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."