Time to Remember

librarian

gardener

shopper

Disney World vacationer

teacher

QVC fan

gift giver

cat lover

pony owner

beader

reader

t.v. watcher

sister

daughter

my friend

Clean and Go Green Week

Wow. It's been a long time since I've posted to my blog.  Time definitely gets away from me.  We had a clean up WEEK at work. I wasn't sure if anyone would bother to participate. What was I thinking??? We're all drowning in paper.  Suzanne (whose office is spotless) spent two days cleaning out her file drawers.  Even she threw away a huge pile of papers, literally.  Interesting how we all needed permission (?) to take the time to clean, sort, and throw away.  

Mentioned in the student newspaper

I love to find the library mentioned in the student newspaper. We were listed 5 times in an article, "Almost 30 reasons to love UR".

• You dress up to go to Gleason [library], considering you will probably run into more people there than you will anywhere else on campus.
  
• You have a straight face when you tell your friends back home that a library is the social hub of the campus.
  
• You realize that the graffiti in the stacks is better than PostSecret's could ever be.
  
• One of the things on your to-do list before you graduate is doing some promiscuous acts in the stacks.
  
• There is always one person in the Gleason cubicle with a bathrobe on, and, yes, he probably lives there.

Student Grades

More on freshman advising. I was able to see first semester grades for my advisees.

• mostly B's with a few A's. Hmmmm. I guess I also shared the impression of my advisees that most students got A's in most classes. If my six are representative, that is not a true assumption.
  
• one student made the dean's list. I have much greater appreciation for a what a big deal this is now that I have seen every one's grades.


• a student who nearly withdrew from a class, buckled down and pulled off a good final grade. Impressive. First semester was a shock for all of them. Some were shocked on the first day of classes. It took some of them until the first exam...


• one student did quite poorly in a key class and yet had been totally confident the entire semester. I'm not sure what to make of that one.

Subject line: naked student

Email from Marylou, "There are jeans on the floor next to one of the tables near compact shelving and there are socks hanging over the back of one of the chairs. BTW, there is a book bag on the floor & books on the table." Gotta love exam week!

Day 2 Exam Week

I Think I Might Know Why They Use the Library

We had a dinner for our freshman advises sat their dorm on Tuesday night. It was great. The RA really did all the work. She ordered Indian food, which turned out to be perfect. The kids are sick and tired of pizza. Some of them had never eaten Indian food! The RA also arranged for one of the students on the hall to give an informal Indian dance performance. It was super fun. The boys all sat squeezed together on one side of the lounge, punching each other. The girls all sat squeezed together on the other side of the lounge, giggling. I forget that they were in high school last year...

I came away with another reason why students might be coming to the library in droves. The dorms, at least the dorm I was in, was pretty grim. I saw four sterile, ugly lounges. The first thing that greets you when you come in the door are the washing machines and the smell of wet clothes. There are no elevators. To get to the fourth floor, I had to trudge up an ugly, cement brick stairwell. In comparison, the library must seem like the Ritz. Beautiful furniture. Big tables. Clean. Attractive. What will we do if they ever upgrade the dorms?

Less is More

I had the opportunity to be a user the other day. The only difference is that I knew better than to just give up or go buy the book from Amazon when faced with an error message. I wanted to request a book, but didn't notice that it was already checked out and so chose the wrong form. If it happened to me, I'm pretty sure it happens to other people too. There are actually FIVE different forms to choose from if you want to "request this item".

1. Pick up item at my circ desk
2. Get checked out/overdue item for me
3. Put on reserve for my course
4. Request a pdf of article or chapter
5. Email a pdf of this microform
   
   
   I can see that each choice is different. I realize that there are probably at least five different back room processes for each of these choices, but do users really need to know about them? Haven't we learned anything from google? One box please.

A Place for Everyone

I was over in Carlson Library this afternoon and Trina showed me this list (edited slightly) her circulation students have made. It made me laugh. I love it that there are fans of *everyplace* in the library!

Reasons Why We Are Better Than Rush Rhees:

1. We have Trina
2. Carlson has coffee and tea
3. Overall super awesome staff of epic proportions
4. We have Ferdous (Super TA) & 2 human calculators
5. We have earplugs
6. We have Sony headphones and real calculators and Rush Rhees has 99 cent headphones and calculators
7. We have a glass staircase
8. We have better bathrooms
9. We are not attached to Gleason
10. We have study rooms
11. Carlson is fireproof
12. We have good lighting
13. We have a combine 8,000,000,000 credit hours worth of science knowledge
14. You can't get lost in Carlson

Writing a Book

This morning Alan showed me the gorgeous book he helped his wife write. It made me dream again about writing a book. Well, not actually writing a book. I would love to HAVE WRITTEN a book. Sadly, not only is writing a very painful process for me, I don't think I have a book worth of content in me. Darn it. Brenda just finished a book. Susan has written two books. I'm following two people on twitter who just finished their books. Everyone around me is writing books and I'm writing dorky blog posts. Sigh.

Is Anyone Suprised?

We saw some usability footage the other day for our new website. We asked some undergraduates to find a book on x topic. A librarian of course would immediately go search the OPAC by keyword or subject. What did one of the undergraduate do? Go search the subject in wikipedia and scroll to the end of the section looking at the references. When the references turned out to be only articles and not books, they just jumped over to Amazon. Not only were they able to find books over there, they could read a review which helped them choose one book. And then and only then, did they go to the OPAC to find the call number.

You Can Do That???

We, we libraries, are just terrible at marketing our services. We had a design workshop for graduate students this week. In the course of drawing a picture of their ideal library space, they also made suggestions for new library *services*. One enthusiastic and articulate student suggested that we offer a new service where you could request a book and it would be delivered to a circulation desk. Great idea. In fact, we HAVE this service. We offer this service. The graduate student has been at the UofR for seven years and has never found the service, despite actively looking for it. Groan. We're rolling out a new interface today for our request forms. Hopefully this will help. We have no where to go but up.

Making Shields - Kid's Day

We offered a new activity for freshman orientation this year -- a session for kid's day (activities for the younger brothers and sisters of freshman). Kids signed up to make a shield in the Robbins Library, a medieval special collection in Rush Rhees Library. Of course it was fantastic thanks to Alan, Barbara, Rosemary, and Nora. Barbara cut shields out of heavy paper. The kids could draw or paste things on the shields. When they were done, Alan took their picture with the shield. The shields were fabulous. They were decorated with ballet shoes, cows, hatchets, and pink pompoms! It was a lot of work for us, but I bet it made a huge impression on those kids.

Freshman Advising

I am doing freshman advising this fall. Six freshman. I have so much to so say about the experience, I hardly know where to start. It has made me remember back to when I was a freshman. I was often afraid, alone, lonely, uncertain. I spoke on the phone to my parents once a week. I communicated with my high school friends entirely by letters. We never even spoke on the phone. What a different experience my freshman year was these first year students. My advisees talk to their parents on their cell phone all the time. I know they had long discussions about what classes to sign up for. I made my choices entirely on my own, for better or for worse. They talk and text and facebook their high school friends. Even when they haven't made any friends at the UR, they are still very much in touch with their old friends. I'm guessing it's easier to be a freshman now than it 30 years ago. But maybe it's harder to make new connections when the old ones are never broken?

Always Connected

I went to convocation on Friday. I frankly sat on the grass and kind of spaced out in the gorgeous weather. But not so, the students all around me. Every single one of them was either texting or listening to their ipod. I had one of those "ah ha" moments. They simply are always connected. I'm still struggle to understand what that's like.

Ice Cream Give Away

Our last event for orientation week was giving away ice cream to the freshman when they come off the buses from their day of volunteering. It was cold. It was drizzling. We gave away 900 pieces and for the first time ever, RAN OUT!!! We wore our new t-shirts - thanks to Marc and student from the Art Library.

Book Sale -- Orientation Week

Good grief. What were we thinking? We had three events on the Tuesday of Orientation week. Helen and Eileen (with many volunteers) had a small book sale in the reference area. We used to have our major book sale before school started. The parking was ideal, but there were no students. Now we deliberately have more frequent, smaller sales while the students are on campus. It's fun.

Parent's Breakfast

This is the third year we've had a parent's breakfast. If I do say so myself, it was the best year yet. I'm not sure exactly what the difference was, but librarians and parents were deep in conversation for the entire hour. The first year was reminiscent of a high school dance - librarians and parents awkwardly standing in separate groups. This year, Susan wondered if she should even interrupt and give her welcome. My initial advisor training left me feeling completely overwhelmed and unprepared for the task. Ha ha! It turns out, I did learn something and was able to answer all kinds of questions from parents about classes, withdrawal, writing requirements, etc. Very satisfying! The librarian in the picture is Stephanie, head of the Art and Music Library. One of her students came up with the original idea for our t-shirt. Marc translated the idea into the actual design. Very sharp.

Presidential Jeopardy

Day one of freshman orientation. Students and their parents have to sit in their cars waiting to move into the dorms. While they're waiting, they have a big bag of information to look through. We always include a handout with a piece of candy taped to it (so ours stands out from all the other paper...) This year the theme for orientation was board games. Our invitation to the parent's breakfast on Tuesday had a candy land theme. On the other side of the handout Lisa made a presidential jeopardy game. They can call the reference desk and enter a contest to win a flash drive. We don't get a lot of calls, but we hope they see the invitation and maybe the game helps pass the time for those trapped in the car.

Book Cart Drill Team

Last week was a shocking one for Cynthia. She learned about the fall out shelter, pornography, and last, but not least, book cart drill teams. There are two camps. Those who think the book cart drill teams are silly (Susan and Stanley). Those who think the book cart drill teams are FABULOUS and go out of their way to watch the competition at ALA (Katie). I wonder which camp Cynthia will fall into?!