Thank god for fall semester

I often wonder if library vendors or publishers would ever release new products if it wasn't for the relentless calendar of midwinter and annual meetings. I feel the same way about Fall Semester. Suddenly I have kicked into high gear. Stuff HAS to get done, and no fooling around. I must get new pictures hung on the wall. I must get new signage installed. There must be a new display in the case. I must get photos taken for my Read Posters. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Count down to freshman move in day - 20 days!

August is slow in the library....

I can remember when I first became a librarian, I had a fit about student workers wearing baseball caps at the desk. And now here is one my students knitting at the desk and I don't even blink an eye. I have definitely mellowed and it's probably a good thing!

More Facebook and Flickr

I'm equally obsessed with facebook and flickr.

Yesterday was the first time someone I didn't know commented on my flickr pictures. I had posted pictures of the dorm I stayed in when I went back for my 30th reunion (!!!) at Mount Holyoke. (It was a dump.) Some incoming freshman found my picture and went into a panic about what dorm she should choose next year. I felt kind of bad and tried to steer her to current students on, of course, facebook.

I have struck up a number of conversations with incoming freshman on facebook (thank you Brian Matthews). I have been asked to be their friends, but I'm not kidding myself. I know it's a blanket invitation. In fact one student asked me to be her "top friend", which I'm POSITIVE was a mistake! I alerted the dean of freshman to the Class of 2011 group, which she had never checked out. You certainly get an excellent feel for what they're worried about by reading the posts. I also told one of the IT guys that there seemed to be a lot of confusion about vista. He joined the group, supplied some information and also updated the website. That made me feel good and like I'm not TOTALLY wasting my time here...

Using del.icio.us for a class website

Sue made a web page this morning for a group of summer school students using only del.icio.us tags. (The idea came from Carrie Newsom at at U of Florida.) It's not perfect -- she can't figure out how to change to order of the links. But it was very quick to put together. And now as students send her more links, she can add them.. Kind of a fun experiment.

The Schools They Turned Down

There is a fascinating discussion going on the Class of 2011 facebook group. The question -- What schools did you decline offers to go to UR?

They turned down Cornell, Penn State, Brown, Bowdin, USC, George Washington, U Washington, Scripps, Bucknell, Carnegie Mellon, Gettysburg, Virginia Tech, Skidmore, Duke, UNC, NC State, Ohio State, UMichigan, Tufts, Emory, U Illinois, Colgate, Brandeis, Indiana, Wesleyan, Brown, Rice, Wash U, Amherst, U Minnesota, Northeastern, Northwestern, UCLA, Tulane, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Dartmouth, U Virginia, American, Georgetown, Oberlin, Lehigh, RIT, Syracuse, Purdue, Penn, Johns Hopkins, etc....

Reasons they chose UR

financial aid (lots mentioned this)

"so much better"

beautiful

seemed friendlier

early decision

UR is a "new ivy"

it's about getting an education

brilliant professors who are actually good at teaching

loved my visit (several mentioned this)

got accepted to the 8 year medical program

Reasons they turned down other schools

too big (more than one mentioned this)
they did turn down some full rides. In fact one student wouldn't consider a school until there was a full tuition package

curriculum not as flexible as UR

knew friends who couldn't switch majors because their GPAs weren't high enough

high suicide rates

professors not actually doing the teaching

big names colleges have a lot of ego

ivy league schools don't allow graduates to do research

pompous

too close to home

I love to cruise facebook!

Web Page for Future Students

Quite by accident, I was looking at the Colorado State University Libraries homepage. They have a very cool page for "future students". I especially like the quotes from current students in the box "how we use the library". Very nice page. I'd like to do the same thing.

New Picture

We finally took a new picture of the reference staff. It takes a lot of shots to get one where everyone has their eyes open and doesn't "look funny".

Mission Accomplished

I have to confess -- I set the bar quite low with these classes we do for freshman (actually pre-freshman) that don't have a library assignment. Sigh. But I am declaring Tuesday's class a complete success. One of the students said she wasn't planning to use the library but now that she had seen it, she probably will. That's a home run as far as I'm concerned.

Too Much Information?

We were having one of our summer technology show and tells today and Sue came up with an interesting idea. Should we add links to our flickr pictures, our librarything accounts, our facebook pages from our staff pages? We're always looking for ways to break down barriers. Would more personal information help or would it be too much??

Where to start?

We did a class for freshman yesterday. Well, they're not even technically freshman yet; they're on campus for a special three week program. We showed them the library homepage. That was excellent. How do you find the library homepage? What is the url? Can you find it in google? Can you get there from the university homepage? We thought we were showing them the course reserves pages.... But I was sitting in the back of the room watching and listening to them, and I realized they didn't know WHAT a reserve book was. Sigh. Go back a step or two. We had them find a book in the stacks. That was useful. They were awed by the size of the library. We ended by showing them the DVD collection. That caught their attention more than anything else. I'm always of mixed mind about these classes. At best they learn their way around the library and come away knowing that there are people to answer their questions. But at worst, they think the library is really lame and a total waste of time. I'm not sure if we can ever undo that impression.

LibraryThing and the OPAC

Heard a very cool talk by Tim Spalding, found of LibraryThing at ALA. The Danbury Public library has purchased their tags and added them to their catalog. Wow. How cool is that?

I'm looking at the record for an indian cookbook. The LCSH are Cookery, Indian and Cookery, Asian. Cookery??? Who has ever used the word cookery? Asian? Huh?

While the LibraryThing tags include cooking, indian, indian cooking.

We need help and user added tags might be the answer!

Freshman and Facebook

I read an interesting post by Brian Matthews about reaching freshman through Facebook
http://theubiquitouslibrarian.typepad.com/the_ubiquitous_librarian/2007/07/making-a-good-f.html

So I went and checked out the group of the entering UR freshman class, "University of Rochester Class of 2011". It's interesting to see what they're talking about - vista vs. xp, room assignment, what to bring for a dorm room, freshman writing classes, etc. They are also lots of pictures, including some of the library. I joined so I could answer their questions about the pictures and I added a few pictures of Carlson Library. Within minutes someone had commented on my comments and on my pictures! I don't know if it will lead to much, but the response was immediate.

The "no list"

The best talk I heard at ALA was by Don Barlow, Executive Director of the Westerville Public Library. He and his staff keep a running list of all the occasions during the week when they say "no" to a patron. At their staff meetings they review the list and talk about ways to turn the "no" into a "yes. Oh my gosh. This is such a great idea! I turned two "no's" into "yes" before I even got back to work. And they have a cool homepage and even cooler catalog.
Blog: blog.westervillelibrary.org/director/
Web: www.westervillelibrary.org

You know you work in a geeky library when

students have taken all the free Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) time line posters. Wow. Imagine those in a dorm room!

Trusted Network of Friends

I was looking at a presentation about a photo diary study they did at MIT from Computers in Libraries. Really cool project and very well written. One of the observations they made was that students ask questions first of people in their trusted network. Libraries and librarians are not part of that trusted network. One of my colleagues was telling me a story about a friend of her son's. She (the friend) is a grad student at a big research university and needed an article. She emailed her undergraduate friends, one of whom is the son of a library staff member. Her son forwarded the email to his mother, who is my colleague in the library. So of course my staff member answered her reference question. Did the friend ever go to the Big Research University Library. Nope. Did the friend ever go ask anyone at the Big Research University Library? Nope. "I didn't even think of going there". Wow. We are so not part of their circle.

Less is Sometimes More?

I got a really interesting email yesterday from someone setting up a group study room in their science library. When I worked at Texas A&M (TAMU) we used to reserve rooms for students and it was a living nightmare. Students would want us to settle arguments about who was supposed to have the room reserved when. At one point we limited the number of hours a day students could reserve the room, so then they would make up names. It was horrible. I vowed when I created two group study rooms here in Carlson that I would NOT go down that path again.

We don't make reservations for students. Period. The room is first come, first serve. The room cannot be locked from the inside and they have big windows. There are blinds, but even when they are closed, we can see in the room.

We do reserve the room for faculty who have weekly "workshops" associated with their classes. In fact our rooms are so popular for these classes that they're pretty much booked solid every afternoon and most evenings until 9 p.m.

So why are we having such a good experience and my experience at TAMU was so dreadful?

Fewer rules?

Maybe because we have lots of big tables where students can study and work in groups even if they can't use the rooms?

All I know is that our group study room policies work like a charm.

Knock on wood.

It's a very small world

How weird was this??? I went to my THIRTIETH college reunion this weekend. I meet a women who was also a biology major, so I at least vaguely remembered her. She casually mentions that her daughter goes to the University of Rochester. But wait, not only does her daughter go to the UR, I have met her!! She won the Carlson Art Purchase prize and we are going to hang her painting in the library. How weird is that??

Facebook Status

Cynthia has informally gotten a whole bunch of us (me, Sue, Brenda, Eileen) to start using facebook more. We're posting pictures and changing our status. Wow. It's really interesting. Two people commented to me today about my status. I feel like people know more about me, in a good way. I could get addicted to this!

Anniversary Exhibit

Marylou and Sue did a fabulous exhibit in honor of the 100 year anniversary of Chemical Abstracts Service. Yes, we are a geeky science library!

Reading Student Blogs

I read about a dozen student blogs. I learn about their lives; I get a good picture of when the semester is crazy and they are feeling swamped. They write about their love lives, which seem to have changed little in the past 30 years...And quite by accident, one of the blogs is written a student who works in the library. It feels a little bit voyeuristic and I'm not entirely comfortable doing it. BUT... I can't stop myself. She wrote the *sweetest* post when she promoted to circulation supervisor -- honestly, it made my day. I guess that's justification enough.

Why is so hard to just find Nature???

I've helped the same graduate student twice this week find the journal Nature. Of course finding it in the OPAC is a well documented, living nightmare. I'd forgotten that it's even hard to find in the list of electronic journals. I know it's Nature (London) - but she sure didn't! Who would know to look under that title except someone who works in the library? Sigh.

Carlson Art Purchase Prize 2007

I chose a painting this year for our art prize. It's titled, Lab Rabbits, and was done by Sheila Tripathy '09. She's coming by next week to find a good place to hang it. I love it. But I love all our student art.

What are we most proud of

It's spring and academic librarians are writing annual evaluations. Sigh. I would hate to think how many of these I have written over the years - TOO MANY. At our department meeting we each named the one thing we were most proud of last year. I'm always fascinated by this exercise. Sometimes, I know exactly what people are going to say and other times, it's a total surprise. People's major accomplishments were wide ranging, including:

Four major shifting projects

Two presentations

Two new instruction sessions

Review of and improvement of signage

Hiring and training new students

Extensive reference work that led to acknowledgment in a faculty paper

Working with faculty to purchase new serial titles

Sharing pictures on Facebook and Flickr

1. I had one of our circ students, Sarah, take pictures at our study break.

2. I posted them on flickr for staff. It was much easier than putting them in a power point slide.

3. I posted them with 365 libraries group.

4. Then I posted all the pictures with students to my facebook account as well as to the Carlson Library group.

5. Sarah tagged all the student pictures for me.

6. I got a facebook message from at least one of the students tagged in the picture.

Sweet.

Lots of laptops during exam week

When we interviewed students a year ago, we found that very few of them brought their laptops to the library. It's exam period now, and almost every table of students has at least one laptop. In fact, I walked by a table with four students, and four laptops. They have even started to plug in their laptops at the same table with the library computers. I think I understand what's different - they bring their laptops to the library during *exam* week, because they don't have classes all day. Ah so!

If it's free, they'll take it

I honestly think students will take anything we put out if it's free.

empty boxes (yes, just empty boxes) - gone

discarded books - gone

superseded maps - gone (they even ASK when we're going to put out more...)

boxes of miscellaneous cables and wires - gone

old posters - gone

Update: White Boards on Wheels

No one used them initially, but now the white boards on wheels have taken off. Not only are groups of students writing the *white* boards, they are using the boards themselves to create a little private spaces. Phew. We were right after all!

Extension cords?

O.k. We are now officially a full, service library. We have Kleenex, we hand sanitizer, we have white boards on wheels, we have laptop locks, we have coffee, and now, we have extension cords!

All 4 of the cords were loaned out on Sunday, and at this moment, all of the cords are currently loaned.

The cords were put on reserve 3/6/07 and the loan stats are as follows:

Cord 1: 23

Cord 2: 35

Cord 3: 7

Cord 4: 3

Carlson Library Study Break May 2007

10:30 p.m. the night before exams
150 students
soda, cookies, candy, doughnuts
20 minutes
all gone

Two books by my cousins

I just found out that both of my "little" cousins have written books. I am so impressed. I bet I can get a personal autograph!

Margaret (left) co-edited the latest volume of the Adams Family Correspondence published by Harvard University Press. Yikes! And Mary Kate who writes for Good Housekeeping just came out with 37 Houseplants Even You Can't Kill.

I'm technostressed

I signed up for Library Thing, Twitter, and Delicious yesterday. This morning I created a facebook event. I'm suffering from technostress!

The best part of my day - Wegmans

What a horrible day I had yesterday. I should have predicted it -whenever I have big blocks of unscheduled time AND have big plans to finish a project, the day falls all to hell. I spent several hours editing two separate documents, only to discover that in both cases, I was not working off of the latest version. Grrrrrrr. The phone rang off the hook with - well I guess I probably shouldn't go there. But suffice it to say, many issues were brought to me that did NOT need immediate attention.... Oh yeah and I accidentally submitted a correction form and marked it **urgent**, when it wasn't at all. And even worse, I have a bad feeling that I got the problem wrong all together sigh. The only redeeming thing about the day was that I went to Wegmans after work and got to eat a bunch of free food. Though even there, I managed to knock down a display of ttravel cups not just once, but twice! Hopefully today will be a better day.

Checking Out Laptop Locks

Circulation so far this year for laptop locks. This is a lot for a science library on the "other side" of campus.

LOCK 1: 144

LOCK 2: 109

LOCK 3: 133

LOCK 4: 119

Who would have ever thought that students would check out LOCKS for their laptops??? I even had an email from a graduate student asking that we buy MORE because they were all checked out the other night. Sometimes it is the little things.

Retirement Party

We had a retirement party last week for a colleague who has worked in the library for 25 years. I hope when I retire I have her energy and enthusiasm for the job. I certainly have worked with people who have coasted for their last few years, their last ten years.... I also hope that seventy five people come to my party.

It's nice working in a small library

at a small school. (University of Rochester only has about 7,000 undergraduates.) This morning I have been asked for tape, a ruler, a paper clip and a pair of scissors. I have them and I can give them out. They're rarely demanding about their requests; they often are almost apologetic about their requests.

Roy Tennant is leaving CDL

and going to OCLC?? Wow this is huge! I had dinner with him once and asked him how he stayed in touch with users when he clearly had a high level, administrative position. "I'm practical", he said. Ah so! I guess if someone as brilliant as Roy is practical, I too can embrace my own practicality!

Three cell phone conversations

are going on at once in the atrium across from me. (I can see them through the glass wall). One young woman is standing. One woman is sitting on the stairs. A third is sitting on the bench. They are all about four steps away from each other having separate conversations. Fascinating.

Referring Students to the Library

Barbara was arguing this afternoon that it's important for us to connect (reconnect?) with the faculty because they refer students to the library. I'm not sure I'm too worried about this generation of faculty. Most of them are my age and did their graduate work in a library and have fond memories of the physical space, the books, the journals. It's the next generation of faculty and students that I'm thinking about. Today's graduate students (at least in the sciences) rarely use the physical library. In fact I suspect if we asked them they would say they didn't use the library at all, even though they use library resources in the form of electronic journals, every day. Will they refer their students to the library? Will they be interested in library instruction? Hmmm. Maybe I should have been an acquisitions librarian.

It's been a good week

Some weeks it's one step forward and two steps back, but this week I think there has been a net gain of a step.

We're going to be open 24 hours the night before exams. I know lots of libraries are open 24 hours all year, but this is a huge deal for us. And we're the first library on campus to do this, which appeals greatly to my competitive side!

Sue put a sweet meebo widget on her subject pages so students can easily IM with her. It can't hurt and I love it when we just DO something rather than talk and talk and talk about it....

And after 8 years, my staff have all (well at least a majority) agreed to use the online calendaring system. Frankly I never thought I'd see the day. I give Marylou total credit for calling the question again. Yeah!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I've never seen these people before

I went to a biology seminar last week. The room was packed. The room was packed with people I had never laid eyes on before. Well, I recognized one faculty who is retired and maybe some faces that I had seen on the web.But otherwise, they were complete strangers. Just in case I needed any reminder that graduate students and faculty (at least in Biology) aren't coming to the library building any longer.... Interesting, they do use library resources. The speaker cited lots of articles and books in his presentation. At some point, they came from a library subscription.

Wrong about the white boards

Rats. I guessed wrong about the white boards. I thought there was an insatiable demand for them so we bought two more white boards on wheels. We put them out on Thursday and no one has written on them or moved them since. Rats. When they like the furniture or the space, they start to use it immediately. Publicity is not necessary.

"Do you have the organic chemistry book?"

You have to love their confidence!

Maybe DSpace is just too hard for everyone

I don't think anyone would disagree that the majority of faculty find depositing documents into DSpace to be just too darn hard. So our library long ago offered to take care of all the work associated with depositing. It turns out that it's pretty hard for us too. Good grief. Technically it's not straight forward. The whole "can I legally put it up" issue is just as confusing for us as it is for faculty. And it turns out that figuring out who the publisher is, what keywords to assign, etc. aren't trivial decisions either. Sigh.

I should have thrown it away

and started over. Sigh. Over the years I've heard dozens of authors describe how they sometimes just have to throw away pages and pages of writing and start over again. Easier said than done. I've been working on a book chapter with some colleagues. It's been painful. The words are awkward. The thoughts don't flow. I knew I should have just chucked the whole thing and started over again. I didn't. I thought it was good enough. I wanted to meet the deadline. I wanted to get it off my desk. Hopefully a little humiliation (deserved) will help me remember this lesson next time.

Second Life and the Berkman Center

Sarada's daughter, Erica came and demonstrated the Berkman Island in Second Life last week. Very interesting. The extension students found it very valuable to have a forum to talk to teach other and to their professors. It made the online experience feel more like a "real" class.

I also felt better when Erica admitted that manipulating the avatar was not intuitive nor was finding your way around. I've tried second life a couple of times, but wow, the learning curve is steep.

This made me laugh -- this virtual class was the first time that law school lectures were made available to the public. It turns out making that happen was as big a challenge as setting up the class in Second Life!

My brother uses the public library

I knew that my brother used the public library for books. There are always tons of library books at his house. He was awestruck to discover that the public library also had CD's. Apparently he has been taking out dozens of them and uploading them to his ipod. And not only does he use his "local" library, he has been exploring the holdings of other public libraries in the county. He was astonished to discover that each library owns "different stuff". He was thrilled. It's funny what we, librarians, take for granted.

Of course, it's probably illegal to copy library cds onto his computer and then his ipod....

Did I mention that he's an attorney?

Hmmmmm.

April Fools Prank

Well there is no denying that I brought it on myself. I forwarded this funny blog post about office pranks to a couple of my colleagues (Alison and Marylou, this means you!). I came into MY office on April 2 to find it filled with boxes labels "National Geographic", "Scientific American", and "Playboy". I fell for it hook, line and sinker! All I could think was -- "Who was dumb enough to accept dozens of boxes of old National Geographics??"-- the nemesis of every science librarian in the world!

April Fools!!!

Yes, I Do Look Like a Librarian

Well, there is no denying I do look like people's stereotype of a librarian - middle age woman with thick glasses, hair in a bun, AND flat shoes. I seemed the obvious choice to create this facebook group, "Yes I Do Look Like a Librarian".

Two Different Views of Interlibrary Loan

I helped two undergraduates yesterday afternoon place their first ever, interlibrary loan requests. They were astonished. They were amazed. Someone was actually going to send a copy of the article to THEM via EMAIL?? They couldn't believe it. Who was on the other end sending the article? Did we do the same thing for other people? And suddenly I remember - interlibrary loan is an amazing service.

On the same day, there were many complaints from a very unhappy faculty member who felt that Interlibrary Loan service was unacceptably slow.

Different points of view I guess. Why do I spend so much more of my time looking at the world from the second point of view instead of the first?!

Should we talk to faculty during their office hours?

I had an interesting conversation with a friend who worked for many years as an academic librarian and now teaches Information Technology at RIT. She is unique in that she has both the librarian point of view and the faculty point of view. She thinks that librarians should come by and talk to her during her posted office hours. That's when she goes and talks to colleagues. It makes perfect sense to her. On the other hand, one of my librarians, thinks it's a terrible idea and totally violates the faculty - student privilege. Hmmmm. I suspect my first friend probably has a useful insight that we should pay attention to.

Registering in order to give a presentation

I've been reading with fascination Michelle Boule's posts about give a full day preconference at TLA. Not only is she not getting paid for the preconference, they are REQUIRING that she register for the conference in order to give her presentation. I'm impressed that she is throwing a fit and such a public one. Now it turns out that she misunderstood the letter from TLA, but I know from personal experience, that this situation is not out of the realm of possibility. It happened to me last fall at the USAIN meeting. I was being a sport and filling in for a speaker who cancelled at the last minute. I had to drive two hours down to Ithaca. And when I got there, they demanded that I pay the registration fee. I argued briefly, and then just gave up. I won't do that again!

Taking a break from signage

I've decided that we had gone over board with the signage. We had signs about recalling books, extension cords, wireless printing, saving to flash drives, and printing clusters. It was just becoming a big clutter of information that no one paid any attention to. I went out this morning and just picked up every single sign holder on every single table and put it away. We are officially taking a break from signage!

A sweet story about two of my librarians

This is a sweet story. Katherine O'Clair, a life sciences librarian at Arizona State, is one of the 2007 Library Journal's "Movers and Shakers". She is a graduate of Nazareth College which is in Rochester. She became a librarian in part because of her positive interactions with Isabel and Kenn, who helped her when she was working on her biology papers and using our collections! How often do we actually know that we've had an impact on someone's life? Not very often!

Living the Life Sciences

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6423400.html&

Back ups

When we interviewed faculty as part of our IMLS grant two years ago, we were struck by what a big problem it was for them to keep backups of important texts and files. Now we're interviewing graduate students, and again, they go through all kinds of hoops to backup their data. They back up their files to laptops, lab computers, flash drives, ipods, gmail, and finally print. I was feeling kind of superior until we lost access to our library network drive for 48 hours. Yikes!!! Suddenly sending myself an attachment on gmail didn't seem so silly after all.

Finding an article in a print journal

Twenty years of helping students find articles in print journals, and it's still just as hard as it always was and is still completely non-intuitive. I just helped a woman find a journal title. She had dutifully looked up the call number in the OPAC. And that's all she had. No author, no title, no year, no page. She understood the problem when I showed her shelves and shelves of bound journals. Who could blame her for being ticked off at having to go back and redo her work? Sigh. No wonder everyone (me included) chooses the online article whenever possible.

Google Personalized Home

Oh my gosh, we're having so much fun playing around with the google personalized homepage. It's probably been available for months, but we just noticed it. And we LOVE the different themes. The tea house theme goes dark at night. The little fox is asleep in the bed at night. When it's raining outside, the tea house is dark. At noon, a picnic table appears. It's too clever!!!

The Hole Punch has been set free!!!

I had the illuminating experience this morning of being a patron. I tried to the use the three hole punch that we've put by the printers. Hmmmm. It turned out to be almost impossible to actually use because we have it secured with a cable and lock. It doesn't seem to make much sense to put out a hole punch if it can't actually be used to punch holes.... I set it free and we'll just take our chances with theft. Somehow I think people are more interested in stealing laptops and ipods than a hole punch.

Self Check out Machines

I shouldn't have done this, but I squashed concerns yesterday about installing a self check out machine. But good grief. I saw a woman with a SEEING EYE DOG use one at Seattle Public Library!!! I'm pretty sure our geeky UR students can figure out this technology....

Extension Cords

We're checking out something new at the circulation desk - extension cords! We now have laptop locks, desk lamps, and extension cords. Students are moving tables and chairs all over the place in order to plug in their laptops. We looked into the cost of adding new outlets, but it was prohibitive. Just buying a half dozen extension cords and checking them out seemed to solve the problem without breaking the bank!

Why do we make everything so hard????

I've been thinking a lot lately about book delivery. Why aren't we delivering books right to faculty offices??? Good lord, Netflix can deliver a DVD to your house and we can't take books to the building next door? And I think the librarians should do the book delivery, not student workers. What a fabulous opportunity for those casual conversations that are so important in developing a relationship. This started me to think about just getting books pulled and held at the circulation desk. Wow. I forget, we already do this!! Unfortunately the service (I use the term loosely) is so buried and non-intuitive that even I forgot about it. Librarian Avengers wrote a very timely post about book delivery at Cornell. It made me laugh out loud. How ridiculous is this??? It takes thirteen steps, thirteen hard steps, to get a book recalled and held at a circulation desk. And this is acceptable????

Waiting in line for computers

I think this is a first for us. Every single computer (except the
Mac...) in the library is being used and I just saw a student sitting
on a chair waiting for one to open up. Very interesting.

Are graduate students doing puzzles?

It's semester break. There is NO one here. But someone has done two more puzzles. Graduate students? Cleaning staff? Gremlins?

Two puzzles a week now

They've gone mad. Someone just finished a beautiful puzzle by Gustav Klimt. I put a new one out yesterday and it's already almost done. Serious procrastination is going on. Tomorrow is the last day of the semester!

Study Break December 2007

We had a very successful study break in Carlson Library
last night. There were about 150 students, which meant the
line snaked around in front of the circulation desk. We gave
out paper bags, so students could easily take the food away and
get back to studying. And in fact, within a half an hour, they were
all back at their seats working.


On the "menu" - clementines, apples, bags of chips, granola
bars, cookies, donuts, soda, water, juice, Hershey kisses, cow
tales, and fire balls.

Puzzle Madness

It's puzzle madness this semester. Every week the students do a huge jigsaw puzzle. We never see them working on it. But every morning a little more has been done. I just love and I can't tell you why.

You can tell it's exam time

You can tell it's exam time even with your eyes closed. It smells pretty funky out there this afternoon. The floor is packed with students who probably haven't slept, showered, or laundered in a while. Everyone has food with them - big bags of chips, cups of coffee, bags of take out. It's desperate times.

Audrey Taylor from University of Houston

I just read in LibraryJournal Academic Newswire that Audrey
Taylor passed away on November 28, 2006. I feel very sad.
She was a lovely women and an excellent reference librarian.
She really loved her work. I can remember laughing with her
about being a "Cougar Doll", which is the name of the University
of Houston Cheerleaders.

Fabulous write up of POA library

The Society of Physics Students took the department chair to lunch and raved
about how the Physics-Optics-Astronomy (POA) Library is their second home. That afternoon he came to check out the library and brought a camera. By the next day, there was a very nice write up on the department's homepage. It doesn't get much better than that!

A lot has changed in six years

I was cleaning out old files at the reference desk. I found a four page training checklist for reference desk students. When I first started at Carlson, we had students working with us at the reference desk from 9 a.m. until 12 midnight!! It seems impossible to imagine now. Over time, we cut back more and more, until now we have no reference desk students at all. Frankly these days there is barely enough business to justify a staff person on the reference desk, much also scheduling a student. It was a huge job to supervise so many students. The scheduling was horrific and the training was non stop. Still, it was super fun to work with them. I miss that part.

Friday Flicks

Oh rats. I wish I had thought of this! My friend Nan showed movies on Friday afternoon at her
library, the Physical and Mathematical Sciences Library at Penn State. Apparently they have been very successful. Sounds like fun!

Is everything old new again?

I just saw a kid walk by with a Michael Jackson "Thriller" t-shirt. Is M.J. so old and weird that he's hip again??? I don't get it. Of course I don't get the rubber flip flops in the 40 degree rain either....

Why are we so busy this fall?

It is just crazy in Carlson this semester. There are already students working when I come in at 8:30 a.m. When I left last night at six, every computer on the first floor was in use and every big table was filled with students working. What's going on? I'm guessing it's no single thing, but a combination of a whole bunch of things.

1. They accepted 200 more students than usual this year. Apparently there are lots of freshmen living in triples. I guess I would want to come to the library rather than studying in a crowded dorm room with two other people.

2. We renovated a second group study room that can be reserved for workshops. A whole group of students who normally would never have come to Carlson are "forced" to come here. Once they find us, do they come back to study?

3. Free coffee in Carlson seems to gone through the roof. In particular there is a rush on the coffee between 4 and 6 p.m.. There are workshops scheduled from 6:30 to 8: 30. Blick. I guess they just pump themselves up on caffeine to make it through.

4. Lots of students used to study in the Management Library in Rush Rhees. With that entire area under renovation, those students have been displaced to somewhere. Is it Carlson?

5. We didn't exactly get *new* computers on the third floor, but we moved them out of the scanky computer room right into the middle of a big study area. It seems very public to me, but the students are crazy for them. They're certainly in use every minute of every day.

6. And why are they (someone??) doing jig saw puzzles at such an incredible pace??? We put one out during the summer, just as an experiment. Now we're putting a new one out at least once a week, sometimes more often than that. I have no idea what's up with this but someone is keeping busy at night!

Day Two. Internet Librarian 2006

Let's just confess. There really is no "second" day to report very much of, because I went to the Monterey Aquarium in the afternoon! In the morning I did go to Judi's talk about institutional repositories at University of Rochester. I also heard Megan Fox talk about "Trends in Mobil Tools". Wow. She crammed a huge amount of information into 45 minutes. I had no idea how little I actually knew about mobile tools!!! Yikes. Very interesting stuff.

More library fun Scare Fair 2006

The Scare Fair was a huge success again this year. The original idea came from student complaints that the stacks were scary, which in fact, they are. We decided to capitalize on the scary issue and hold a "Scare Fair". One of the main activities is to introduce students to the stacks. We do a "stack stalk" where they have to find three books by call number. The reward is a ticket to go up in the tower on the top of Rush Rhees library. The tower of the library is the focal point of campus and it is only open one day a year, so this is a big deal. Every year I think the students won't do it. It's too dorky. But every year, they do it. They run through the stacks and laugh and shriek. They find their books, they get a piece of candy, they go up in the tower. It's all good.

We also had a fortune teller this year. Again, it sounds dorky, but students lined up to have their fortunes told. In addition to a fortune we gave them a "ticket to success". The ticket had the name of their librarian, picture, email, etc. The punch line, "we hope there is a librarian in your future". The idea for this came from our undergraduate research project where we have learned that students have no idea what a librarian can do for them or even that there is such a thing as a subject librarian.

Internet Librarian 2006. Day One

Our talk, "Using Ethnographic Methods to Know Your Users ", went well. I think in particular the list of things we thought were true before we started the project and proved to be true versus the list of things we thought were true about undergraduates before we started the project and proved NOT to be true was quite useful. Turns out we all can learn something by actually talking to students.

I loved the session on Second Life. That Lori Bell makes me laugh and laugh. She's right, sex and gambling do lead the way in technological innovations.

Darlene Fichter and Frank Cervone are a fabulous team. I know that everyone else has seen this pair before, but it was completely new to me. It's really really hard to do a joint presentation and they totally pulled it off. Most of the things they showed were of course over my head, but I still took pages of notes.

Fun in the Library

I am a huge fan of Liz's call to have more fun in the library (specifically play games) at the closing keynote of Internet Librarian 2006. On that note, we celebrated "10-22-38", the anniversary of Chester Carlson's celebration of xerography. There were balloons and cupcakes. Next year, the anniversary will fall on a week day and we can REALLY do something fun!

Use of Wikipedia for Classes

Where the heck have I been for the past year? I knew about wikipedia, but I had no idea that faculty were assigning readings from it or actually having students make contributions to it as part of a class assignment. Good grief. I was still way back thinking about whether or not they could cite it for a paper. Obviously faculty and students are way ahead of me on this one. There is even an an article in wikipedia about using wikipedia for class assignments.

Why didn't we think of this before?

Why didn't we think of this before? Every year, usually around exam time, we have a rash of laptop thefts. It's horrible. We're distraught. The student devastated. Our response has always been to post signs and more signs. As you can imagine, it is not very effective. This year students can check out laptop locks at the circulation desk. Lots of other libraries are doing this, but somehow we had never paid any attention. Geez...

If you build it, they will come

For years we've had a little computer room on the third floor. It has never really worked. We replaced the computers, we painted the room, but it still didn't feel right. Students only used the room after ALL the other computers on the other two floors were filled. So we decided to give up. We're going to convert the room into group study with white boards. We *know* that will be wildly popular.

We moved the computers to new workstations right by the big group study tables. Students started to sit at the workstations before we even installed the computers. It's terrific. All eight seats were in use by 10 a.m. yesterday morning. This new arrangement is a huge success! I'm definitely glad we did it.

Here is a link to all our construction photos.

They're baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!

They're back - the freshmen. I'll know it's time to retire the fall that the freshmen *don't* bring tears to my eyes. They seem impossibly young and their excitement is palpable. I love these first couple of weeks. They're the best time of the whole year.

The libraries hosted a breakfast for the parents yesterday. The idea came from our research project and observations that these kids talk to their parents all the time about their course work. We figured maybe it would be a good idea to talk to the parents as well as talking to the students. It was super fun. The parents are so proud of their kids and so eager to learn anything and everything about being a college student. One of the mothers I talked to kept tearing up. It was so sweet. I loved it!

Bridge connecting the library to new building

They are building a bridge connecting the library to the new BME/Optics building next door. Yikes! We will have THREE entrances, one on every floor. Of course, this creates all kinds of security and staffing problems. But when departments actually *want* to make a connection to the library, how can you say "no"?? We're going to put in security gates and a self check out machine and keep our fingers crossed.

Browsing Nostalgia

Every year we discuss with faculty what print journals to cut. Sometimes we do it because inflation rates have outstripped our budget and sometimes we do it because they have requested new subscriptions. It's always an interesting conversation. Until just this year, we kept track of how often we reshelved the unbound journals. As you might except, we rarely reshelved any of them. With the exception of Science, Nature, or Chemical and Engineering News, the current print issues are rarely used. And yet, when we discuss canceling print, the faculty talk about their need to browse, presumably their need to browse print. So is this browsing nostalgia? Nostalgia for the old days when they found their research ideas by browsing through print issues of the journals in the library? Of course who am I to talk? Just look at my nostalgic print reference collection...

Retreat to discuss research results

We all went on a retreat to discuss the results of the Undergraduate Research Project. It was good to bring everybody up to speed on what we had learned. After all these months of happily collecting data, now it's time to actually *do* something with it. That's much harder!

ALA New Orleans

Back from ALA in New Orleans. The best thing I did was go on a field trip sponsored by STS (Science and Technology Section of ACRL). Paul St. Pierre, from Tulane, made all of the arrangements.

Stephen Nelson, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, at Tulane led the tour.
He even has a web site for the tours.

http://www.tulane.edu/~sanelson/Katrina/index.html

Other people have written far more eloquently than I about New Orleans. I was shocked to see
how little work had been done. The area of destruction is enormous and it is not a hub-bub of activity. It is not filled with construction crews. There are not FEMA trailers every where. It is quiet. There are ruined houses and businesses as far as the eye can see. I don't think there is a plan. It is very sobering.

STS Hot Topics Discussion Group in New Orleans

I think we're going to have an interesting discussion group in New Orleans. Stephanie Hartman from MIT and Lori Critz from Georgia Tech were co-authors of two great articles in the winter issue of ISTL and I invited them to come and help get the discussion rolling. I love the T-paper, a newsletter they put in the bathrooms at Georgia Tech and I subscribe to the MIT news blog. I can't wait to meet them!

Sunday, June 25
10:30 - 12:30
JW Marriott
Ile de France II & III.

Library Videos on YouTube

I found this video entitled, Library Dominoes, from someone's (?) blog. It made me laugh. Then I searched "library" and found this one of kids leaping off the mezzanine and onto the top of the stacks. I've always wondered what happens at 9 p.m. when all the grown ups go home. Now I know the answer!

The Millennials: Always On

Here is an interesting article in the Northwestern alumni newsletter, The Millennials: Always On.

Once again, I've struck that we have made the same observations of undergraduates in our Undergraduate Research Project. Parents are heavily involved with their children's studies, they are scheduled from morning to night, they all have cell phones, and they get to library resources online.

We're going to do it

Wow. The world really has changed since I became a librarian. We decided we could and would withdraw our old print volumes of Pollution Abstracts. Yes, discarding an index. Once upon a time that would have been heresy. Now it seems like a no-brainer. The undergraduates barely use the *online* indexes any more. Even if there was a world wide catastrophe and we lost internet access, no one would go back to this print index...

The Vampire Librarian

I don't know how I found this blog. You know, one blogs leads to another, leads to another... This librarian really knows where the rubber hits the road. I laughed and laughed at this entry about the stapler. Forget all that fancy Web 2.0 stuff, I spend way more of my day fixing staplers, copiers, printers, etc. etc. Very funny stuff.

Mapping Diaries

I'm getting ready to do my 10 minute presentation about our Undergraduate Research Project. I got so much out of the mapping diaries we had students do. We asked them to keep track of every place they went during the day. Their lives are just packed. They work out, go to class, go to lab, go to work, go to a music lesson, eat on the run. No wonder they don't bring laptops to the library! They would be crazy to drag one around with them for the 12 hours they are running back and forth all over campus. And when the heck do they eat???

Have you ever played these games?

Susan has been looking at gaming for a chapter in her book. Wow. I was pretty clueless about what was going on in these virtual worlds. She's been playing Second Life. I knew that players bought virtual things like cool clothing or accessories with real money, but I had no idea that they bought real merchandise with real money. Home Depot has a store! According to Susan, "you browse the shelves, as you would an online catalog, pick out what you want and purchase with a credit card. Then it is sent to your house or you go to your local store to pick it up. Just another interface for e-commerce."


I'm trying to get my head around all of this. Susan's observation is that " the games are less games than just a virtual environment for socializing. Second Life has no game objective- it is just for socializing, e-commerce, virtual dating".

Future of the Book

Well, much to my amazement, I spoke for 15 minutes on Saturday about the "future of academic libraries". Hmmmm. Actually I dodged the bullet when it came to predicting the future and just talked about problems with no obvious solutions. Someone from the audience commented about how much he had gained by browsing the stacks of Stanford, Harvard, and New York Public. I couldn't think of a useful comment, other than to agree with him. Is anyone building a system that has browsability?

Carlson Library Study Break

We had such a fun time last Sunday night for the Carlson Library Study Break. There were zillions of students in the library; the line snaked out the door. They love getting a brown paper bag that they can fill with bags of chips and drinks and cookies, etc. It's great.

Cancerbaby

I always tell my colleagues that I read blogs so I can keep up-to-date, keep abreast of the latest developments, etc. etc. But I really started reading them because they were fabulous stories, but true (or at least I chose to think they're true). I loved Julie Julia and Chez Miscarriage. (Both have stopped blogging.) They made me laugh and cry. How strange to feel so connected to people that you've never met, will never meet, don't even know their names. I will miss Cancerbaby.

Check out alt ref blog

I really like this new blog, alt ref, by Brian Mathews at Georgia Tech. In this entry, he made (I think) two really short videos about why students don't use the OPAC. We especially laughed when he showed an example of a URL link in the OPAC that doesn't lead to full text.... Duh.
We have some of those links and they make people CRAZY!!! Sometimes you get so close to the situation, you forget how completely nutty it is.

Susan has been looking at the statistics for the papers in UResearch. Jeepers. It's amazing how many hits these things get once they're "out there".

• Eastman School of Music has 27 masters thesis and dissertations in dspace. Collectively, they have been downloaded 10,533 times!
• Three computer science undergrad research papers have collectively been downloaded 753 times .
• Two economic phd theses with 590 collective downloads

Do you think students equate librarians with finding the physical book? I've been rereading some of the data we've collection for our undergraduate research study. They will ask someone in the library (librarian?) if they need help finding a book. But, I'm struck by how few problems they report *finding* the information they need, i.e. electronic information. They seem to seek out more help from the folks at the writing center than they do from us at the reference desk.

I've been reading all this stuff how this generation of students wants, needs, expects to participate. How do we do that in libraries? How can they participate in the catalog (book reviews?), the web site (blogs), etc.

Here is a very cool, commercial example of user participation. You upload your own pictures into the Kodak commercial. Slick

Linda Musser just won a big award from ELD. I am so happy. I used to work with her at Penn State and she is amazing. Incredibly smart, productive, organized, energetic. Did I also mention that she's very *practical*?! I could go on and on.


The ELD Awards Committee is pleased to announce that the 2006 Homer I. Bernhardt Distinguished Service Award will be presented to Linda R. Musser, Head of the Fletcher L. Byrom Earth and Mineral Sciences Library at the Pennsylvania State University. All nominations were incredibly strong this year. The committee cited as determining factors Linda's: inspirational, no-nonsense leadership to advance the profession; approachability, generosity, wisdom, and many other mentoring skills; prolific, extensive, significant, and practical collaborative record of scholarship including research, presentations, editorships, and publications; appointments to national and international committees or leadership teams; and last, but not least, lasting, far-reaching, and substantial contributions to ELD, other societies, the field of engineering and science librarianship, and beyond. "Linda is ... one of the people who helped establish the culture of ELD that we see today: a culture that is welcoming, knowledgeable, energetic, respectful of colleagues, and interested in the evolving mission and role of engineering librarians." Linda's nomination received a record number of support letters from ELD colleagues, former co-workers/mentees, Bernhardt honorees, and faculty from Penn State. One quote that best summarizes the views expressed in those letters and the committee's decision: "All of these factors lead to a greater appreciation of the positive impact that Linda has had on engineering librarianship."

We're doing a little pilot project offering late (or at least later) evening hours on the reference desk. As I suspected, we have little to no traffic at the Science Library. In fact, our reference desk business is way down; the "main" library still seems to be hopping. Why?

We don't have very many faculty or graduate students come ask for help verifying citations any more. Lots of citations just automatically link to the full text; you don't have to figure out the abbreviation, navigate the OPAC, find it on the shelf, etc. And if you really did need the abbreviation, you can type them into Google, and almost always find the full title. Yikes! Maybe people just don't bother when the article is in print; if they can't get it from their desk top - forget it.

And most undergraduate in the sciences only need a few articles to write a paper. They don't have the vocabulary or knowledge to read the scholarly literature. They used to come to us to use the print indexes or the cdrom databases. Now you can find very good stuff on google. So why ask at the reference desk?

Data? Did people ever ask for data? I don't think I can remember the last time I was asked a real data question. And now where are they going? Well obviously - google!