Here’s a story: I was at LOEX in Denver in May, 2015. I was still working at Colorado State University-Pueblo, but had just accepted a position at Auraria Library ten days earlier. During a break between sessions, I was chatting with a colleague from another library in the west, a person whom I admire tremendously, …
As I wrote in my last post, I recently moved across the country, started in a new position, and am having a great time in Pennsylvania. I got the job I wanted, I live in a cool place, and I anticipate I will be here for a long, long while. That said, I did want …
Today marks two months in my new job. I’ll publish something about my search process in the near future, but for now let me just say that while this move was a long time coming, I am thrilled to be where I am. Where I am is the suburbs north of Philadelphia, working at Penn …
My sense of time has been obliterated. In the BeforeTimes, I would have a pretty good sense of how long things took. I would often know the time without having to check a clock. I used weekly and monthly timelines to help strategize at work, and would say things like “let’s wait until after week …
I tried to keep my last post short because I knew that I needed just to get something out there to help break the writer’s block. But I’m also thinking a lot more about what I write, why I write, and how I share it. Do I really want to keep posting here? Why? Like …
This marks my first post in over two years. It’s been wild to see how much the pandemic has consumed, and continues to consume, so much of my energy and focus. It’s been harder to read, harder to write, harder to engage. During a work meeting a couple of months ago, a group of us …
As I mentioned at the end of my last post, eighteen months ago I moved into a new role as the head of my library’s instruction department, and now I directly supervise nine faculty librarians. I spend markedly less time talking with students and much more time in meetings, and am still figuring out a …
My university is cutting its budget. This fall we didn’t meet enrollment goals (off by 344 students) and are consequently making reductions across departments. I’ve attended several meetings on campus to hear from administrators, and while the situation is far from dire, I learned a couple of weeks ago that the specific dollar amount reductions …
A few days ago I published a blog post about faculty reactions to some of the decisions that library workers are making. You don’t necessarily have to read that to understand this, but it might give some more context. The library at my previous institution was built in the late 1960s, during a higher education …
Several years ago–I’m not sure exactly when–I came up with a joke to describe university faculty. I had just had a particularly frustrating conversation about some collection development decisions, and said to a co-worker “it’s almost like faculty are suspended in amber the day they defend their dissertation, and refuse to engage with new ways …