Sometimes when speaking about research skills and the importance of information literacy, things can seem a bit…ethereal. As if they were sort of ideas floating around, but no actions. That is decidedly not true. Please allow me to demonstrate with a research project of my own: Meringue. Once upon a time, I wanted to make…
A child, perhaps 4 or 5, came up to the desk to ask me a question. Here is the conversation that ensued. Child: Do you have any toys? Me: I have these blocks you may play with, if you’d like. Child: No…do you have toys you’re giving? Me: Not right now. We do sometimes have…
I don’t, generally speaking, consider myself a poet. But then, isn’t everyone, sometimes? Most don’t share their poetry, and that is reasonable and fine. But my goal, the goal of Brave Wednesdays, is to share things that I wouldn’t have been brave enough to share without this weekly nudge. So here is a little piece…
Welcome to the 3rd week of Brave Wednesdays, and happy first day of Black History Month!
My second brave Wednesday! I’ve spent a lot of time with a sketchbook close at hand. And all of that time, my hands have been there too, surprisingly enough. Generally the right one is not holding a pencil, as I favor my left for sketching. Here are a few sketches of that hand that I’ve…
My resolution this year, for 2017, is to be brave and share myself. In this space,I will be sharing with you my writings and works of art, both large and small, both years old and brand new. None of these works have ever seen the light of day until you see them here. I’ll be…
The Last Tree, written by Ingrid Chabbert and illustrated by Guridi, is a short picture book, elegant and concise, but don’t be fooled by its simplicity. This tale of a boy and his friend working hard to save a tree cuts to the quick. The stunning illustrations display the world the boy lives in, with “roads…
Possibly one of the most purely fun jobs of a librarian is collection development. Adding new materials in a pattern that best builds your collection as a thriving complete whole, no section over-enhanced, no section under-appreciated, is an art. The most important piece of that art is listening to your readers. What do they want…
Customer (or Client, or Constituent) Relationship Management systems, known as CRM, are at their core simply database structures. Which is to say they are lists of lists. More formally speaking, databases are structured collections of data. The data can be anything and everything. The structure is based on “relationships” between data points and between sets…
I appreciate ritual in my life. As my religious tradition is Judaism, the tradition I seek out is generally from Jewish sources. And sometimes, rituals don’t yet exist for the things I’m doing. Sometimes that’s because I’m doing something that didn’t used to be a thing that happened, and sometimes it’s because I’m doing a…