Mayo Clinic presentation recap

On June 21 I traveled to Rochester, Minnesota, with Augsburg College colleagues to talk about LibGuides with the Mayo Clinic librarians. They’d been intrigued after one of them saw the nursing guide I created for Augsburg.

deathref in American Libraries Direct!

This is becoming old news, but I still want to share: My post at the Death Reference Desk about Premature Burial Device Patents was featured in the February 10 edition of American Libraries Direct, the e-newsletter for the American Library Association. Nice! Click “Continue Reading” below to see a screenshot of the blurb, or check out the full newsletter. DeathRef is mentioned fourth from the bottom.

PRI internship and libe tech conference

Quick shoutout! I recently started an internship with Public Radio International cataloging radio segments for the PRI / WNYC show, The Takeaway. I’ll also be presenting at the Library Technology Conference 2010 at Macalester College in St. Paul next week with my Augsburg colleagues, discussing contracting for LibGuides. Forget how to make the dang things [...]

escape coffins and patent classification

Blogging at the Death Reference Desk has been interesting, entertaining, befuddling and more. We get the occasional reference question, but it’s mostly pulling in news articles and other content through RSS feeds (the deathwire, as I calls it) and selecting, summarizing and commenting on items of interest.

I do, however, look for opportunities to dig deeper—to be a librarian, not a blogger, and add research value, not regurgitate the web…

MLA 2009

Thanks to the hounding encouragement of my colleagues at Augsburg (thanks, guys!), I’ll be attending the Minnesota Library Association 2009 Conference in St. Cloud, MN, October 14-16. I recently became a member of the MLA — it’ll be great to meet some people and check the pulse of Minnesota libraries, including public ones (oo oo, [...]

Minneapolis moved! and into the work fold

I forget I can write asides with this blog… updates without the hassle of premeditated depth. In short: I’ve moved back to Minneapolis, MN, and am currently doing contract work with Augsburg College to create subject guides using the all-hailed LibGuides. The software isn’t bad, but it definitely has its foibles and limitations, resulting in [...]

birth of the death reference desk

A few months ago, once fellow Minneapolitan John Troyer, now a professor of death and dying practices at the University of Bath, England, approached me with a vision. Well, it was more like a statement: “We need a blog.” He and his colleague Kim Anderson, a public librarian in Portland, Oregon, were in the habit [...]

degreed!

It is official; I am a graduate of the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia with an MLIS. Hooray! Actual commencement was May 21. Having missed the inordinately early and devilishly well-concealed cap-and-gown deadline, I was not in attendance and thus have no capstone photos of me in full graduation regalia. (Awww.)

#acrl2009

March 12-15 I attended My First Library Conference, ACRL 2009, in three-hours-south Seattle. Schoolmates and I skipped classes and ditched work to play Tetris with a car trunk and try not to laugh explaining to the border guard the purpose of our visit to those United States. They look at you funny when you claim you’re a book-sort, even if you’re not, without fail, it’s true.

ACRL

I am biting the term paper bullet and running away to Seattle for four days for the ACRL Conference. Woo hoo! Get in touch if you’d like to meet up!