Publications

Strongly recommended... an excellent source of ideas and resources for providing your patrons with better access to your community.
—Teralee ElBasri in RUSA Quarterly

The Collection All Around: Sharing Our Cities, Towns, and Natural Places is my book about ways that libraries reduce barriers to the local riches around us and how that model can be embraced. Reviewed in Library Journal, Public Libraries, Reference & User Services Quarterly, and Catholic Library World.

An excerpt and interview appeared in American Libraries magazine. I also had the pleasure of talking about it for the library podcast Circulating Ideas.

Related is my article "Online Ticketed-Passes: A Mid-Tech Leap in What Libraries Are For" (pdf) in Information Technology and Libraries.

My essay "Walk this Way: Service Design for Clarity in a Disaster" appears in Pivoting during the Pandemic: Ideas for Serving Your Community Anytime, Anywhere. It's about the library bias for authoritative (official) information and the challenge that principle faced during Covid-19; the pedagogical role of service design; and how some libraries turned to outdoor services, in part to contend with those issues.

My article "The Dizzy Compass: Questioning How collectionHQ Works" explores how the widely used library collection development product arrives at dubious answers to the right questions. Subscription only.

A misc older one: Why Libraries Are Still Crucial Community Anchors. Oh, and I enjoyed doing a capsule review of Conor Dougherty's Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America for the San Diego Union Tribune.

I've done a small handful of presentations and panels, including at ALA and CLA annual conferences, Creando Enlaces, and Serra Adult Services. Available online are We Belong: Powerful Library Membership from Computers in Libraries 2020 and  One Step at a Time: How Libraries Can Promote Healthy, Thriving, and Livable Communities from OCLC/WebJunction, a panel including myself, Noah Lenstra, Mike McGinn, and Mary Sizemore.

One day I'll have the courage and focus to write a critique of public libraries' centering of education and school-like programs, a trend that may have recently peaked.