One of the things that came up in conversation a few times when I was at NASIG this past weekend was that last year I made a proposal to UIUC GSLIS for a new, advanced course on electronic resources management. My intent in proposing this new course was that an existing course that I [...]

Life is hard.  Do you ever feel so overwhelmed, so downhearted that you find it hard to literally and figuratively put one foot in front of the other?  When doing even the most routine and little things seems impossible or too much to handle?  When you can burst into tears at the drop of a [...]

Recently my mentee at UIUC GSLIS asked me to look into my crystal ball and articulate some thoughts about what lies in store for technical services librarianship. What follows is my response. I publish this here because although my points aren’t polished and well-defined, what I wrote to my mentee expresses some of [...]

The latest issue (Spring 2007) of LIBRA: LIBrary Reports and Announcements, is now available. LIBRA is a publication of The University of Chicago Library. I like to read each issue because that helps me keep informed about what’s going on at the place where I spent my formative years as a librarian. [...]

Next week I will be speaking about electronic resource management at UIUC GSLIS. At the end of May I will be joining a panel of friends who are speaking at NASIG about alternative career experiences in libraries. These are my only speaking engagements for the foreseeable future. I continue to be amazed [...]

If ever there was a librarian who deserves all of the honors she gets, it is Dr. Linda Smith, Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I was very pleased to read that she received yet another award, this one celebrating her pioneering [...]

Yesterday I made a decision to not teach a graduate course this year. I was asked again to teach Technical Services Functions in UIUC GSLIS’s LEEP program (www.lis.uiuc.edu/leep/), and I was grateful to be asked. But given the situation with Michele, she and I both felt it would be wise to not do [...]

Tomorrow during class, Karen Calhoun, Associate University Librarian for Technical Services at Cornell, will be a guest to discuss the report she authored for the Library of Congress, entitled “The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools.” I am really thankful that Karen so graciously agreed to meet online [...]

The following is a group photo of this summer’s technical services functions class, which I am teaching. They are a great group of people!

Last week I met face-to-face with the students who signed up for LIS578LE: Technical Services Functions at UIUC GSLIS. Overall it was a great time, including an informative meeting with librarians and staff who work in technical services areas at the Main Library at UIUC, followed by a guided tour. This invariably serves [...]