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.

World Economy Assignment

I've had 3 students so far this afternoon working on an assignment for a World Economy course (I forgot to get the actual course title/instructor). The students are required to find at least 1 recent book and 1 journal that deal with the economy of their country - I think they're actually supposed to have 3. It looks like the professor wants them to find a journal they can follow for the rest of the semester, so they're supposed to find a journal title, not a specific article. For instance, I just helped someone find the Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy to cover Thailand. Titles like the Wall Street Journal aren't specific enough to count as their primary journal/magazine, unfortunately! They're also supposed to write the information down in "bibliographic documentation", which is confusing since they're not citing a specific article, just the journal. 

So far the best way I've found to do this is to use a database like Business Source Premier and search as if I'm looking for an article, and then look through the results for a good journal title. From what I can tell the books don't have to be just on the economy, as long as they're a recent publication on the country (and hopefully they mention the economy in there somewhere).

Musings

I so much more enjoy being at the Reference Desk when the library is busy and there are people to help.

The computer tower has a wonky power button so when you are unable to get it started fiddle with the blue button.

Not sure if I like the out-of-the-box reference desks sold by various companies. Strangely enough, the desks look like out-of-the-box reference desks.

Does anyone go right into advanced search when looking for information packages in our catalog? I don't as a first choice, but it works first-rate when I do.

Who compiles the use statistics for patron activity at this desk? I remember seeing a report once, but that was a couple years ago. The archives keeps use statistics if anyone is interested.

Reviving the Reference Blog!!

It has been a long time since we used this blog, but let's see if this will give us a way to communicate about assignments, frequent issues, and possible solutions. I think it may be particularly useful as we fold our reference peer tutors into our ranks. I'm first going to make sure all the librarians can join in, and then if we feel comfortable with it, I'll invite the students and see if they would like to post on occasion, too.

Today I had a question: how to limit a Google search to government web sites. A little digging, and it turned out they particularly wanted sites from the state of California. So I used my skillz and showed them how to add site:.ca.gov to a Google search and voila.  Though honestly it looks as if California's legislature's website was designed in 1993.