This is a talk I gave way back in 2017. I was invited by Rachel Frick to keynote the first OCLC DevConnect developer conference. Five years later now, I just had an opportunity to re-read this presentation and thought it… Continue Reading Library IT Projects As Drivers Of Organizational Change
From a twitter thread I wrote today in which I asked, “Are you un/comfortable with the level of ambiguity we’re experiencing professionally right now (not enough info, lacking specifics)? We often see “comfortable with ambiguity” in job ads & this… Continue Reading Comfort with ambiguity in the age of Covid-19
Note 1: This post is a slightly modified version of a twitter stream I wrote on 3/15/2019 inspired by Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, and by conversations I’ve recently read… Continue Reading What it means when white people are asked to “stay in your lane.”
I’ve been in my current position for two years now and I’ve been thinking a lot about the many ways to practice effective leadership and to expand my skills. In November 2016 I moved from a middle management position–where I… Continue Reading Practicing and cultivating leadership
I’m not sure why the conversation about feminism between Roxane Gay and Erica Jong, which took place in September 2015 at the Decatur Book Festival, is getting publicity on social media right now. I’ve seen several links to it in… Continue Reading White fragility and toxic white feminism, a demonstration
Health outcomes for white Americans New research, described in March 2017 in the Washington Post, describes a “sea of despair” among white, working-class Americans. According to this ongoing research, the consequences of despair and lack of opportunity in the white people studied… Continue Reading Despair for all, Black and white
This text was originally posted by me on Twitter 2/24/2017 in reaction to this tweet by Vann R. Newkirk II, @fivefifths: As many of us white people are now awakening to the meanness, violence, and fear propagated by our current government, we need… Continue Reading White awakening: What we’ve missed
Actually it’s the meanest thing anyone’s ever said to me that I can remember. I’m sure other people have said other mean things to or about me. But this one has stuck with me since it happened in 1995. In fact,… Continue Reading The meanest thing anyone’s ever said to me
This is the second part in a series. See Part 1, on Impostor Syndrome, Dunning-Kruger, and Compassion. The job search process can be so secretive. Rarely do people make it widely know that they are on the job market. And once… Continue Reading What I learned during my job search, part 2
The news is out: I’m leaving NYU to become Associate Director for Information Technology at Ohio State University Libraries, reporting to Vice Provost and Director of University Libraries Damon Jaggers. Aside from the excitement of taking on a new challenge under a new boss… Continue Reading What I learned during my job search, part 1
This is the text and slides of a keynote I delivered on June 11 at the inaugural Oberlin Library Group Digital Scholarship Conference, at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. I. Introduction I’ve been trying to make my talks and… Continue Reading Tech-ing to Transgress: Putting Values into Library Practice
Note: this was originally posted on the NYU Digital Scholarship Services blog. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to virtually reconstruct a manuscript whose physical pages are dispersed among multiple archives? How about easily using a virtual lightbox to… Continue Reading IIIF will fundamentally change the way we deliver and use images on the web
This post is a follow up to my recent In the Library with the Lead Pipe article entitled The Quest for Diversity in Library Staffing: From Awareness to Action. I ended that article with “Brass Tacks for Library Leaders,” suggesting some… Continue Reading Reducing Bias in the Library Job Interview
This is a lightly re-edited post that I originally shared with my NYU colleagues. I’m posting here because I thought the process of making do with the technology one has and understands might resonate with other self-taught technologists. I thought I’d… Continue Reading You do the best you can with what you know
I’m just picking up an old, neglected research project that involves downloading lots of individual article PDFs linked from webpages, stringing these PDFs together into yearly journal volumes, then turning the PDFs into plain text in order to run them through… Continue Reading How to download multiple PDFs from webpages and prepare them for text analysis
