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.

That Expensive Database We're Mad About

Tom Emmert has students in two of his courses looking at the New York Times and the Readers Guide (maybe the same assignment Amy blogged about?) but he apparently insisted in class they had to use microfilm. I am not sure he knows about the Historical database so I e-mailed him to tell him it was just as good and really expensive so they'd better use it!

Find my historical event in magazines and newspapers

Find my historical event - this is the one where they use the Readers' Guide to find articles about their historical event in contemporary magazines and newspapers. I pointed a student today (her event was from 1919) to the New York Times historical online and to the Readers' Guide and said she could also browse the microfilm of the other papers we have going back that far, since there are not indexes to them that are that old. I also told her about the key in the front cover to the abbreviations used in the Readers' Guide.

Another student asked me if the checkmarks by the titles in the front of each volume meant that our library had the title. I said that made sense, but, if that was the case, then that was probably done a long time ago and might not be 100% accurate for our collection now.

I should have also mentioned our primary sources page, specifically American Memory, as another place to find information, but...I didn't think of it until now.

Please post comments if there are other places I should tell students to look!

Media assignment

Another interesting challenge today was for a Media and Society assignment. The student needed to find out who produced a media artifact (she chose a Dixie Chicks album) and track down who was the ultimate parent company. She also needed company info and some idea of how profits are shared in the industry.

We used a handy-dandy site called Who Owns What to figure out who owned the company (in her case it was SONY BMG, which is a joint venture of Sony and Bertelsmann). We looked up those two parents in LexisNexis and found Hoover reports (they're predicting a divorce, by the way). I also showed her Business Source Premier and Proquest Newsstand (which has the Wall Street Journal, unlike L/N.) Oddly enough, Communication and Mass Media Complete was less useful than I expected.

I don't know how many are in that class, but there may be more questions about this. It's a short paper, but they need to cite at least ten sources.

Leitch Alert!

I helped a student today who was looking for the Foreign Relations of the United States. These are shelved upstairs under JX233 .A3 from 1861 or so to the end of the 1970s. Look for a lot of maroon books.

The 1980s volumes are on that new-fangled technology, microfiche. They're on the main level and kept in the small microfiche cabinet at the end of the microfilm drawers closest to the not-so-aptly named "Value Center" where students feed money onto their cards. Some older volumes of this set are online, but not the fiche-y Reagan years, alas. If you scan to your right there is also, a few ranges down, a series from the State Department that looked useful. The title escapes me, but it's blue.

She also was happy to find the volumes of Presidential Papers (upstairs at J80 .A283 and, for two Bushes and Clinton, online).

We may get a few more of these!