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.

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!