How to Create Fake News and Deal in Private Data
How would you do as a Somali pirate? A third world farmer? A fake news dealer? Find out here.
What to Read in Your Nonfiction Book Club
Recently, someone asked me for good books for her nonfiction book club. As an academic librarian, I don’t usually get asked for broad recommendations—instead, it’s specific research requests like where do I find site reports on shell mound archaeology or I need academic articles on ancestral genetic testing among…
The curious thing about bucket lists
Oddly enough, I started writing about bucket lists… and ended up exploring my thoughts on wills. So here we are. I suppose I felt I had to set bucket lists in the context of our wills, because I see both as a snapshot of our hopes and desires at…
What I Love About Wills
Little Women is a Civil War-era novel of close friendship among four sisters, and in one of the more vivid scenes, Amy worries about her dying sister while trying to please her wealthy aunt… and resolves this tension around money, life, and death by writing her own will. I could…
What would a day without the ladies look like?
If the women in your life disappeared, what would happen? Reading about this today, I realized I’d find it hard to get much done: no bus driver to take me to work no one to purchase the library’s journals no one to manage the students who lend books no…
Get Tools, Toys, and Seeds from Your Library
I’m a big pusher for libraries. “Did you know they have free stuff?” I say. You roll your eyes. Yes, you know. “I mean, they have books, but did you know they have other free stuff?” *** It’s easy to take the free thing for granted, but many early…
Affordable Genealogy Research
I’ve been interested in genealogy ever since a childhood 4-H project, where I carefully wrote each person’s names with colored rhinestones on a poster. Even now, I enjoy exploring historic records and helping others find out more about their families. But genealogy can appear expensive — so this piece…
Expert Google Searching
Once we understand that search engines can’t do everything, we can look at what search engines can do. Since most of us use Google, I’ll start with a few ways to zoom in on useful information and ignore the rest. Searching on Google Find a specific phrase with “…
How to find things on the internet
Recently, I’ve had folks ask for my expertise in things like how to do research, how to find things online, and how to be an expert Googler. I have a few tips for web searching that I’ll share in the next post. But really, your most important skill isn’t to…
Using folk motifs to write stories of your own
As a child, I drank in folktales in all colors, from the olive book of fairy tales to the crimson and lilac books. And then, I tried rustling through the coats in our large wooden wardrobe to find Narnia, or sweeping under the rug to find a virtuous girl’s golden…