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.