, but it’s slow. This was the first day of my first conference in…
So, remember when I was all “Bleh, I hate that we Doodle all the time at work”? Funny story: I am not the only person at my workplace who feels that way. A group of us ended up chatting about just that subject, last week (and I promise I wasn’t…
Scheduling is generally acknowledged to be a messy process. It is what we developer/geek types refer to as a “Hard Problem.” (I’m pretty sure it’s actually an “np hard problem,” but why risk overstating it?) But I find myself really irritated by the current “solution” that I and most of…
I don’t usually use my blog for “notes to myself,” at least not much, but, not knowing when next year’s Snapshot Day is going to be, I can’t very well make myself a calendar reminder, the way I do for National Gaming Day @ Your Library or, now, National Poetry…
You’ve heard that goals need to be “SMART,” right? It’s a fairly common model for making goals, you know, not pointless. And I have, over the past few years, improved at making goals “Specific,” “Measurable,” “Relevant,” and “Time-bound.” The first two, especially, I do well—I think it’s the engineering training…