This is Damask Bowie, reporting for NPR News.

@allisunrae I’m definitely still working on the critique part. But honestly, if you simultaneously synthesize instead of summarize AND provide a strong description of each study’s context, methods, and results, you’ll be way ahead of most people.

I have made a grave error. I ate carrots and hummus for lunch, but that is not a lunch. It’s a snack.

A thing I’m telling myself today that you may need to hear, too: Who do you want to be later? Go ahead and do the things that person will do.

The first issue of my newsletter goes out today. Thoughts on peak nostalgia and assurances that you are wonderful will be included. tinyletter.com/kimberlyh… to subscribe.

I find myself having a lot of existential crises lately. I think it makes sense for somebody who is preparing for comprehensive exams but hasn’t fully articulated the research question for her dissertation, is parenting full-time with four hours a day of childcare, is sharing caregiving responsibilities for a post-op parent with her siblings, is in the middle of a chronic illness flare up, and lives in the world. (When I put it like that, it sounds like I have stuff going on!)

These crises come up especially when my kid is sleeping, especially especially when he’s having a rough teething night, so I feel like there’s little point in trying to sleep myself.

It was in the midst of just such a crisis that I decided to return to the work of Katie Linder, whom I think I found because she is one of the few people actually doing podcasts explicitly about scholarly communication and engaged scholarship. I took a break from her stuff when this flare up got unignorable, but it felt like exactly what I needed in the middle of my latest existential crisis.

And it was, even more than I anticipated. Dr. Linder’s latest blog post about Radical Self-Trust articulates exactly how I operate when I’m at my best, when I’m managing to keep the imposter syndrome and existential dread at bay. I highly recommend checking it out and following her work.

I’m reading Emilie Wapnick’s book How to Be Everything and I got to this section header and felt like she was speaking very directly to me.

Several weeks ago now I was having a late night conversation with W. We were talking about how he would have fared at my high school, where he would have gone if he hadn’t gone to the local Friends School instead.

“I think you’d be okay. I mean, I was in the middle of my class, and I did alright.”

I was tenth in my high school class of about 300. I was in roughly the top 3%. And I perceived (and apparently, continue to perceive) that as the middle.

When my final report card came, my dad said, “Why didn’t you tell us you were tenth in your class? That’s amazing!” I said, “Well, you know, it’s not like I was valedictorian or salutatorian, so it’s not a big deal.”

I think my perception might be skewed.

It’s a very privileged problem to have, I’m aware, but I suspect this kind of thinking contributes to mental illness in academia.

Twitter. Let's talk about the intersection between #CLinTE and LIS education. Any iSchools doing great work in CL that you know about?

Impatient for #CLS2018 proceedings after seeing all these great tweets.

Thread. This is one of the reasons I haven’t spent my time in school worrying about doing everything right. If doing things right doesn’t get me the prize it’s supposed to, I might as well instead focus on doing what’s interesting.

Librarians and teachers looking to squeeze three more weeks of PD into their summer might want to check out Greg McVerry’s #EDU522: “three weeks to figure out the web and how to use it to teach.”

Let’s teach students how to own their data, manage their online identity, and build the web.

Drew Zandonella-Stannard perfectly captures the reality of early parenthood in the latest issue of her newsletter.

I have been really digging newsletters for the past several months. I’m planning to do a write up of my faves soon. But for now, think about these questions:

Are we BFFs? Should we be BFFs? Do you like to imagine we’re BFFs?

If the answer to any of these is yes, my new newsletter is for you. (Sorry, the two people who signed up for my old secret newsletter… This is a whole different thing. But it’s still for you.)

A really common exercise to help people decide how to spend their time is to ask them to imagine their funeral. What do they want to be remembered for?

The only answer I consistently come up with is that I want the people gathered to all feel, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I cared about them.

My brother-in-law got married this past weekend. My mother-in-law had to give a speech at the rehearsal dinner. She was self-conscious going into it. At the reception, she told me that as she stood there, she thought, “Well, Kimberly would tell me I can do this, so I can.” And thinking of that helped her get through it, and of course she did a beautiful job.

I want as many people as possible to feel that way. I don’t know what kind of reach this newsletter will have or where it will go. But I hope each person who reads it will feel like they’re not alone, like someone believes in them, like someone has their back.

I’m describing it as

Like a high five in your inbox. Platonic love notes and things that made me think of you.

If that sounds like something you would like to have in your life, you can sign up here.

My new newsletter: Like a high five in your inbox. Platonic love notes and things that made me think of you. khirsh.us/b/1Rs

Just browsed the cooking section of the Durham County Library Hoopla Collection and I’m blown away by how comprehensive it is. I want to cook all the things!

I wrote 279 words about definitions of “makerspace” today. Tomorrow: reviewing all 26ish pages I’ve written so far and making a plan for the conclusion.

Just thought to myself, “I want to be the Jonathan Van Ness of library science.” I’ll let you know when I figure out what I mean by that.

Hey writers. What are your day jobs?

I’m fairly open about the fact that I have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and polycystic ovary syndrome and that fatigue is my primary symptom for both of these. I’m in the middle of a Hashimoto’s flare up, and today I sat down and made a little table of the types of tasks I can do depending on what type of day I’m having: low energy, medium energy, or high energy.

This is a valuable table because often I think that, since I’m working on a writing project and a curriculum development project, I can only ever get any work done on high energy days. But that’s not so, because each of those projects is made up of smaller tasks. Writing up my literature review workflow really helped me set up this table. Here it is in list form, in case it would be valuable for anyone else.

Literature Review Tasks

Low Energy

• Literature search

Medium Energy

• AIC review
• concept map
• revision

High Energy

• synthetic note
• memo
• outlining
• writing

Curriculum Development

Low Energy

• identify resources
• format documents

Medium Energy

• outline

High Energy

• write

This is a great example of a library policy that was excluding people and how a library professional changed it. Le… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Reading the Hopeless/Rodriguez run of Spider-Woman and feeling super seen.

Sorry for weird colors- I use a blue light filter app and it affects my screen grabs.

Anyway, highly recommend for parents-to-be or new parents.

Which, I recently read a thing that says postpartum is three years, so if you, like me, have been doing this for almost two years already and don’t feel a lot more competent than you did in the first six weeks, don’t feel bad.

When you have been together for almost 20 years and you’re both librarians. Happy anniversary, Will!

Me: ugh writing this comps lit review is such a slog Also Me: I should probably put together an annotated bibliography of everything that’s been written about Rupert Giles and librarianship

I’ve owned my own personal domain since 2001, though it’s a different domain name now than it was then. For the past year or so I’ve been trying to remember how I internetted in 2001, because I’m super nostalgic and think that was my favorite Internet time, and then I remembered that the Internet Archive has my back. So I visited my own domain on the Internet archive and have implemented a few things here inspired by that.

Here they are so far (probably more to come):

• A "Currently" widget to let you know what I'm enjoying right now
• A shoutbox widget where you can say hi
• A "Speaking" page about where you can find me in meatspace
• A "Following" page full of links with fun annotations

My makerspaces lit review is just over 25 pages, with two sections left to write: definitions and conclusion. After I get those done, I’ll take a little break to work on other stuff. (Reading about Connected Learning, probably!) Then back to revise this.