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.