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The Pattern Language of the Library
I am an olds. When I first started working at the University of Windsor in July of 1999, the first floor of the Leddy Library was largely taken up by stacks of reference books. The largest collection of the library’s private and semi-private study carrels were on the second floor. Keeping in mind that ideally…
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Learning Objects: Teach Me Goodness, Discipline and Knowledge
Last week, a tweet pointing to this article “A Stanford researcher’s 15-minute study hack lifts B+ students into the As” caught my attention. The article describes how Stanford researcher Patricia Chen improved her class’ performance in a test by sending out a 15 minute pre-survey designed to get them thinking about how they were going…
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Working to Code
My cataloging professor once quipped in class, “There are two kinds of people: the people who know where things are and the people who know where things should be.” I used that line on my daughter this morning as she looked for her dress shoes because it was picture day at school. She loves her…
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Why Libraries Should Maintain the Open Data of Their Communities
Today I’m preparing for my participation in a seminar on Open Cities that will be held Monday in Toronto as part of the Monday Night Seminar series by The McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology. As part of my preparation, I thought I would take and publish an edited version of a draft of a…
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The Game Believes In You
Over Thanksgiving, my sister and I met up at my parents’ house as per tradition. Whenever we’re back at home we’ve tried to continue our own tradition of sorts and take the time to play some tabletop games. On this particular holiday, my sister brought with her the card game Dominion and over the long…
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The Hashtag Syllabus: Part Three
In The Future of the Library: From Electric Media to Digital Media Robert K. Logan and Marshall McLuhan, you can find this passage from Chapter 9: The Compact Library and Human Scale: As an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, I (McLuhan) encountered a library in the English Department that had immense advantages. I never…
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The Hashtag Syllabus: Part Two
Last week I finally uploaded a bibliography of just under 150 items from the Leddy Library that could be found on the BlackLivesCDNSyllabi that has been circulating on Twitter since July 5th. In this post, I will go into some technical detail why it took me so long to do this. For the most part,…
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The Hashtag Syllabus: Part One
Marcia Chatelain, who started the #FergusonSyllabus almost exactly two years ago wrote about her work in The Atlantic: From the beginning of the situation in Ferguson, news reports alerted the public that Michael Brown was to start college soon. Before surveillance videos and photographs of protestors with their hands up were available, people saw a…
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The Observer or Seeing What You Mean
If you are new to my writing, my talks and work tends to resemble an entanglement of ideas. Sometimes it all comes together in the end and sometimes I know that I’ve just overwhelmed my audience. I’m trying to be better at reducing the sheer amount of information I give across in a single seating.…
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The Library Without a Map
One of my favourite exercises from library school is perhaps one that you had to do as well. We were instructed to find a particular term from the Library of Congress Subject Heading “Red Books” and develop that term into a topic map that would illustrate the relationships between the chosen term and its designated…
Librarian of Things
Mita Williams. Her blog.