Guardienne of the Tomes

Okay, so my professional bio is a lot more sparse than my creative writing bio. I'm supposed to send one in to book chapter people, and after reading everyone else's (which is all 'director of this' and 'president of that' and 'been presenting on this topic around the globe for 15 years', I'm feeling kind of bummed. I can't list my publications & presentations yet because everything's still in the works. *sigh* I feel like sort of a loser. I was going to say I could never use teh follwing bio, but all of my TwitPeeps liked it: "Colleen is a chunky library sort who stays at home and writes with her bossy dog on her feet when she's not teaching ungrateful ghetto kids how not to plagiarize their shit or use Wikipedia & Google as scholarly sources. When in doubt of her prowess, she distracts onlookers with her fierce bosoms." Thanks to tinfoilraccoon for reminding me about my fierce bosoms! And to everyone else for admirin...

Writing this book chapter on the digital divide made me consider my university’s current push for offering increased online learning opportunities. Because we serve students who generally come from lower socio-economic backgrounds, I’m wondering if administration isn’t going about this the wrong way. Is it really about offering more online classes and more online-only degrees and gen-eds? Or would it be more useful to decrease the digital divide that exists within our student body, between the higher-income kids who grew up with computers and gadgetry and those who may have had to make-do with less access? Many of our students still don’t own computers and make constant use of those available in our student labs and library. Many of our students – at least, the ones I see in our library – are not terribly comfortable navigating technologies used in learning environments, including BlackBoard and the library databases they are expected to use to conduct their research. These are the stu...

I am always better about getting things done when I write them down. And when I have some sort of accountability factor. Since I hate looking stupid, writing these here for public consumption will force me to get all my shit done. I am also attaching aspirational deadlines in cases where hard deadlines do not exist. Book Chapter abstract: deadline 4/30. (That's not aspirational, that's fact, per editor) Proposal for LI Cookbook: May 15. (Also not aspirational.) ALA poster, "Academic Library 2.0: Self-Paced Guided Training for Faculty and Staff," for Annual: deadline 6/16. Book Chapter: deadline 6/26. (Actual deadline is 6/30 per editor, but am leaving for ALA on the 26th.) Scholarly Article 1 (full 1st draft): deadline 7/18. Scholarly Article 2 (full 1st draft): deadline 8/1. Scholarly Article 1 (final manuscript): deadline 8/22. Scholarly Article 2 (final manuscript): deadline 9/5. Of course, this doesn't take into account various library projects like develop...

Coming from a private liberal arts background, I do have to admit that I didn't immediately understand why universities would offer for-credit classes in information literacy. Isn't all that information essentially interwoven through the courses students take? I mean, it's essential for any discipline. Let's back up. I went to a very small, private, expensive (I will have student loans to bequeath my grandchildren) liberal arts college. You know the sort - kids who drive cars daddy bought practically (if not actually) new, who clerk at daddy's law firm during the summers, and who don't drink beer because frankly, that sort of thing is for state school fraternity boys - Crown and Jack welcome, all others will be booted at the door. On the other hand, it was an extraordinarily rigorous academic atmosphere: if you missed three classes, you automatically failed. Fifteen page papers were the norm. There was no such thing as multiple choice, and we regularly hobnobbed...

I know how to write an academic article. I train people how to do their research, and how to structure their papers. I'm a peer reviewer for a number of journals, and I read such articles on a regular basis. Given all of this, why is it so gosh-danged hard to compose myself and get myself together to write one myself? I have a good seed of an idea. I've printed all my research and have ILL-ed the books we, of course, don't own. The problem is that I cannot seem to pull my brain together in similar fashion. I can't decide where to start. I can't stop the hamster on its wheel in my brain for long enough to sit with the articles and just READ. My trouble is that I have developed work-induced ADD. I have grown accustomed to putting out fires and working in fifteen minute blocks of time (generally interrupted by meetings, emergencies, backing up at the refdesk, teaching, and random folks wandering into my office). This is the nature of the beast. I recognize that, and I ...