This is the last of the interviews Allison and I did for the Librarians are ROCKSTARS! series at this summer’s ALA conference. We hope you enjoyed them, and we hope to be back with another round soon! Let us know if you have suggestions for authors you’d like to hear featured.
Around the time of the ALA Midwinter conference last year, I teamed up with Allison and Michelle from Authors are ROCKSTARS! to produce a series of interviews we called Librarians are ROCKSTARS!, where we spoke with authors about their experiences with libraries. Since Allison and I were both attending the ALA conference in Chicago this summer (Michelle couldn’t make it, sadly), we wanted to do some more interviews with authors. Last week, you heard our chat with Gene Luen Yang and this week, we’re proud to let you hear our insightful interview with Cory Doctorow. Even though he had a busy conference, Cory graciously gave us his time and shared his thoughts on how librarians remain relevant in the 21st century, his support for fair ebook terms for libraries, and spoiled the end of Homeland (not really). Stay tuned to Authors are ROCKSTARS! next week for our final joint interview from ALA. SHOW NOTES:
Collaboration is one of my favorite things to do. I love working with other librarians to accomplish bigger and better things, and I’m happy to say that I was able to connect with Allison Tran from the Authors are ROCKSTARS! podcast once again for our semi-regular Librarians are ROCKSTARS series (we spoke with Kirby Larson and Tom Angleberger earlier, along with her regular co-host Michelle). When Allison wasn’t busy trying to recruit me into YALSA like Sam Jackson recruiting superheroes into the Avengers, we were chatting with a number of great authors.
First up in this series is Gene Luen Yang, Printz Award winning author and artist of AMERICAN BORN CHINESE and the new BOXERS & SAINTS. Visit the Authors are ROCKSTARS site for more info on this interview and stay tuned throughout August for more great author interviews!
Kate Kosturski is JSTOR’s Institutional Participation Coordinator for the UK and Northern Europe, where, in her words, “I tell people in Europe how awesome JSTOR is and then hopefully they buy some.” A 2011 ALA Emerging Leader, Kate received her MLS from Pratt Institute in 2010 and is the co-founder of ALA CraftCon, a relaxing crafting hour at the Midwinter and Annual Meetings. In her spare time, she enjoys crafts, cooking, baseball, running, photography, politics, and technology. View her work online at katekosturski.info and follow her on Twitter as librarian_kate. Coral Sheldon-Hess is an engineer-turned-librarian living in Anchorage, Alaska. She has worked at the University of Alaska Anchorage as a Web Services Librarian since 2009, when she drove across the continent with three birds, some house plants, and a trunk full of homebrewing gear. In her spare time she teaches computer programming to women, crochets, does geeky tech things, reads, bicycles (poorly), and evangelizes on behalf of the Oxford comma. You can find her blog at http://sheldon-hess.org/coral, or follow her on Twitter at @web_librarian. Marge Loch-Wouters received her MLIS in 1976 at UW-Madison SLIS and had worked as a children’s librarian and children’s library manager ever since. She is a long time active member of ALA (she currently sits on Council), Wisconsin Library Association and WI Women Library Workers, a feminist library organization. She blogs at Tiny Tips for Library Fun and also presents workshops, webinars and teaches as an adjunct on innovative youth services. Loch-Wouters was named WI Librarian on the Year in 2010. When not working she can be found hanging out in social media or in nature.
Buffy Hamilton was not supposed to be the first guest on the show but I’m sure glad that she was.
Now, a few years back, I had first really gotten involved in the online librarian world through Leah White’s Young Librarian Series (and you can hear Leah on the show here, here, and also here). I had been getting more and more involved with professional activities on Twitter, including a stumbling attempt at keeping up a blog, and was looking for a way to contribute and participate more.
I had also been listening to a lot of podcasts, my favorite at the time being Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and realized that I wanted to hear an interview show featuring librarians. I searched around and while there were great library-related shows like T is for Training and Adventures in Library Instruction, they weren’t quite what I was looking for, so I decided to create it myself. Bobbi Newman was scheduled to speak at a local professional development event, and since I’d been following her work through her blog and Twitter, I got it in my head that I would interview her as my first guest. However, I couldn’t quite get everything together in time, so that fell apart (though Bobbi was a valuable asset for brainstorming and promotion of the show and I can’t thank her enough for that).
I had recently met Buffy Hamilton through social media and we clicked as colleagues and friends, and I was incredibly impressed with her efforts at her middle school library, so I asked her to be my first guest (I think she agreed because I was more interested in her Media21 program than her Kindle loaning program, which is all anyone else asked her about). The interview with Buffy completely set the tone for the show moving forward, despite some technical difficulties. My initial thought for the show was that I would ask questions and wait for the interviewee to answer, but it became more conversational, more back and forth, more engaging, helping it live up to its name.
I went on to interview many of the people I’ve looked up to in the profession that I never thought would agree to be on, like Sarah Houghton, Jessamyn West, David Lankes (not once, not twice, but three times!), the Unshelved guys, and the upcoming interview with Nancy Pearl. The show has been a tremendous source of inspiration for me, and I hope, for the listeners.
Thanks to all the guests who have appeared on the show over the past two years, to the guest hosts who helped me get through an exceptionally busy time, to all the colleagues and friends who have acted as sounding boards for crazy new ideas, to my wonderful listeners, many of whom came out to support the Kickstarter campaign, and of course my beautiful wife and kids for patiently putting up with me constantly making our printer unusable because my mic was using its USB port.
Post-ALA, the show will receive a few tweaks and improvements that I hope you’ll enjoy. Let’s keep circulating the ideas together.
Kate Sheehan is the special projects coordinator for Bibliomation,a consortium of public and school libraries in Connecticut. She joined Bibliomation in 2009 to work on their migration to the Evergreen ILS as the open source implementation coordinator and has been fortunate that the good people of Bibliomation have been willing to scrape together funding to keep her popping up at meetings. Kate has been the coordinator of knowledge and learning services at Darien Library and the coordinator of library automation at Danbury Public Library, which was the first library to implement LibraryThing for Libraries. Prior to joining Danbury Public Library, she was a technology and reference librarian at the Ferguson Library in Stamford, Connecticut. A graduate of Smith College, Kate’s post college experiences in the corporate workplace inspired her decision to get an MSLIS from Simmons. She finished library school in December of 2003 and has been happily ensconced in the public library sphere since then. When she’s not coordinating, she works as a writer and consultant and blogs at loosecannonlibrarian.net, ebookprimer.com and ALA TechSource.
Meredith Farkas is the Head of Instructional Services at the Portland State University Library in Oregon and is an adjunct faculty member at San Jose State University’s School of Library and Information Science. She’s also the author of the book Social Software in Libraries: Building Collaboration, Communication and Community Online (Information Today, 2007) and writes the monthly column “Technology in Practice” for American Libraries. She’s the creator and manager of Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki and has created a number of well-known national conference wikis (ALA 2005 and 2006, Internet Librarian 2006-2008, etc.). She has presented internationally on topics such as social technologies, managing library technology projects, encouraging innovation organizationally, and LIS education. In 2006, she was named a Mover and Shaker by Library Journal for innovative uses of technology to benefit the profession and in 2009 she was honored with the LITA/Library Hi Tech award for Outstanding Communication in Library and Information Technology.
She lives with her wonderful husband and adorable toddler son in one of the best places in the world and feels lucky to have been able to achieve what she has in both her professional and family life.
Jenica P. Rogers is Director of Libraries at the State University of New York at Potsdam, coming from a background in cataloging, collection development, and staff training.
Jenica serves as the chief administrator of the Crumb and Crane Libraries, with responsibilities that include short-term and strategic planning, fiscal management, fundraising and donor development, representing the libraries to outside constituents, and supervision of 24 FTE employees spanning NYS Civil Service employees, professional staff, and librarians.
Jenica’s current professional interests include interrogating the ways our information economy is breaking down and reforming now that the internet changed everything, figuring out what the role of a library is in a reality in which warehousing books is sort of passé, and informing, mentoring, and supporting new library professionals as they hit the real world face first and at full speed.
Jenica earned her MLIS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001 after graduating from Trinity College in Hartford, CT in 1998 with a BA in English Literature. In 2009 she received a SUNY Potsdam President’s Award for Excellence in Professional Service and was was nominated one of Library Journal’s Movers and Shakers for 2009.
Karen Schneider is the University Librarian at Holy Names University in Oakland, California and she has just embarked on a PhD program at Simmons College. She blogs at Free Range Librarian and she has published over 100 articles and 2 books.Her less technical writing includes essays, portraits, travelogues, video reviews, and a historically dubious account of Washington crossing the Delaware. She has been published in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009, The Best Creative Nonfiction Volume 2, Gastronomica, White Crane, Nerve, Ninth Letter, Linux.com, IT Managers Journal, American Libraries, Library Journal, The Bottom Line, the dear departed Wilson Library Bulletin, a few other places she can’t remember, and has articles forthcoming elsewhere, but chooses not to jinx the process by naming the lucky publications.
Schneider’s technology writing has been recognized in a variety of venues for being both lively and learned (“venues” in this case meaning “homes of close friends or relatives”). From 2005 through 2007 she wrote at ALA Techsource, where readers showered her with compliments such as “Stop using the work ‘suck’, you tramp!” and “My cataloger can beat up your metadata specialist!” From 1995 to 2001, as the Internet Librarian columnist for American Libraries (circulation 66,000), Schneider consistently ranked in magazine surveys as AL’s most popular author. In 1998, her article “The Tao of Internet Costs,” one of the first discussions within librarianship about sustainable technology funding, was selected as an article of the year for The Bottom Line, a journal of library finances. In 1998, as author of A Practical Guide to Internet Filters, Schneider provided expert testimony for Mainstream Loudoun vs. Board of Trustees, a pivotal First Amendment case about free speech on the Internet.
An Air Force veteran (1983-1991), graduate of Barnard College, University of Illinois, and University of San Francisco, and skilled treadmiller, Schneider now divides her free time somewhat unevenly between housework and watching television when she is not working on her collage of rejection letters she receives for those depressing little belles-lettres she insists on begging editors of fine journals to read.
Schneider, a world traveler who has lived in such exotic locales as Clovis, New Mexico and Tallahassee, Florida, now lives in her lavishly overpriced home town, San Francisco, with her long-suffering partner Sandy and their spoiled cats, Samson and Emma.
R. David Lankes is a professor and Dean’s Scholar for the New Librarianship at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies and director of the Information Institute of Syracuse. Lankes has always been interested in combining theory and practice to create active research projects that make a difference. Past projects include the ERIC Clearinghouse on Information and Technology, the Gateway to Education Materials, AskERIC and the Virtual Reference Desk. Lankes’ more recent work involves how participatory concepts can reshape libraries and credibility. You can hear earlier Circulating Ideas interviews with Dr. Lankes here and here. Jill Hurst-Wahl, MLS, is a digitization consultant and owner of Hurst Associates, Ltd. She also an Associate Professor of Practice in Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies and the director of the iSchool’s Library and Information Science Program. She is a member of the SLA Board of Directors (2011-2013). Jill’s interests include digitization, digital libraries, copyright, web 2.0 and social media. Cori Dickerson is an absentee MLS student and a part-time librarian in the great state of Texas. Her art and English degrees keep her in the lap of luxury, and the high school students keep her from making any progress on her To Read list. Cori’s trying very hard not to be a responsible adult, and spends far too much time playing Star Wars: The Old Republic. (Star Trek is her one true love, however!) She can generally be spotted on Twitter and Pinterest, scavenging ideas from much cooler people.
R. David Lankes is a professor and Dean’s Scholar for the New Librarianship at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies and director of the Information Institute of Syracuse. Lankes has always been interested in combining theory and practice to create active research projects that make a difference. Past projects include the ERIC Clearinghouse on Information and Technology, the Gateway to Education Materials, AskERIC and the Virtual Reference Desk. Lankes’ more recent work involves how participatory concepts can reshape libraries and credibility. You can hear earlier Circulating Ideas interviews with Dr. Lankes here and here.
Jill Hurst-Wahl, MLS, is a digitization consultant and owner of Hurst Associates, Ltd. She also an Associate Professor of Practice in Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies and the director of the iSchool’s Library and Information Science Program. She is a member of the SLA Board of Directors (2011-2013). Jill’s interests include digitization, digital libraries, copyright, web 2.0 and social media.
Cori Dickerson is an absentee MLS student and a part-time librarian in the great state of Texas. Her art and English degrees keep her in the lap of luxury, and the high school students keep her from making any progress on her To Read list. Cori’s trying very hard not to be a responsible adult, and spends far too much time playing Star Wars: The Old Republic. (Star Trek is her one true love, however!) She can generally be spotted on Twitter and Pinterest, scavenging ideas from much cooler people.
Circulating Ideas 