Wanderings of a Librarian

2006-09-27

Feeling like a librarian

Like Jane, of a Wandering Eyre (here, here, and here), I've been teaching, preparing to teach, or debriefing my teaching for over a week.

We get library preparation assignments from each student before the 50-minute one-shot session. When everything works well (the prep assignments come in more than 24 hours ahead of time and they actually reflect the topic the student will be working on all semester), this is great. Although it takes an amazing amount of time, I write notes with research ideas on each assignment and hand them back to the students at the beginning of the library visit. This means I've looked at each person and said his or her name. I really startled a student in mid-class last week when I called on him by name. But he was a good sport and answered my question about what disciplines might provide fruitful research on his topic.

Marking up each prep assignment is a mini-research project, or a maxi-reference question. I feel more like a librarian when I'm working on those prep assignments than I do at any other time.

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2006-09-15

Survey closed

Thanks for taking the Survey Monkey survey. Very helpful!

I found Survey Monkey quite easy to use. I built the survey without reading any documentation--I had to go back a couple of times when I guessed wrong what a particular "question type" referred to, but that was easy enough. It was a bit less intuitive when it came to making the survey active and figuring out how to link to it.

  • To make a Survey Monkey survey active, you open it by clicking on the closed box next to the survey in the listing

  • To figure out how to link to the survey, you click on the collect icon and it gives you a choice to create a link for an email or a web page.


Accessing the results were also intuitive, so here they are:
  • 26 respondents

  • Number of books that I have read so far in 2006:
    • 0 to 2: 7.7% 2 respondents
    • 3 to 5: 3.8% 1 respondent
    • 6 to 10: 11.5% 3 respondents
    • 11 to 20: 15.4% 4 respondents
    • 21 to 30: 26.9% 7 respondents
    • 31 to 40: 3.8% 1 respondent
    • 40 plus: 30.8% 8 respondents

  • The type of books I have read most often for pleasure in 2006 are:
    • Mystery novels: 34.6% 9 respondents
    • Romance novels: 15.4% 4 respondents
    • Adventure novels: 17.7% 2 respondents
    • Science fiction novels: 23.1% 6 respondents
    • Biographies: 3.8% 1 respondent
    • Self help: 0% 0 respondents
    • Other: 57.7% 15 respondents

  • The number of nonprofessional magazine titles I have subscribed to or regularly read in 2006:
    • 0 to 2: 50% 13 respondents
    • 3 to 5: 46.2% 12 respondents
    • 6 or more: 3.8% 1 respondent

The "other" in the types of books questions drew responses like: nonfiction, graphic novels, and history. Thanks, everyone! This was fun.

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2006-09-14

Survey Monkey

We're using Survey Monkey this semester for evaluations of our Library Instructions sessions. I want a bit of practice with the collection half of this process before I start using this with students. So, help me out here. Take this survey on reading for pleasure--it's only three questions and I'll post the results late tomorrow afternoon. Thanks!

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2006-09-09

Why I love working on a college campus

Well, okay, so I'm working on a Saturday.

But, how many Americans get to say they watched a cricket match while eating lunch today?

Of course, I didn't know much of anything about what was going on. But neither did about half the players. Lack of knowledge of the rules or strategies didn't seem to diminish any one's enjoyment of a delightful late summer afternoon.

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2006-09-06

IM a Librarian

We have rolled out Instant Messaging reference for the fall semester. I would still like to improve the web page with status indicators and/or logos of the services, but the information is there. Besides the web page, we marketed the service with bright red bookmarks printed with the IM information and IM was mentioned in the promotional material that was sent out for Techology Changes Fall '06, our attempt to get the word out that the Libraries will begin charging for printing on October 20.

We're getting maybe a question a day via IM at the moment--not bad for a new service and the beginning of the semester. We've had a variety of responses from patrons and librarians:

  • When I was stationed at the greeting table for orientation, I pushed the red bookmarks. Most students said "cool!" There were a surprising number, however, who said "I don't do that."

  • One IM session took an hour--the librarian reported that it could have been done in under ten minutes if the student had come to the desk.

  • A student ended an IM session this weekend by writing that it was awesome that the library was offering this service.

The first, and longest, step to getting IM reference at our library was to research the security issues. Two articles proved most useful for that:

  • "Naughty but Nice", from SC Magazine UK which focuses on security issues, discusses the scope of the problem--small but growing at an alarming rate.
  • The second article, "How 2 Luv IM," from CSO (Chief Security Officer?) magazine, has a good point-by-point discussion of the issues.

The most serious security concern comes from file transfers. At our library, staff members are using either Trillian, which we set to not accept file transfers, or Meebo, which doesn't yet support file transfers. The second security concern involves clicking on links. We have asked people to be as careful about doing that as they are about clicking on attachments to email--or more careful since some viruses can apparently mask themselves as a person on your IM buddy list.

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