For the last year, I’ve had an extracurricular activity that, while professionally-related, won’t ever go on my curriculum vitae, workload, or activity report: I coordinate Anchorage’s “Interlibrary Lush,” a monthly happy hour for LAM (libraries, archives, and museums) workers and friends. It’s been fun getting to know more of the…
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,…
Once again, I’m participating in the Tour de Cure, to help fund the prevention and treatment of diabetes, a disease which affects many of my friends and family members and which I believe we have the power to cure. If you would be willing to support my ride with a…
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…
The preliminaries I sometimes admit things, in my blog, that I probably shouldn’t. Case in point: I didn’t know there were actual resources for readers’ advisory! I just thought we were supposed to know these things off the tops of our heads, or cheat by going to GoodReads or LibraryThing…
The preliminaries First off, yes, I know that we’re well into Week 3 already. Er. Week 4. But that’s what “self-paced” means, right? If I finish by the end of May, it counts, and I get some sort of color certificate or something! (I didn’t sign up for the credit…
Explanation of what I’m doing, for people not taking the course: Alaska has this very cool thing, where people living in the state have access to a whole bunch of electronic resources through the “Statewide Library Electronic Doorway” (SLED) and “Digital Pipeline.” (I admit, I haven’t the foggiest idea what…
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…
Google Plus OK, I don’t know how long this will be available (and I don’t know a better way to capture it forever than to play-and-grab with screen capture—any Elluminate Live wizards out there with a better plan?), but my Google Plus talk is available here. You’ll need to fill…
I keep being asked if I have free time at the Alaska Library Association conference, coming up on February 23-26 in sunny Fairbanks, and I keep having to look up my registration. So I thought I’d share my schedule (even though I’ve learned not to post ahead of time what…