Cool Off @ Carlson

We had our annual social event for library staff this week, "Cool Off @ Carlson". We rented a snow cone machine and made our own snow cones. It was very fun! Pictures are posted on flickr. The blog "checking out and checking in" saw them and expanded on the idea of having a cool off event for patrons. Better idea! We'll have to try that next year.

Dimensional Barriers?

I describe some of our users as crazy.
Kenn says they are "working across dimensional barriers".
Isn't that a much nicer way to describe it?!

Article in the Chronicle

It's finally out - the article about the undergraduate research project is in today's (online) Chronicle of Higher Education. Yeah. He (Scott Carlson) did a nice job of bringing together a project that spanned two years. Our observations seem obvious to me now -I wonder if others will be surprised or if we're behind the curve? We'll see what the response is.

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??