Monthly Archives: January 2012

Today was a rough day. I started out with not enough sleep — I’m going through a divorce and wound up fuming well past my bedtime. That’s never how I like to start a week!

I started my day by catching up on email at home. Tomorrow, we’re hosting an event in the library, glazing bowls for Empty Bowls (read more tomorrow or see this post about our bowl making workshop). So I needed to send an email to the all faculty list serve for the university and the library staff list serve to further publicize it. And I had to email the library reference list serve (includes library faculty plus staff that are qualified to work the reference desk, but not all staff) to find someone to cover my reference desk shift during the glazing workshop tomorrow.

Then I realized what time it was and rushed to slap a sandwich together for lunch and run out the door. I am the liaison to the anthropology department, and they are currently interviewing for two positions. One of their candidates was doing their research presentation at 9:45 today… I hate to admit it, but I parked my car at about 9:44 and practically ran to the correct room… And only the candidate and one other person were there! Whew! One of them joked that they were running “on Africa time”. I missed anthropologists when I was in library school!

After the talk, they invited me to join them for lunch in the campus food court. I hadn’t had time to drop my sandwich off at my office on my way in, so I said “sure!”

I finally got to the library right around noon, with a stop at our Starbucks on my way in. I headed up to my office on the third floor, checked email again, and chatted with colleagues about class. As I mentioned yesterday, I was scrambling to decide what to do for class today — no matter how much I plan on Sunday, I will rethink it aka second guess myself in the hours leading up to my actual class meeting.

Around 1:05, the band for Friday night showed up for our 1:15 meeting. Luckily, our systems librarian is a musician and was able to join us to talk about setting up and equipment and whatnot. That was pretty brief, but on the way back upstairs, we wound up chatting in his office (on the second floor) about a webinar and plans to promote the digital repository he’s hoping to get set up. So it was 1:30 or 1:45 when I got back upstairs to my office.

I spent the next hour or so printing & copying worksheets for class, posting the week 4 discussion board prompt for the class (watch and discuss the Filter Bubble video), and viewing an assignment that was already completed. Then off to class!

My plan was to cover keywords, Boolean logic, and then have them work through a worksheet that guided them through searching in the catalog and playing with some options. They totally threw me off my game from the start — they all knew Boolean! Of course, they didn’t know that term for it, but they answered the and/or questions right and filled in the Venn diagram correctly! Yay for our one-shots, apparently we’re getting through to them! The worksheet went well, and one of them stayed after to ask for help developing a topic for a paper in another class.

From there, back to the office to catch up on email again and maybe work on a book display. Then the IT guy brought my new MacBook to me, so working on that book display went out the window! It’s shiny and fabulous, but I’m really looking forward to being able to work on it out in the collaborative space in our office suite to, you know, collaborate!

I finally came home around 5:30, checked email again, spent some more time with the new MacBook, and then switched gears to cooking dinner. Yippee!

Early to bed tonight, for a hopefully much better tomorrow!

It’s just about time for Library Day in the Life round 8, which will be my first opportunity to participate! The idea is that library folks around the world, working in various different facets of the library field (staff, systems librarians, instruction librarians, catalogers, etc. at all types of libraries) will share some of the minutia of their daily work. It gives us an opportunity to see what our colleagues in different settings do all day, and gives students considering or in library school a chance to see what we really do. More information about the project and a list of participants in this round can be found over here.

Round 8 officially runs Jan. 30 – Feb. 5, but I’m getting a jump on it because my work week normally begins on Sunday (today). Plus, this week is going to be a busy one!

First off, I suppose I should explain what my job generally entails… I am the Instructional Services Outreach Librarian at an academic library. The instructional services part of my position means that I teach a section of our 2 credit hour information literacy course, LIBR1101, along with teaching one-shots as requested. The outreach part means that I come up with or borrow ideas for ways to get students into the library… I think that also includes outreach to faculty, to let them know what we offer to their classes and their students, but I’m still fairly new, so I haven’t gotten to that part yet! I also serve as a liaison to a couple of departments on campus.

I teach LIBR1101 on Mondays and Wednesdays, which means that I spend a good chunk of Sunday at least thinking about my planning for that week. I just started this position in September, after the fall semester was underway, so this is the first time I’m teaching this course. I usually think about planning and get caught up on discussion board posts on Sunday… And then scrap all of that planning and put something else together before class on Monday. It helps that my class is at 3pm, so I have time to do that if I don’t have other appointments that day, though it puts me behind on other things.

This week, however, I’ve got other plans for Monday. I am the liaison to the anthropology department, and they are hiring for two positions this year. So I’ll be attending a candidate presentation Monday morning. I’m also working on organizing regular live music performances in the library on Friday nights — this Friday will be our first one, so I need to meet with the band to make sure we’re clear on what equipment I need to get and what they will be bringing. Of course, the candidate talk will only take about an hour, and meeting with the band should take less than half an hour, but it chunks up my day enough that once I factor in talking to colleagues and catching up on email, I don’t want to rely on being able to work on any planning.

Sadly enough, this will be our fourth week of the semester, and it will be the first time I will be getting the kids into a library database. In the first week, we talked a bit about an overview of the course and then did some on evaluating information. In week 2, I lost a day to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, then covered plagiarism on Wednesday. In week 3, we went over some lingering issues from plagiarism, then talked about types of information sources, scholarly vs. popular sources, and evaluating information again.

For the discussion board posts in week 3 (first post due Wed. 11:59pm, response to someone else due tonight by 11:59pm), they read an article from BoingBoing about peer review. So hopefully it will be more meaningful to them when I have them go into an actual database!

Right now, I think I will start by talking about what a database is. In Georgia, we have a set-up called Galileo, or GeorgiA LIbrary LEarning Online, from the University System of Georgia’s Board of Regents. It’s a package that contains a bunch of databases, but a lot of students think that it is a database itself. So I need to try to pick that apart for them. Then I’ll walk them through getting into a general database.

From there, I haven’t decided what to do. We have an exercise that we use in one-shots, which would fit well here — pull up a peer-reviewed article and a magazine article, and compare them to illustrate the difference between scholarly & popular. On the other hand, it might be more useful to cover keywords & Boolean searching, and come up with an exercise to get them to play around with the filtering options that Ebsco offers. It will probably depend on whether I can come up with a good exercise to guide them through playing with the filtering options before tomorrow.

And I need to grade a stack of quizzes. Yippee!

Other things on my agenda for this week include:

• Empty Bowls glazing workshop on Tuesday
• The first installment of Friday Night Live @ the library
• Contact people to recruit more musicians for Friday nights
• Work on my self evaluation, due by Friday — the first stage in the annual performance review process here
• Attend a lunch for new faculty members with the University President
• Attend another candidate presentation in anthropology (in addition to the one mentioned above)
• Do a one-shot for an anthropology class
• Work on a publication about some events at the library

When I list it all out like that, it doesn’t sound like that much… Huh. Wait till this week is over, and we’ll see how much I’ve forgotten today!