Dog-eared & Overdue

Author: Kate Gukeisen

  • Lesson 7-New Librarians Cry When Confronted with Meaningful Artifacts

    The crying started with a visit to the university library. It was the middle of our residency week, and we had spent the previous few days discussing the importance of keeping our focus as librarians on community, innovation, collaboration, and creation. I had embraced the concepts of roving and embedded librarians, empowering people through their very…

  • (Finally) Catching Up on the Lessons Learned List–Number 10

    Our Title, My Friend, Was Blowin’ In the Wind One of the great pleasures of my summer 2011 gateway week in Syracuse was working with so many equally invested, passionate, and fun fellow students. Of the many group projects we did, our grand finale took the form of presenting at a poster session. I was…

  • Lesson 2-Mints Invigorate Students

    Effective instructors are in tune with their students and able to shift gears with them. And they know when to pass out the mints.   

  • Library Dogs Aren’t Just for Public Libraries

    My post about Ace the Library Dog led to some great questions and to a few friends sharing their experiences with similar programs. I thought I’d take the opportunity to share some a few interesting links regarding library dog programs. After exhaustive research (okay, after typing “library dog” into google), I struck gold in the…

  • Lesson 9-Library Dogs are Pretty Awesome

    Ace, the Northern Onondaga Public Library Dog, came to visit our class along with his human, Meg. Ace is a registered Therapy Dog and Canine Good Citizen who spends his time working split shifts between three branches in the NOPL system. He also comes with his very own barkcode–and is available for patrons to check…

  • 10 Things I Learned at Library Boot Camp

    The following are my personal Top Ten Take Aways from my first week on the road to New Librarianship. I’ll explore a few of these topics my next blog posts. 1.   New Librarians embrace body art. 2.   Mints invigorate students. 3.   Librarians do not need to prove we are relevent. 4.   Militant idealists…

  • I Will Never Leave a Fallen Comrade

    In the final Thread of R. David Lankes’ The Atlas of New Librarianship (2011), we finally get to the librarian. In amongst the descriptions of skill sets, teamwork, processes, and curriculum, there is a statement which stops me in my tracks. Lankes proposes that in the case of deadlocked debate between new librarians and bibliofundamentalists,…

  • We Happy Few

    “This time, this information age? This is our age.”   -R. David Lankes, The Atlas of New Librarianship, p.135 I am a sucker for a good call-to-arms style speech. My favorite movies (which mostly come from great books) all contain rousing pre-battle speeches. William Wallace rallying his fellow Scotsmen at the Battle of Stirling, Henry V…

  • Azimuth Check

    Or, How Reading About Community Got Me Ruminating Over Collection Development Ironically, after writing my last few posts about how individuals, people, and communities must remain at the center of every thing we do as librarians, I read through Lankes’ entire Community Thread thinking about books. It may have been that I had just finished…

  • Power to the People

    Librarians don’t own public libraries, communities don’t own public libraries, the individuals who make up our communities own public libraries. That ownership comes with privilege, and it comes with responsibility. Have I mentioned yet my conviction that libraries are about people? They are not about buildings or collections or how many computers you have available.…