shinylib

I love the way I feel after a conference, like I have all of this brainfire motivating me and synapses pinging all over the place. This is a sharp contrast to how I feel at the end of the quarter, which is a lot more accurately described as brainfried. The challenge is to keep all [...]

Just a quick note from Anaheim to say that our ACRL 101 program went off without a hitch. I am so pleased and proud of the work of all of the Emerging Leaders in my group. Planning a national conference program was a totally new thing to me but I think it’s a skill set [...]

These guys win my award for best presentation slides of the entire conference, no contest. Sadly I can’t give them the same award for polished verbal presentation, but you can’t winnem all, eh? I wasn’t really sure whether the schtick about forgetting who was presenting which slides was authentic disorganization or a poorly executed attempt [...]

DL Byron is nothing if not a nut. He’s the geek behindTextura Design,and the co-author of Publish & Prosper: Blogging for Your Business. He runs the srs bike culture blog, Bike Hugger and does cool stuff like host Twitter giveaways at conferences. To be clear, I like any dude who starts a presentation by encouraging [...]

Blogging for a living: Taking your skills to the next level
Jim Turner, founder of Bloggers for Hire and creator of the Genuine Blog (a “Daddy blog”) spoke about the challenges and triumphs of blogging professionally. He suggests that there are significant differences between those seeking to blog part-time and those looking for full-time professional blog-writing [...]

Webvisions is officially done and over with. It was an awesome time. I think I will have quite a lot to say, but I’m going to attempt to break things up into smaller, segmented posts. We’ll see how that goes—my conference writeups are always sorely lacking and out-of-date.
From my standpoint as a librarian, Webvisions was [...]

It’s interesting that recently I was reading some David Lee King archives about 2.0 sounding job titles. Although my job title hasn’t really changed (I still don’t know what it officially is, I just go with Faculty Librarian) it has opened to incorporate some other ideas. I am now some kind of Web Reference Librarian, [...]

I have beta sickness, always have. I just feel this irritating compulsion to get involved in the ground floor of everything. Consequently I usually end up bored and leaving by the time other folks are showing up. Ah well, that’s a different issue altogether.
Anyway, if you also suffer from beta sickness you might want to [...]

I just taught a really awesome WR 121 class. There were no sleeping students; the obviously mentally elsewhere managed to keep the IMing to a minimum; and students were engaged and asked really great questions. That generally is enough praise for me—I managed to keep your attention. So when a student came to me at [...]

I try to keep shinylib pretty attuned to the professional, much the same as I try to keep my work environment, but sometimes your life spills over into…well, your life.
It’s times like these that allow you to take stock of your colleagues (and yourself). There’s a rough patch in the shiny world right now, nothing [...]