Eeek! it's EEB!

This year the biology dept. decided to do their own instruction for the Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior course. Be forewarned: students will be looking for biology journals in print (try the biology guide) and for books on E, E, or B (they should be in the QH-QL, I should think).

And in two weeks or so, expect an avalanche of needs for bio articles for their lit reviews. 

Searching for Plays/Monologues

So this is more of a question on my part than anything else, but how do you handle searching for plays or monlogues when a student comes to the desk?

I had a student today who was looking for a monologue, but then also needed to read the entire play for her class. Finding monologue books is easy, but I was having a hard time locating books of plays (and of course we don't own any of the plays she was looking for by title). We ended up locating a section of books with plays, and just browsing there until we found a couple books that looked passable, but I can't help but feel this isn't the most efficient way to search.

Any suggestions?

How about a Little Euthanasia, Scarecrow?

As many of you have found, there's a really tough assignment out there, roaming the stacks. Students need to find out about euthanasia in three locations. In some cases, three countries; others are looking for data from three states. Usually it involves at least two time periods. This can be awfully challenging. (Amy spent about 90 minutes with a student last night...)


Rumor has it this assignment is due on Friday, so it may be visiting a reference shift near you.... especially Jeff's Thursday evening shift. If you come across fantastic resources, make a note in the comments.

FTS bibliography review assignment

You may run into students needing a librarian's review of a bibliography. It's for Micah Maatman's class. I just talked it through with a student who, interestingly, had only books and websites on his list. We went over how to find scholarly articles, but he was quite sure none of them were really useful and said the teacher wasn't requiring a variety of source types. Oh well, his choices all looked acceptable, even though I thought some of the articles I found were fabulous. I couldn't persuade him of that.

EBSCO Issues on Ref. Computer

I've been having problems connecting to ANY Ebsco database from the reference computer today. No matter which I try, they all refuse to load - they get stalled while talking to the Ebsco servers, or something like that.

This appears to be just on the reference desktop - I tried from a different computer and had no problems, and Anna didn't have any issues from home, wither. Just wanted to let you all know in case it's still happening tomorrow.

I'm beginning to think I'm cursed with regards to computers this week...

Health Care

I've assisted five students and Jay helped another this afternoon with scanning their health insurance cards. I think they need to have copies to receive flu shots. Keep your eyes peeled for people looking somewhat confused/lost. Some have tried using the traditional image scanners.

Rivers assignment

I had two FTS students in Laura Triplett's class come in asking for books about rivers Wednesday morning. It seemed, on further investigation, that articles would be okay, which is a good thing because we don't have a huge number of books exclusively about particular rivers. One went away happily looking at fairly technical articles in Academic Search Premier on geology-type topics related to the Congo River. The other found an essay in a book about historical/social aspects of the Tiber river. I hope they know what they're doing, because I didn't see an actual assignment and am not sure if they can pick any aspect of a river. They each had different ideas, though seemed not too panicked about meeting particular expectations.