Guardienne of the Tomes

I received an email from a colleague who keeps us all reminded of faculty development opportunities. One of the things she regularly emails about are the regular weekly faculty writing groups that have been established--a way for faculty to set aside time to write alongside colleagues. My personal favorite is the Friday morning silent writing group that history professor and fabulous colleague Dr. Robin Mitchell set up--no discussion, no talking, just a handful of us around the table, plugged in and surrounded by our notes, clattering away at keyboards. It's my preferred way of group writing. Some of the other groups do regular shares or colleague critiques. I find that what I need most is really just the set-aside block of time where I can focus and dive deep for three or four hours. There's no good way to make that happen in my office with the myriad distractions, and I don't like writing from home because pajamas, dog, tv, bed, couch--you get the idea. I need something w...

Things on my librarian brain: Our library team is working on our MOU (Memo of Understanding) in response to the program review we recently had (where outside folks come in and evaluate us). [Side note: in my previous life as an Access Services manager, an MOU was the first step in the disciplinary process of an employee. Not so with this MOU, this is just a normal response with a 2 and 5 year plan to address each item where needs were noted.] Sort of related to the above, the 2015 ACRL Immersion Program has begun! Though I won't head to Seattle until the beginning of August, the Moodle course is up and running, our readings and pre-assignments have been posted. I'm hoping to leverage the Immersion program to inform how we want our information literacy program to evolve for a growing campus with semistatic resources. A "freemium " model of peer-review, where authors could pay for faster review of their articles, was pretty much unanimously shot down as privileg...

In order of importance, the things going on as the semester careens to a close: On the library front: Finals are coming, finals are coming! Students are feeling the pressure, which means we at the library do, too. ALL OF THE PRINTING.  On an admittedly less-than-superior printing setup. And the last papers of the semester, so we're seeing some hail-Marys at the reference desk; This will be my first finals where I take lead on the end of semester feedback. We set up "graffiti" boards with giant post-it's on whiteboards asking what we're doing right, and what we can improve, and collect all that information. We also have a student survey, and a faculty survey. My colleagues all tabulate and organize the data, and we'll see what we can do to improve for next finals season; The 24-hour library. The week before and the week of finals, we stretch the library and its staff to 24 hours for our students. Thank goodness for the folks who work the overnight! I'...

For those interested in the writing life of an academic librarian who is on the tenure track, you may be interested in what my research and writing schedule looks like. If you include all of my writing for librarianship, professional conferences, my Ed.D. work, and my Ph.D. work, it adds up to a lot. I usually don't list it out this way, since it makes me want to hyperventilate, but it is helpful to see it in this form to (1) give myself credit for what I've accomplished, and (2) budget my time wisely for what remains. Not much writing happened in January and February - largely my focus was polishing up the dissertation, and getting healthy after some wicked bouts of illness. Papers submitted for publication or a grade already this month (March 2015) include: "The Relationship between Academic Library Department Experience and Perceptions of Leadership Skill Development Relevant to Academic Library Directorship" (submitted to peer-reviewed journal in academic librar...

Frustrated with some data and fed up with my own inability to locate an appropriate statistical technique, I finally posted to Facebook in the hopes that a friend would commiserate with me: "Bending my brain around ILL stats and thinking about exploratory factor analysis with categorical variables, despite the issues with it. Desperately missing [my old group of Emory PoliSci nerdbuddies and profs who were excellent at stats] and brainstorming these sorts of things." Five seconds later, the prof I had tagged in the post replied, "Three words: polychoric correlation matrix." And I had four distinct reactions in rapid succession. They were as follows: First reaction : sarcasm. Well OF COURSE polychoric correlation matrix, duh. Who WOULDN'T know that? Certainly not I. Pshaw. Second reaction : confirmatory exploration. A quick Google search of that conglomeration of words, a quick scan of the Wikipedia description , and yep, this is much closer to what I ne...

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...