Finally!

Happy New Year?

What does "new year" mean to you? And when is it? Obviously, there's the Big New Year when the calendar year flips over. And then there's you're birthday, a great time to start new thinking (or having an age-related crisis). There's also the Jewish (or Chinese or Muslim) New Year, times of celebration and thinking…

Yes, I’m taking time off this summer…

I think I am... I think I am... Between now and the end of Break, I have a number of planned "days on", including: AISL's Summer Institute, focusing on Incubating Creativity in the Library ALA's Annual Conference (I'm part of a panel conversation) Tier One Circle Training LiLi's Conference Planning the virtual 2022 AISL Conference…

Up from the ashes (part eight)

As I've been going through the process of rebuilding the collection and the facility (neat pictures of our "permanent" temporary space to come next week), attending meetings and so forth, one question keeps coming up: what does a 21st-century library look like? How do we plan for what students are doing today and think ahead…

Up from the ashes (part two)

Very Important Idea: 100% replacement valueSeriously, if you don't have 100% replacement value as part of your insurance policy get it now. We have it and it's going to help us with our rebuilding. What does this mean in practical terms? It means that I have until I leave work tomorrow to re-create POs for…

Up from the ashes (part one)

This is the first in what will be a long series of posts on how we rebuilt MPOW. Here's what the building looked like from 1905 through August 3, 2007:And here's what it looked like on August 4, 2007:

National Library Week

It's National Library Week again, and because it's so close to the end of Spring Break I never feel like we're prepared to celebrate properly. Last year we did quizzes, this year we're use Kahoots to engage our students and faculty. They seem to like it - we'll see how tomorrow's live lunchtime Kahoots go.…

Can’t say we’re not busy!

Because the library and its program are usually a mystery to the administration, we thought it might be helpful to share what we'd been doing over the summer and through the just-finished first semester. It was also a great exercize for us to look back and see how much we've done (or haven't done). Here's…

Racing towards Research Season

While teachers have been reworking their classes, adjusting things for hybrid learning and multiple time zones, we've been working on getting our (digital and print) collection ready and preparing to work with students virtually on their upcoming research projects. We know that many of the teachers who do the February project are concerned because they…

Rapid Response

Wednesday, after working on a semi-physically demanding project in the library I went home and took a nap. Then woke up to... well, we all know what was going on Wednesday afternoon. Scenes that reminded me of my vague memories of Chicago '68, with the fear that the Rodney King riots spread (I was in…