It was a pretty good reading year for me. I met the target of 50 books that I set for my Goodreads reading challenge. As part of gearing up for this new year, I went back and pulled the five books that I am sure I’m going to keep thinking about. In no particular order, below are my top five reads of 2023. Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life – by Dacher Keltner. Keltner provides a powerful tour of contemporary social psychological research on the importance and need for us all to experience awe and wonder. The book does a great job of laying out how valua ..read more

As a year comes to a close I try to round up and reflect a bit on this unit of time. This year 10th one of these year end reflective posts that I’ve written. You can see my reflections at the end of 2022,  2021,  2020, 2019,  2018, 2017, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012. I’m a big fan of metacognition, so I get a lot out of taking time to round up, reflect, and try and synthesize things at least once a year. If you are curious about what I’ve been reading about, you can see the 50 books I read this year in order on Goodreads. Year two as Director of Digital Servic ..read more

The open access version of the Spanish translation of my book The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation is now available online. La teoría y el oficio de la preservación digital was produced by a team of library and information science experts led by Isabel Galina Russell. It was published earlier this year in print by the Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Now the digital open access version is freely available online. Below are a few images from the book. I wanted to take a moment here to both share out about this new publication ..read more

My next book is a little closer to being fully finished. After working through some thoughtful feedback from peer reviewers I am now reviewing a round of copy edits. In fun news, the book now has a page on the University of Michigan Press website. It also has BISAC subjects, a DOI, and three different ISBNs. Page for After Disruption on the University of Michigan Press site. It is really rewarding to see the book becoming more and more finished. This view of the book is particularly exciting in that I also got to seem some advance praise/blurbs from the book that come from two scholars whose w ..read more

As a year comes to a close I try to round up and reflect a bit on this unit of time. This year marks a milestone in that reflective practice itself, now being the 10th year I have written one of these posts. You can see my reflections at the end of 2021, 2020,  2019,  2018,   2017, 2015,  2014, 2013, and 2012. I’m a big fan of metacognition, so I get a lot out of taking time to round up, reflect, and try and synthesize things at least once a year. Back into the world: Teaching, Working, and Exploring At the start of 2022 I was still deep in what become m ..read more

I’m excited to share that I have a new paper out, Slide Decks as Government Publications: Exploring Two Decades of PowerPoint Files Archived from U.S. Government Websites, in the journal Archival Science. This paper is a collaboration between myself and Jonah Estess. If you don’t have access to the final version, you can see a preprint of the paper here. It was a lot of fun to work on and I’m thrilled to see it up in print. As a side note, the team at Archival Science was really great to work with. We got really thoughtful peer review feedback and the paper is a lot stronger for it. Below is t ..read more

I’m excited to be able to share the second half of my next book, After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory with you for input and comments. For more background on the project, you can read the full book proposal for it here. You can also read drafts of the first half of it here. Like I did with my pervious book, I am posting draft chapters for input from the broader community of memory workers. Each chapter is up in a google doc for anyone to suggest edits on or offer inline comments. Below are links to each chapter. Chapter 5: The Maintenance Mindset Chapter 6: Conce ..read more

I’m excited to be able to share the first four chapters of my next book, After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory with you for input and comments. For more background on the project, you can read the full book proposal for it here. Like I did with my pervious book, I am posting draft chapters for input from the broader community of memory workers. Each chapter is up in a google doc for anyone to suggest edits on or offer inline comments. Below are links to each chapter. Chapter 1: A Future for Cultural Memory Chapter 2: What Disruption Wants Chapter 3: Where Data Drives Chapter 4: Why M ..read more

As a year comes to a close I try to make some time to reflect and synthesize some of what I’ve been up to across my work here on my blog. I’ve done this almost every year for the last decade. You can see my reflections at the end of 2020,  2019,  2018,  2017,  2015,  2014, 2013, and 2012. I’m a big fan of metacognition, so I get a lot out of taking time to round up, reflect, and try and synthesize things at least once a year. Continuing to stay inside Last year I was reflecting on how strange and abrupt the shift to “going inside” was at the start of the Pand ..read more

I’m thrilled to share that the new issue of Library Leadership & Management includes a new article from me, titled A Good Jobs Strategy for Libraries. Huge thanks to Thomas Padilla and Ruth Tillman who provided some really thoughtful comments on a draft of it. Sharing the abstract for it below. Abstract: In the 2014 book “The Good Jobs Strategy” management and organizational theory scholar Zeynep Ton identifies a set of key issues in job design, operational models, and staffing that enable organizations to both create good jobs and, as a result, deliver better products and services. Writte ..read more