Meet Meg, our new coworking librarian

Last month, Meg approached us with a brilliant idea: could she try to create a coworking librarian position at CoCo?

There was only one possible answer: “How soon can you start?”

You may know Meg as DotMeg or even as Meg Canada. She’s got a new mini-gig which she’s blogging about thanks, in part, to the support (though not financial) of her employer Hennepin County Library. Read more about her in her Mover and Shaker profile. Also check out this beautiful space (the St. Paul location is just as lovely but not as classic). [thanks joe!]

librarians and roller derby

I went to a roller derby match this weekend, my first, and this morning this article crosses my desk. Coincidence? I think not.

By day, she’s Beth Hollis, a 53-year-old reference librarian in Akron, Ohio. By night, she’s MegaBeth, an ageless dynamo on the roller derby rink. “All my life, when I tell people I’m a librarian, they say, ‘You don’t look like a librarian,’ ” Hollis said. “And now that I’m a roller derby girl, they say, ‘You don’t look like a roller derby girl, either.’ So I don’t know where I fit in.”

update: please head on over to FM Daisy’s blog to see more Derbrarians.

a day in the life of a library/librarian

I didn’t work in a library today, so I didn’t think I’d be good for the Day in the Life project that many librarians were doing today. However, I did enjoy reading people’s tweets and now I’m going back and checking out some blog posts and Flickr photos.

Evan Farber 1922-2009

My sister is an Earlham college graduate and she passed along the sad news of Evan Farber’s death. The college has written a lovely obit for him and a memorial page where people can share their own memories of him which many people have. I’ve been enjoying reading them and curious to learn more about some of the stories…. “who of my EC generation can forget that picture of Evan leaning back in a chair up against the newly installed electronic security system with a machine gun across his lap.”

Evan’s leadership in college librarianship ran counter to the conventional wisdom of the time and he spoke, consulted and wrote prolifically to counter those accepted ideas. Perhaps his most famous thesis, that “the library is not the heart of the college, the teaching-learning process is,” not only rankled his peers, but also caused them to rethink their professional roles and the services offered by their libraries. In debunking such conventional wisdom, Evan illuminated the real importance of the college library and articulated ideas that today have become central tenants of modern librarianship: the meaningful value of a college library is the degree to which it helps students learn and faculty teach. College librarians’ most important responsibility is to work closely with the teaching faculty to educate students about how to use information resources as a key part of their education. This is the legacy he leaves and the challenge he places before present and future librarians.