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.

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.

interlibrary loan puzzle

I just tried to help someone ILL a book that is missing. It's volume two of a two-volume thing. MnPALS told me I couldn't. I asked Sonja if she knew what was up. She tried checking out volume one; once vol. one was checked out, MnPALS was happy and said I could borrow vol. two from another library. As if to say "you've got a volume, what's yer problem?"

Anyway - thought I'd mention it in case you run into the same thing. If it's a 45-volume work, this will become quite tiresome.

An aside - while untangling this I helped as student find a print journal for the first time. He was a senior.

Trees!

Not sure if anyone's reading this anymore, but it looks like the trees are back. I had a reference question this evening about a certain kind of ash tree. As I was helping the student, I recalled being warned about the tree assignment in previous semesters. Not sure if this is the same assignment or if there will be more students, but I actually got to take someone to the tree reference books. Come to think of it, the public library also had some sort of infamous tree assignment where the high schoolers came in and checked out every darn tree book in the place. What is it about trees??

the reference sign

Sylvia pointed out that I had accidentally put the J-term schedule sign up on our high-tech wooden sign holder. I stashed it in the drawer.

Then I decided to also stash the sign that just says "reference librarian" because a focus group pointed out that students only know when librarians are available when we're not available. We decided to keep the sign with the hours up all the time.

So that's why, if you're wondering.

EEB lab assignment

Michelle has left the Ecology, Evolution and Behavior lab assignment at the reference desk. There are two parts to be aware of. The first part, due next week, asks them to explore journals and books in the library. The journals exploration piece is particularly confusing - it suggests they search a topic in CSA, then find two articles that are here in both print and electronic versions. This could take hours - but if they search CSA and include a limiter by source to one of the few journals that we have in both formats, they can streamline the process.

The journals we get in print are available here. Some titles I've checked are -

• American Journal of Botany
• American Midland Naturalist (most recent four months not available online)
• Animal Behaviour
• Ecology
• Ecological Monographs
• Plant Physiology (most recent year not available online)

So I would suggest doing a search limited to one of these titles as a source and then picking an online and print article to view. Sounds like cheating, but it beats going nuts.

The other part, also due next week, involves looking up books on ecology, evolution, or behavior and that just means searching MnPALS and looking for books shelved in the Qs.

The third part, a literature review, is due March 7th and will probably involve a flurry of activity on March 6th.

my new favorite reference question

A lady calls and says "I just have a quick question about 19th century British periodicals. Do you have any of those?"

My favorite reference question

A girl just came up to the desk and asked, "Do you have any magazines we could like rip the pages out of?" I was like, no.

pardon the interruption...

...but a friend just asked how you upload pictures on Blogger and, since I mostly use Wordpress these days I can't remember. So here's a picture...

A prize to whoever can identify this library. There does not appear to be a coffee shop OR group study areas, however. Tut tut.

So long as I'm here, thought I'd point out this cool image search site - which may have a purpose other than being fun to play with: oScope.

Call numbers again

I was working with a student today who said that she would often look up books in our catalog and then buy them online or get them from the public library instead of looking for them here - because it's too confusing! This made me sad. A few things made me happy:

• She came to the desk for help
• She wanted to know how to find books in our library
  
• I showed her how to look up one call number and she found the second one on her own

Here's what I learned:

• It is confusing to find books in the library!
  

The issue for this student was the tags on the side of the shelves that give the call number range. One of them had something like this - HD 5412 - HQ 112. It was the switch from HD to HQ that was confusing. The student knew she was in the H section, knew she was close with HD, but then couldn't figure out why the number went from 5412 - 112 right after I finished telling her the numbers increased. She had gone past the first letters in her mind and didn't think to look back to see what the letters were doing. And you know what else? It was confusing to explain it.

This seems like genuine confusion, not laziness or unwillingness to learn the system. I think most of our students come up against this wall - getting to the right section but not being able to decode what the call number range on the side of the shelves actually means. At the moment I'm picturing simple directions mounted on the side of all the shelves with further instructions on how to locate the books. I'll toy with this during the summer.

Either that, or closed stacks... :)

Holy Worldcat!

The free version of Worldcat just added articles - holy smokes, that's a big change!

Try it out. I wonder if they're hoping to catch up to Google Scholar or what?! One big drawback, though: there's a "search my library" button but unfortunately for articles it only looks it up in the catalog, not SFX. So it certainly wouldn't be my first choice, though if I wasn't affiliated with a library that had a lot of databases it would be cool.

If you need to waste time at the desk...

Google Maps just announced easy-to-use mashup tools. I haven't actually tried it yet, but it looks like fun. Just click on the "my maps" tab. And then take a trip on Route 66 - a sample mashup they include there.

Check out the Cadillac graveyard.