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The elusive dream of work-life balance

I have been wanting to write a post on work-life balance for a while, especially after spending a week at ACRL Assessment Immersion with a bunch of people who are deeply committed to their work and...

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Classic blunder #1 – Let’s just try it and see what happens!

There are a lot of popular assumptions people make in this profession that lead us to make classic blunders. These can be assumptions about the change process, assumptions about our colleagues, and...

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Classic Blunder #2 – Assuming resistance is a bad thing

I remember when I was in library school, a lot of people talked about librarians who were resistant to change and would try to derail your exciting and innovative projects. Often, this discussion was...

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Up to my neck in… well, everything.

You know you’re a real blogger when, no matter how absurdly busy the rest of your life is, the thing you can’t do that you miss the most is blogging. It’s been a crazy almost two months and isn’t...

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Reflections on year one at PSU

Yesterday was my one-year anniversary of working at Portland State. I’d wanted to write a post yesterday reflecting on it, but I was driving three hours (to Bend, OR) to give a four-hour...

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No, we can’t do it all

So many of us struggle with determining priorities in teaching. Few of us have a workload that would allow us to do everything we would like to do. We hear stories about embedded librarian programs,...

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Setting priorities

In academic libraries, there are usually so many levels of priorities. There are the priorities of the university. There are the priorities of the library. Each unit probably has its own priorities,...

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Broad vs. deep in information literacy instruction

When I was at Norwich, my focus was often on increasing our instruction stats. My Director wanted to see us doing more instruction and being in at least two classes in every department (in addition to...

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Behavior vs. belief and changing culture

At LOEX of the West this summer (a fantastic conference, btw), Joan Kaplowitz did a session where she started by asking attendees what words they associate with assessment. I won’t list the litany of...

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The devil you know in first-year instruction

It’s pretty clear from the comments on my recent posts that many of us have a sense that the sort of information literacy instruction we’re providing is not having the impact we’d like. But even when...

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Living our values

I have wanted to write about so many things that have come across my desktop lately, but work and getting ready for a major trip to New Zealand with my husband and a three year old have kept me from...

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Getting out of your own story

When I was a psychotherapist, I was drawn to narrative therapy and cognitive therapy in my own work with clients. Both support the idea that the way people view and interpret things can be at the root...

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The entrepreneurial library

Years ago, I visited the libraries at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. After lots of conversations, the one word that stuck with me was entrepreneurial. The library faculty there were a...

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Self-efficacy in retention and how we can help build it

A little while back, I wrote a post about the role of narratives in our lives. The stories we tell about our lives that inform the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Those stories impact...

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The right to create our own digital footprints?

There are things on the Internet about me that I regret. Things that embarras me. Things that make me cringe. However, it’s nothing that I didn’t do to myself. I own it. I feel like, for the most...

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Gender, “thought leaders”, ego, and subversion

Lots of people have been writing about Ask Miss Julie’s post Ego, thy name is librarianship. Julie is a talented and humorous writer and a hard-working and innovative children’s librarian. She feels...

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Assessment on the brain

This has been a crazy year, full of a lot of research and activities centered around assessment. From my participation in RAILS last Spring, to my Assessment LibGuide, to my presentation at LOEX of...

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Shared vision, transparency, and the high performing organization

As I’ve mentioned before, Lisa Hinchliffe and I presented on and authored a paper for the Library Assessment Conference in October. The spoke about applying the High Performance Programming Model of...

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Stratification and losing faculty status

I was surprised when I read a couple of weeks ago that the University of Virginia was taking faculty status away from its librarians. Even more surprising was the fact that it was at the behest of the...

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My critique of Value of Academic Libraries and a happy update

My critique of the Value of Academic Libraries initiative has just been published in OLA Quarterly (it’s the first article in the PDF). I wrote it on the fly after a desperate request for content from...

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