Friday, October 22, 2010

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.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

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...

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

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.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

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.