erl2017_empathy

A presentation given at Electronic Resources & Libraries conference April 2017. Title of presentation: Purposeful empathy towards better processes and products. Libraries exist to serve users, yet we often fail to empathize and appreciate how they think and work. Empathy builds a better team, a better product, a better us; we need to recognize when to incorporate it into our teams and design processes. Join our workshop for a hands-on experience analyzing and discussing scenarios where empathy should be present, as well as discussing its limitations.

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reference-it-style

An all female IT panel given at NELA 2016 about utilizing traditional library reference methods and skills in IT troubleshooting.

Libraries and IT: the struggle it is

Panel given at Access 2016. This panel of four will discuss the current state of the merging of Libraries and Information Technology (IT) and the illusion we have that IT has been successfully integrated into our organizations. In many ways, IT has not found its way to the center of our organizations but continues to experience a divide from the library culture. Bringing IT to the center of Libraries has been viewed as an invasion of library work rather than an integration and a benefit. We will also discuss the idea that library culture is not just one culture but encompasses many different cultures: cataloging, IT, admin, and public services, etc. The integration of each culture - being able to see the individual pieces fitting into the big picture - is important to the success of the library. A struggle heard often from those who have merged IT and Libraries is not seeing the importance of hearing what IT or Library departments are working on.

The Reference Interview: IT style

Conference Presentation at Access 2016 in New Brunswick

Calendar Hack