Reading Time: 8 minutes
Over the last couple of years, I’ve done a lot of virtual meetings. Mostly interviews, if I’m exact about it. One morning, as I was preparing to join a media platform, I hit peak frustration. I had slowly added about a half dozen virtual meeting apps to my PC and this
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I’m coming up on my first year working directly with a governance board again. As some of you will know, a board will have its own personality. You may have one that is right in the middle, neither hot or cold. Some boards I’ve worked with will have one or two
Reading Time: 8 minutes
I am working on a presentation for an AALL caucus in the next month. It’s given me a reason to play around with Microsoft PowerPoint’s Cameo feature. It validated a concern that I have about virtual presentations, which is that the speaker and the presentation are split, visually, and that it
Reading Time: 6 minutes
Twitter remains a key social media tool for me. Its value has substantially diminished in the last 6 months, although some recent changes like view count have been enlightening, emphasizing that diminution if anything. I have used TweetDeck as well, which is a Twitter tool that enables post management. It has
Reading Time: 9 minutes
I read a lot about management and leadership. Other than my family, the people I work with are among the most important people to me. It’s not that we’re all great friends. I think I’m a difficult person to be friendly with, I’m pretty private. But when you run an organization,
Reading Time: 10 minutes
Empathy is a foundational leadership skill. The ability to understand another’s feelings is integral to understanding how to work with them. It can help you understand what motivates them. Or when they are pushed to their limit and you need to ask less of them. But I am struggling with fear.
Reading Time: 9 minutes
This blog is a multi-purpose outlet for me. It was fun to have to really stop and think about why that is. AALL asked me and Sarah Glassmeyer to do a coffee chat recently. The starting point was what we put out on the internet and why. As with any final
Reading Time: 6 minutes
A password is such a simple thing. People do not need much help to make a password. The difficulty comes when you want them to make a strong password. It increases when you ask them to make multiple unique passwords. As the difficulty increases, you create reluctance because each new, unique,
Reading Time: 7 minutes
I don’t write for money. Some of what I write, here or in publications, may eventually mean I can take a particular job or have a particular experience. This flexibility means that I sometimes say no to opportunities. I’m especially likely to say no if a publisher wants to own what
Reading Time: 14 minutes
As some of you may know, our family’s personal tragedy returned to the media recently. It was a stressful time for me as the family spokesperson. For reasons that I’ll get into below, it was vastly more difficult than it has been before. As I was coming out the other side
Reading Time: 5 minutes
One of the challenges of a courthouse law library is to serve a broad audience of researchers. Perhaps more than any other law library, we serve people across a lifecycle. I was talking with one of the people who used our law library at the start of their career and even,
Reading Time: 7 minutes
We have been going through a large amount of staff change since I arrived in San Diego 9 months ago. Perhaps its the result of leaving the fog of the pandemic and sailing out into the sunshine again. People are seeing new horizons. We’ve had some retirements and resignations to go
Reading Time: 7 minutes
One of the many reasons I blog is because of the technology. Ever since I first learned html back in the late ’90s, I’ve been fascinated with web publishing. For many years I ran my own web server. Then, four or five years ago, I finally committed to having someone else
I am now on Mastodon, the open source social media software. It’s not a platform like Twitter or Facebook. It’s just software and I am on an instance of it called Mastodon.world. I have not left Twitter nor do I plan to. But, like LinkedIn or Google+ or other platforms I’ve looked into,
The last mile of legal information is where law libraries can have the most impact. We can patch the gap between free-to-access information and actually helping people find and stitch together the information they need. Our ability to help people navigate the information – to understand it, rather than just browse and search it –
I gave a speech the other night. It’s the second public speaking event I’ve had in the last few months. Well, last few years, really. The pandemic meant that, even when I did a presentation, it was virtual and, somehow, simpler. It has been interesting to do something again after having fallen out of practice.