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.