A white woman with dark hair and glasses stands in front of a wall with several words in 3d on it. The word 'BOOK' is centered over her head.
Kimberly Hirsh in front of the wall of words at
Planet Word Museum in Washington, DC

Hi there! I'm Kimberly Hirsh. My pronouns are she/ her/hers. I'm somebody's mom. I work as a school librarian. I have a PhD in information and library science. I love to read, play tabletop and video games, and make things. I used to perform in theater and improv comedy and I may one day again. I have been extremely online since 1993 and still enjoy tinkering on the web. I manage multiple chronic illnesses. I'm married to my kid's dad. We have a cat.

Want to get in touch? You can reach me by email.

Recent posts

I get excited and ambitious and then I have a flare and then I forget all my passions and ambitions. Listen, body: I am doing my best to build a life where I take good care of you. Could you stop derailing literally everything else I want to do?

I want to food, to cook fresh ingredients into beautiful and tasty things. But I like to experience this as meditative and do it when I have energy, so I’m currently parsing out the things that keep that from happening. Maybe I start making really excellent lunches.

How to Scholar(?)

In my doctoral program, there was a class that we colloquially referred to as “babydocs.” As it was taught the year I took it, the purpose of babydocs was two-fold: 1. to introduce us to the field of library and information science and the variety of potential research areas and 2. to introduce us to the skills a person needs to be a scholar.

It’s been over seven years since I started babydocs and I’m still trying to get that “how to be a scholar” part down. Here are the topics and skills babydocs covered in this vein:

  • Theory and methods
  • Literature reviews
    • searching for literature
    • reading other people’s literature reviews
    • managing literature
    • writing literature reviews
  • Peer review
  • Project management
  • Research ethics
  • Diversity, equity, and inclusion
  • Presenting orally
  • Empirical research methods
  • Collaborative & interdisciplinary work
  • Creating posters
  • Writing research proposals
  • Grants and funding
  • Data management
  • Writing referred papers
  • Metrics

This was a two-semester course and that was only HALF of what we covered, with the other half being specific to our discipline.

I know how to do all of the things on this list, but I still haven’t created a cohesive framework or workflow that lets me do them in any but the most just-in-time manner. But a just-in-time scholar isn’t really the kind of scholar I want to be.

(And I do want to be a scholar, even though I’m not interested in tenure-track work.)

I share all of this because I’m going to try, all these years later, to create such a framework. Something that wasn’t part of babydocs.

I plan to blog about it and I thought y’all might like to follow along.

Finished up my time at #FSNNA22 with a dance by the pastries.

Okay, getting dressed and then heading to the #FSNNA22 Gather lobby to try dancing and throwing confetti.

Skipping the first sessions of #FSNNA22 today to have breakfast with my family. Back for the 11 am, then missing the closing session to play D&D.

Today, in Kimberly remembers that scholarly publishing is broken: lots of journals demand either full transfer of copyright or an exclusive license for the full term of copyright, without compensation to the author. Academics often don’t control our IP.