Reflections from a Small College Library

Changing

2009-02-25T11:20:00.003-05:00

I started a new blog specifically for my interest in games. It is called Instructional Games in Libraries, and I have transferred a lot of relevant posts from this blog to that one. I've been thinking for a while of changing the focus of this blog to something more specific, but have decided to just start fresh and focused on a new site.

I'm not sure how much I will be posting here from now on. Instead, I will be focusing my energies on developing that one. I think we've only scratched the surface on the potential of games as instructional tools in libraries. I can't wait to attend some of the sessions on this at ACRL on this, nor can I wait to see what other schools do with these.

Great days of teaching

2009-02-23T17:40:00.002-05:00

I have had a few great teaching moments in the past week. Last year, a few of the students in that class got to the library very early. While I was setting up, one girl complained, "Why do we have to do this again? I've been here so many times already!" I ran through the useful resources for the assignment, asking them to explain some of the stuff. There were many questions they couldn't answer. I talked about relevant reference books, but when they broke off to do their lab assignment on creating a profile for a neurological disease, they went straight to Web sites.... and they got very frustrated. Finally I convinced one of them to try the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine, and there was a moment of light shining down as they got it. They were recommending it to the other groups, and I watched those heavenly spotlights shine down.

This year I told the students how much previous students liked that resource, so many of them went straight to it. They loved it even more. One group had to be told to go use some electronic resources because they were so involved in the print encyclopedia. It was wonderful. It was like having a celebrity endorsement.

Today I taught two English composition courses. We did the spy game and it went very well. For the first time, I coupled the game with a clicker review at the end. Almost the entire class got every single question right, and a majority of them reported that this was a fun way to learn about the library.

Furthermore, one student that I had worked with one-on-one the previous week, came up to tell me how much she had learned about the library from our meeting. She was raving about the resources and the elevator. She seemed very excited about her topic and research, which absolutely thrilled me.

Tak'n it to the Alums

2009-02-18T18:29:00.003-05:00

I just got an alumni newsletter from Miami of Ohio with two neat things in it. One is school-related ringtones for cell phones. Not that I want one from Miami, but I think that's really neat. I wonder how difficult it would be to offer our alumns Lyco ringtones.

The other was a variation of the historical photo "big game" that I've been mulling over all year. But instead of playing it physically on campus with undergrads running around taking pictures of what things look like now (it'd be a great program, I just don't know if they're that interested), you send it out in the alumni newsletter. Just ask them what it is or where it is, and offer a prize to the first five people who respond with the correct answer. Something school-related like a school t-shirt would be a good, inexpensive prize.

I might ask my director about this, she's been working on engaging alumni with news and materials from our college archives.

On the cost of e-books

2009-02-17T07:56:00.003-05:00

Shelf Awareness is an online newsletter for the publishing industry. They have archived issues on their Web site, but only starting from last week. So since I can't link directly to the original, I hope they won't mind if I copy a piece that sums up my feelings on e-books and their pricing(speaking as a book-lover, not so much as a collection development librarian):

Michael Herrmann of Gibson's Bookstore, Concord, N.H., writes:

As not only a bookseller but a booklover, I can see why e-books would be priced lower than real books. Not only do you not have printing, storing and distribution costs at the producer's end, but you also do not have a permanent artifact at the consumer's end. That is to say, e-books are not collectible. They are ephemeral. There is no guarantee that they will be readable or retrievable in two, 10, 50 years. They have less value than a real book. So perhaps they should cost less...

If Amazon succeeds in diverting publishers' creative energy into the e-book category, there will be incredible disruption in publishing and in retail. While there is a place for e-books in ephemeral categories and in textbooks, they will never amount to more than 10% of the market. As a technology and as a cultural artifact they are inferior to the printed book. The public will realize that, and e-book sales will eventually find their natural level, beyond all the hype...

I can't imagine I will ever spend $400 on an e-book reader if I will not be recovering my money by cheaper e-books. Many, many book-lovers will never have that kind of money for anything but necessities. And when a person spends all of that money on the reader, it is likely to break or will become unusable after five or six years. Whereas if you collect your favorite books in a physical format, you can pass them on to your children and your children's children... provided they were well-constructed.

Of course just because books don't have to physically be made, the intellectual work behind them and the technology to distribute them does cost money. I still have a hard time believing that ends up costing the company the same, though.

I am all for electronic journals, newsletters, newspapers, and e-books have their place in reference and technology fields, but I cannot envision a world without physical books that were meant to be read from cover-to-cover.

Paperless Campuses

2009-02-16T07:58:00.002-05:00

As some of you may have seen on the library listservs, Washington State is going paperless for internal communications. This includes "posters" and I wonder what this means. Will their campus now be poster-free? I understand tight budgets and I'm all for saving the environment, but I'm having a hard time imagining marketing library services and events without posters. I'm reading a book called Advertising 2.0: Social Media Marketing in a Web 2.0 World, and I'm changing my views on library Facebook pages, but students have to make an effort to go to these places to see the messages we send out. Good marketing strategies today are a mix of physical and electronic. I wonder what the details of their policy are.

Internet, Sweet Internet

2009-02-14T11:41:00.003-05:00

I am writing my first post ever from home. We finally caved in and got Internet access. I am very excited to be able to post here from home, work on my Web programming skills, check e-mail and weather, and check database links from off-campus.

My double-life as librarian-actress will be over after tonight. I have had so much fun working on this production, which I am very proud to have my small part in. I love all of the people I have worked with, and have enjoyed another venue for getting to know a few students a little better. Working closely with students is one of my favorite things in the world.

On the other hand, I think I have learned once and for all that I am not a person who is capable of working two jobs without my work suffering for it. I have been considering a second, very part-time job, and thought maybe I could handle it this summer. However, I am not one of those people with endless amounts of energy to draw from. I have concentrated very hard this week on taking care of myself so that I could be at my best in two places. As much fun as this play has been, I will be happy to go to work on Monday being able to focus all of my energies onto the things that need to be done before I can leave for Seattle, and putting my all into the two classes I will be teaching this week.

Online Reference Tools

2009-02-09T15:36:00.002-05:00

I have been given the task of exploring possibilities were our library to decide to move to more online reference works. Oxford offers a number of reference books online, but when we looked at the titles, none of the librarians was particularly interested. I asked for a quote from Cambridge Histories and it was outrageously expensive, even after the PALINET discount. Today we got a CHOICE card that covers Credo Reference, which seems worth looking into.

I'm a more than a little boggled by all of the issues involved. The first is can we afford it at our little school? Most vendors consider a "small school" to be 5,000 FTE, and even a school that size has a much bigger budget than us at about 1,300. Some reference resources are a one-time fee with annual maintenance fees, and some are flat-out annual fees like a regular database. Some allow you to select individual titles, some are whole collections. How any of them work with Reference Universe will be important to us deciding whether or not to get them at all.

I really love reference books and am always so happy when I take the time to look at them. I think all libraries are watching students skip the reference step and go straight for Web sites, books, and articles. Some libraries report more use of electronic reference resources, and if students are more likely to use those, then they are definitely worth pursuing.

Recovering from a mistake

2009-02-04T09:16:00.002-05:00

I volunteered to donate blood at our school's bi-annual blood drive yesterday afternoon, and got a "bad stick" as I'm calling it. The nurse or technician missed the vein and hit a nerve, which was very, very painful.

This happened to me once before and it scared me off donating for a decade. That's bad, because I'm O- and that's the most useful blood type.

I'm not going to be scared off of donating again, which is all based on the difference in how it was handled. Whereas the last time they missed the vein, the person just continued to jiggle it around until I started bleeding, then abandoned me on the table for 15 minutes, by which time I had been busting out of the bag for about 8 of those minutes and ready to pass out on the table. My entire arm swelled and turned blue and green all the way up to my shoulder, and I couldn't lift anything with that arm for a week.

In contrast, yesterday the woman who stuck me quickly tightened the band at the top of my arm to control the pain, and quickly but very calmly got the best technician there, who was able to quickly adjust the needle without additional pain, all the while telling me silly jokes to get me to breathe. I don't blame the first woman, I've got little veins that are a nightmare to find. She apologized, but calmly and not so much so I lost confidence in her ability. The group checked in on me often and I was done in a mere 6.5 minutes.

As I went home, my arm still in a bit of pain but nothing I thought was serious, I reflected on this experience. I am very happy with the way the situation was dealt with and understanding of the mistake. I appreciated her willingness to stop and get the help she needed, and their calm but caring attitude they showed me during my discomfort.

While I don't think mistakes in librarianship can cause anyone physical pain, we can cause confusion and panic if we give misleading or unclear information, or if something was misplaced or we didn't check that our Web site was working properly. I tend to panic when a student points something like this out, and some other librarians don't seem to care. I think next time something like this happens, I will do my best to care as much as I already do, yet remain as calm as the technicians did yesterday. I think this attitude will be the one that most likely causes the student to want to come back to the library.

Reading assessment comments

2009-01-29T10:01:00.003-05:00

Reading comments on a survey is an emotional roller coaster. Of course you're thrilled when a professor writes how wonderful the current group of librarians is, you dread having to address common complaints about librarians or student workers being grumpy, you feel useless when they ask for more computers or to get the art gallery moved somewhere else (we can't control these), frustrated when they give incomplete answers or ask for longer hours when the extreme hours get little use, and outright angry at some comments.

They want more computers, food, more resources, more quiet, less quiet, group study rooms, and longer hours.

I'm going to have to remind myself that there's no room for emotions in assessment. But that's hard. And it's hard not to just shrug and say "sorry, we can't do anything about this," when perhaps we could do something with some creative thinking.

What a cool idea

2009-01-28T21:26:00.002-05:00

Check this out from the Swiss Army Librarian. What a fun way to use Flickr Notes!

Plagiarised policies

2009-01-28T14:18:00.002-05:00

My mentor forwarded this article from the Chronicles of Higher Education about Southern IL's new plagiarism policy being yet another case of likely plagiarism... and the professors and administrators responsible for the policy give the same excuse of "coincidence" as our students do!!!

I do not see the problem of adopting another school's policy if it is well-written. I printed out many policies in order to aid the examination of our own. I do not understand how supposed "plagiarism experts" can't simply add the statement "adopted from Indiana University" in small text at the bottom.

How embarrassing.

The road not traveled

2009-01-27T11:48:00.005-05:00

I get depressed when I get Miami's alumni magazine because I want news of people I knew in college and lost track of, and in a school of 17,000, it's rare that I ever recognize anyone's name. Working at a campus of 1,300 and reading their alumni magazine, I feel like I've missed out. You are so much more likely to see people you know listed there. But Miami's German Dept. periodically publishes an alumni newsletter and it sometimes makes it to one of my mailboxes. I got one today, and I at least recognize one name. She was my roommie on a mission trip to Macedonia, and someone I would love to get back in touch with... and she's on Facebook!

And on another note... Please encourage every student with the faintest spark of interest to take advantage of study abroad programs, and to make friends from all over the world! It's an experience they will always look back on, and an important event that will shape the type of person they become. They will probably never again have an opportunity to be placed in such a social atmosphere as they do in high school or college. It will make them reflect on themselves and on our country in ways they could never do otherwise, and see the world in a whole new light. We really need more people to see the world from a more-informed perspective. Please, get the word out!!!

LibQUAL Begins

2009-01-26T15:09:00.003-05:00

LibQUAL started today. IT added it to the student, faculty, and staff portals with the nice LibQual logo, so actually 15 people took it over the weekend before it technically went live. When I checked it about 30 minutes ago, we already had 116 responses! I can hold my head up high and be proud if we get at least 400. Three professors are going to pass out paper surveys to their class, for approximately 165 additional surveys.

My husband told his classes today that if this survey wasn't successful, I wouldn't be happy, which would mean he wouldn't be happy. So they'd better do it.

A Miscellaneous Friday Morning

2009-01-23T08:10:00.003-05:00

I caught up on my blog-reading on Wednesday night, though I'm just getting around to commenting on it. I felt so justified when someone like Meredith Farkas feels the same way I do about the usefulness of LibQual. Since she's also talking about customer service and doesn't mention ARL, I wonder if she has had better experiences with them than I have.

I have been excited this week that Reference Universe has indeed improved their widget feature. I created a Reference Portal that is one of our Web site's most popular pages, with the Reference Universe widget right in the middle. I put in the new code and after fixing some random spaces in their code that made half of my page disappear. Once I had corrected that, I checked it. It seemed to be working from on campus, so I deleted the old code that worked on campus but would send users into randomly selected collections if they tried to use it off-campus. My mentor checked it from her home (I still don't have Internet at home, but should be getting it soon), and found the EZ Proxy working, but it wasn't limiting to only the books in our collection. She checked it again on campus last night only to find it does the same thing on campus. I hadn't realize that when I checked it. That is a big deal.

My director is presenting at ALA on Sunday and I would like for this to be working by then so she doesn't have to add any disclaimers into her speech. They are supposedly looking into it. In the meantime, I'm not sure what I should do as a temporary fix.

Relaxing

2009-01-21T18:09:00.002-05:00

I was feeling incredibly stressed out this afternoon, so I treated myself to some pad see yu and egg-drop soup. I am feeling ever so much better, and hoping this feeling can last a few more hours. My fortune was:

Any job, big or small do it right, or not at all

That's a good response to my post earlier today.

Committee Nomination

2009-01-21T15:20:00.002-05:00

We're going up for accreditation by Middle States next year. They have been talking about it since I got here, and are setting up committees to address each aspect of the evaluation.

I got assigned to the committee I wanted, which is Student Support Services. I sit on the Student Affairs committee on campus and work with other support services offices around campus. So it's something I'm very interested in.

Furthermore, I was asked to co-chair the committee. I am flattered as I'm used to not being eligible for such stuff, or having the faculty forget that librarians are also faculty. I may be wishing I wasn't co-chair in the future, but I'm thrilled at the moment!

I wanted more involvement, and I'm certainly getting it.

"Harried"

2009-01-21T10:58:00.004-05:00

I went home last night, fidgety and pre-occupied. I had tons to do there, but couldn't handle anything more than crocheting... though even that can be a little stressful. I realized the word of how I feel right now is "harried." But it's stress I'm putting on myself. I don't want to put off developing my games and learning about gaming. I do want to do whatever I can to fight plagiarism, which at the moment is quite a lot. I want to get more involved with the community, both on- and off-campus, and the activities I have volunteered for are things I very much enjoy. I'm also reading some very good books and am obsessed with crocheting, and trying to give my husband enough of my time. The easy answer is to just say "cut back," and it is tempting to do that and re-find my balance (I'm a Libra, balance is important). But I can't. I want or need to do it all, and I must figure out a way to be more organized and to relax when I'm not at work.

Speaking of plagiarism, we had our first freshman comp class today. We're breaking the class up into four groups, each group gets a plagiarism scenario. They talk about what should be done and the issues involved. It went very well, and so did the voting for best group. We discussed Wikipedia in the context of whether or not you could take material from an un-copyrighted, free online source like Wikipedia, when a student wanted to argue its reliability. Then I stumbled on this YouTube video (one of a series of spoofs off the same German movie clip):

Dinner with students

2009-01-20T15:35:00.002-05:00

I have invited two students for dinner one evening next week, and I'm really looking forward to it. The senior is someone I have spent time with before through German-club activities. She also came over one evening to watch Labyrinth with me (one of my favorite movies), but it's been a while since we hung out. The other is a freshman who recently became my advisee, and is coming out of the foster care system. She works in the library and is one of the sweetest students I've met. She let me tag along with her to see the Twilight premier last November.

I love the position of librarians, at least here, to do stuff like this. If I were a professor, I'd have to invite a whole class, or a club. I guess there are lines to openly having favorite students, but I'm still more free as a librarian. I know the students really enjoy a home-cooked meal, and I enjoy their company.

300th post

2009-01-19T08:09:00.003-05:00

This is my 300th post, I feel like I should have a birthday cake or something. I did start this blog about a year ago, that deserves a cupcake at the least!

I have written about this before, but it has come up again. Working in academia is like living on a military base. It is so transient, both among the student population, your co-workers, and contacts you have at nearby schools.

So my New Year's resolution should be: I need to reach out to people I like before they leave.

Statistically complimented

2009-01-16T14:20:00.003-05:00

We do a short survey each year that gets about 400 responses. This past year was the fourth year we've done it, so it was the first year we had enough data to really dig our teeth into it. Last summer, I gave my report to the stats prof. We both got busy and forgot about it, until this week. He just stopped by and said the report was very impressive, and only made the comment that some of my line charts should really be bar charts so it doesn't look like something changed over time. He said that was very common, and it's easy enough to fix. He said I must have had a stats class in college, but I didn't! I tried to take business stats, failed the first test, and dropped the class. I was trying to take 20+ credits that semester, but it seemed clear to me I wasn't as gifted in stats as I am with traditional math.

I feel this is a real compliment to my intelligence, so I have to brag about it a little. I'm supposed to be collecting faculty comments for my annual review, but I don't know how you'd capture that.

Big thoughts

2009-01-16T11:16:00.005-05:00

I'm having lots of big thoughts about librarianship and where I'm trying to go next, but just realized I haven't been writing here as often. Oops. I'm here now.

I've been obsessed with developing my plagiarism game. Here is the first room of the game: http://www.lycoming.edu/library/instruction/plagiarismgame.html

If you click on the blue flying fairy (it can take a few clicks to catch him), it asks you a question. If you get that question right, the fairy disappears. The score box doesn't update yet, though.

I drew the next room (the library), but you can't get to it yet. I'm working on drawing the fourth room, which will be the dorm foyer. They look very good and students and co-workers seem to be getting excited about it. Though I really should be working on prepping for LibQual and adding Turabian to my citation tutorial. Sigh.

Does it annoy anyone else that there's an assumption that as a librarian, you will be at both ALA's every year? The posts on liserservs and the mail you get doesn't suggest "If you're there..." it is "when you arrive..." My experience is that I got as much from driving down to Philly just to see the vendors last year than I got at attending the actual ALA conference the previous summer. I know I didn't make the best use of my time (as a conference novice), but when I compare it to my experience at CiL...

Gaming in Museums

2009-01-13T17:04:00.002-05:00

NPR just did a story on games in museums that's very interesting: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99244253

The adventure has begun

2009-01-13T16:37:00.002-05:00

Adventure game, that is. I have the first scene for my plagiarism game done:

http://www.lycoming.edu/library/instruction/plagiarismgame.html

So far, the only thing you can do is make the fridge pop open. I intend to put something in the fridge, but I don't know what yet.

The premise of the game is that little plagiarism gremlins/goblins have invaded the campus and are stealing or polluting people's brains. Only you can stop it.

It will have a series of rooms to go through with activities in each one. Some of these activities will just be for fun, others will be about plagiarism. I can't think of how to get away from the quiz-like activities, but if I wrap them up in killing goblins, then maybe it will be more fun than a straight-out quiz.

Conferences as class reunions

2009-01-12T08:17:00.002-05:00

I came into work today on this beautiful, but frigid (12F) morning after being snowed in most of the weekend (pictures to follow as soon as I dig up some batteries for my camera) to find two wonderful Facebook messages from two dear grad-school friends saying one will be at ACRL, the other lives an hour north of Seattle. My best friend who is moving to GA this weekend is also going, and she went to grad school with us.

I love that these conferences allow us to see people we share so much in common with, whom we love dearly, but who live all over the country. In some cases we run into grad-school aquaintences and get to know them better. I am sooo excited for the content of the conference, and to present my poster, but I think what I'm looking forward to most is seeing friends. And hey, we talk about what we do at our respective libraries, so even that is educational!

Book Review: Changing the Game: How video games are transforming the future of business

2009-01-09T15:49:00.003-05:00

Authors: David Edery & Ethan Mollick

Title: Changing the game: How video games are transforming the future of business

Year: 2008

Overall, the majority of this book was not very helpful to me. However, that does not reflect on the quality of the book, rather its focus being more for businesses than education. It is very similar to Digital Game-Based Learning by Marc Prensky (2001), which seems to be one of the most important books in the field.

Here are some useful tidbits I got out of the book. Microsoft wanted to get its employees to voluntarily do bug checking on Vista, and turned it into a game (details not provided and obviously one must question its effectiveness!). The Army's online recruiting game has been unbelievably successful, you wouldn't believe the figures presented on this. Google has turned image labeling into a game.

Games are growing at double-digit rates while the movie industry is slowing down and the music business is actually shrinking. World of Warcraft made $1.1 in 2007 alone.

Everything in life can be seen as a game, the key is just to harness the properties of games that make them appealing. Business has rules, referees, "high scores," levels of progression, cheating, and teamwork.

"Games are compelling because, at their best, they represent the very essence of what drives people to think, to cooperate, and to create. Learning is not "work" in the context of a game - it is puzzle-solving, exploration, and experimentation." (p. 4-5).

They have posted the games on their Web site: http://www.changingthegamebook.com/

Grand Theft Auto is considered a "sandbox game," meaning the player can chose to ignore the given mission and just explore the virtual world.

"The best games keep players constantly teetering on the brink of mastery, even as they employ new twists and challenges to force players to rethink the lessons they have already learned." (p. 105).

According to Bill Ferguson, traditional educational games (which have been wholly unsuccessful) contained only 80% of the learning as traditional education, and only 20% of the fun of a regular game. He thinks this should be swapped, so that the games are 80% as fun as regular games even if you have to sacrifice a good deal of the learning. People should WANT to play the game.

Sun Microsystems hired Enspire Learning to create "Rise of the Shadow Specters" to share company information with new employees who telecommute. Sol City has been invaded by aliens and you have to clear each of the five parts of the city by finding certain artifacts relating to the five aspects of the company that they wanted to portray.

Games don't appeal to everyone. If you're going to make one for employee training, always offer a traditional alternative.

Army general Paul Gorman used an off-the-shelf game called "Neverwinter Nights" to promote teamwork among his soldiers. Harvard developed "Everest" to do the same thing among MBA students. In these types of games, each player on the team plays a role and receives the appropriate information for that role, which is not the same as the info given to the other players.

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) - good for teaching how to handle unusual events.

Google posted two puzzles on billboards as a help-wanted advertisement for engineers. They figured only the best would figure it out and apply, and it would give applicants an idea of what it would be like to work there. L'Oreal has something similar for its business offices.

The authors warn against tying important real-world rewards like bonuses or promotions to these games. They can promote cheating and pollute the environment. Don't label anyone as "losers."

I have made the book seem like a random compilation of fact tidbits, and there is more useful stuff in this book. I have just either seen it before, or it doesn't fit what I'm trying to do with video games. The best book for this is still James Paul Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, which has a stronger educational focus. But I got some great quotes to use from this book and I think if a reader needed some advocacy, theirs is very effective.

More on plagiarism

2009-01-07T10:06:00.004-05:00

I met with the head of the Writing Center to talk about our plagiarism crusade. Our first step is going to be going to freshman composition classes this semester and having them do an activity. We will break them into four groups (very small classes will get broken up into 2), and give them each a scenario to discuss. We have four scenarios:

Blatent plagiarism (buying paper, etc.)
Recycling a paper written for a previous class without permission
Using Web information without citing
Disorganized notes/poor citation/making up source information

They can discuss it for a few minutes to think of what they would do, then each student can vote for the best solution, details on this will need to be worked out. Wining groups will get either a small amount of extra credit points, or small gift certificates to the campus cafe (they go NUTS for $1 certificates!).

We've had two English professors say they're interested.

Article on gaming

2009-01-06T09:21:00.003-05:00

Spiegelman, M. & Glass, R. (2008). Gaming and learning: Winning information literacy collaboration. C&RL News, 522-525.

I had to read this for our weekly meeting coming up, though the meeting isn't until next week. I'm a little disappointed, but I'm finding that's usual for articles written on gaming and instruction. I'm finding much better information from books.

This article is all over the place, mixing the value of professor-librarian collaboration, with the value of integrating Web 2.0 tools to enhance classroom learning, with the value of educational game-like activities to learn research skills. The Web 2.0 part includes mostly having students contribute to wikis and blogs. They mention having attended the SUNY Conference on Instructional Technologies, which I'm interseted in looking into.

The games had nothing to do with technology and were active learning techniques with the game aspect being having teams vote for the best results. The games were as follows:

The Dead Mathematicians Hall of Fame: Students got in groups and researched a famous person in the field of logic. They had to write an acceptance speach from that person's point of view, which required some research. The class voted on the best.
Grateful Dead Scientists Game: The students had to research a famous scientist and create a course that person might have taught. The votes come in the form of registrations for courses the students would like to take.
History of the Times Game: Students use the New York Times Historical Backfile to find an interesting story or ad, then vote on best results.

Other things I want to look into are Jenny Levine's "gamer ethos" in her article from Library Technology, and Friedman and Booth's "cultures of play."

Oh, and BTW, Lone Ranger should be capitalized.

Back from vacation

2009-01-04T14:32:00.002-05:00

I'm back from a nice, two week vacation. My vacation ended up starting early due to the seven inches of snow we got in three hours on the 19th. I hate snow driving with a passion, but it was not nearly so bad with the all wheel drive car I got last spring. Yeah!

We did our whirlwind tour of the south to visit our two sets of parents who raised us, and also visited my husband's birth mother and father, and their respective families.

When we got back, there was a nice pile of mail waiting for us. Before Thanksgiving, I had written to my sophomore English teacher to thank her for having drilled good research and citation skills into us. I got the following reply tucked into a Christmas card... it almost makes me as happy to know my thanks was appreciated as to get thanks as a teacher, if that makes any sense:

Dear Mary,

Thank you so much for the note you sent to me. It came at the right time. Beginning research with my sophmores and wordering if I can "do this again". How kind of you to remember me and that I what I taught you "a few years ago" stayed with you and that you found it to be valuable.

In your note you said that the students don't get it - well, they still don't get it here in high school. I'm not sure who or if it will be taught once I retire [...].

Currently I am teaching all tenth rade academic English classes and two lower level junior classes. I am thrilled that you are teaching research at the college level. Got a chuckle out of your reference to the MLA Handbook as Satan's bible. I am sure that some of my sophomores share your belief.

Again, thanks so much for the correspondence; it means a great deal to me. Wishing you and your husband a Merry Christmas and a healthy, prosperous 2009.

Launching a Crusade

2008-12-17T13:22:00.003-05:00

This semester, there seems to be an increase in the cases of plagiarism. The provost's secretary is working on coming up with quantifiable numbers. It could just be that more profs are using Turnitin, but then that probably means the problem was bigger than anyone realized. Or it could be students are becoming more ignorant as secondary schools continue their gradual decay.

We have also had a sharp increase in the number of students on academic probation. I don't know if these two issues are related, but I'd like to get the library involved where we can.

So I'm proposing an all-out crusade on plagiarism. Here are some of my ideas after discussing the issue with my director.

Teaching Effectiveness/Writing Across the Curriculum lunch this spring - We have three or four of these each semester, but this would be a little bit different. First of all, try to get the Provost to admit to coming to show the importance of this issue. Also, send a special invitation to the coaches as they have more influence over a segment of the students that no professor has. Finally, try to offer food (the college has cut back on this to save money).
Turn the current plagiarism tutorial into a game - Hopefully I can get this done by the TE lunch.
Contact the Dean of Freshmen to get some time with the students during "First Weekend" - This is problematic as there is more to do than they have time for already, but this is a grave problem! This should be something fun. Perhaps a mock trial or a game.
Contact the Panhellenic Council and see if we can do a mock-trial or game with the Greek organizations this spring.
Perhaps in some of these presentations or "games," take advantage of video/animation with the new clickers in the library classroom.
Form a focus group of students to ask them why students do it and their opinion on how to get it to stop.

To play our part in addressing the growing number of students on bad academic standing, perhaps offer a study skills session in game format in the library. Contact the Dean of Freshmen to get her to require any freshmen on probation to attend this program.

With all of the problems of enrollment in such a scary economy, we need to do everything we can to make our students succeed without lowering our standards. And if it's war that's required, I'm willing to stand in the front lines... okay, that's overly dramatic, but I really want to help improve this.

Spark of emotion

2008-12-16T08:57:00.002-05:00

While reading an interesting post on The Pegasus Librarian that sparked a desire in me to post a comment, I found the even more exciting response from greebie who is the author of The Other Librarian. He doesn't seem to publish often, but wrote a fascinating post on how bloggers can't be good leaders, at least not in their blogging mode. I usually can't get into managerial stuff, yet another reason I'm not a good leader, but this comment and its arguments intrigued me. I look forward to reading what he has to say in the future.

Back to the comment on The Pegasus Librarian, he argues that the techies are left trying to compel their co-workers that their knowledge is important, while their non-techie co-workers are going off in very different directions. And even outside of librarianship, techies can't take their organization to the "new space" alone. This isn't ideal, but he doesn't have an easy solution.

I still have a dream of being a part of blending technology and in-person services seemlessly. I think students have done this with their social lives already to the point where they don't think about the difference. I want to help do that with not just library education, but education and general. It will be a much more thorough and engaging experience.

Changing the way we learn

2008-12-15T16:17:00.004-05:00

I am a real academic in the sense that I crave knowledge. There are so many things I want to learn about before I die. Because my MLS has left my monetarily broke and I seem to become disillusioned about formal education halfway through any program, I think I'm done being a degree-seeking student. I'm usually mostly satisfied by reading... usually tons of fiction and figure I'm learning about other people's environments, even if they don't really exist (and neither do vampires).

Anyway, even though I need another hobby as much as I need a hole in my head, I've decided to learn basic crochet. I gave up trying to learn it from a book when I was a kid. On Saturday, I went to the public library and picked out a beginning crochet book with lots and lots of pictures. After setting it asside a few times and coming back to it, I thought I had gotten close to comfortable with a single crochet stitch and did about 10 rows... only to come watch some videos on YouTube to find I'm doing it completely wrong.

I think knitting and crochet are just something you can't learn from a book. Thank goodness for YouTube.

The day got better

2008-12-12T15:51:00.003-05:00

I've had some good meetings today, won a t-shirt for being the last official customer at the campus cafe for the semester plus a free biscotti & orange... and the big news is I just got an e-mail saying my poster for ACRL was next on the waiting list and someone just dropped out. I think after accepting the utter disappointment yesterday, it makes it oh so much sweeter.

I'm very happy I'm getting to the conference many days in advance... that will help as I try and figure out how to get a poster across the country... I like the recent post about this on Please Be Quiet.

Great Christmas Carol

2008-12-11T07:55:00.004-05:00

My mom sent this to me... I'm the kind of person who is sick of Christmas by sometime in mid-September. But this just made my morning and I wanted to share it. I believe they're from my library school alma mater (Indiana), that's the connection to library science!:

Best Books of 2008

2008-12-11T07:20:00.000-05:00

A publishing newsletter I subscribe to (for fun) asked the question, what are the top 10 best books you read in 2008? Since those people probably read more than I do, I'll narrow it down to my top 5:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson
What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (a must-read for everyone!)
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

Amazon Canada

2008-12-10T19:36:00.003-05:00

I just ordered my first book from Amazon Canada. I have enjoyed re-reading the first four Harry Potter books in French, and I've been wanting to buy Twilight in French. I'm just a little annoyed that I couldn't buy a used copy. I think they weren't willing to ship the used book outside of Canada. If I'm willing to pay the extra shipping, I don't understand why this is problematic. But I got a new paperback copy for $17 with shipping, which isn't bad.

I love the titles of the books in French: Fascination, Tentation (temptation), Hesitation, and Revelation. Sorry to those who speak French and realize some accent marks are missing here.

I stopped in a French bookstore in NYC on Saturday and was going to buy the last Harry Potter book (the only one I don't have in French), and they wanted $75 for a paperback!!! We were speaking in English but I still had to repeat it twice to make sure I understood. They said they were going out of business. With Amazon Canada available, I don't understand how they stayed in business in the first place.

Double-crushed

2008-12-10T13:40:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I wonder about the timing of life's events. It's my last late-day of the semester, so I didn't get here until 1 this afternoon. It usually takes me a while to wade through my mailbox on this day, and I had two e-mails. One was from ACRL saying my poster did not get accepted, the other was someone asking if I would be willing to present at a focus group at ALA Midwinter because she was so interested in the Reference Universe case study we did. I am not going to Midwinter, I am going to ACRL a few weeks later.

I think I could handle the rejection better if the phoniness of rejection letters didn't get under my skin so badly. I know my poster proposal was good, and I know they get a lot of submissions. But my supervisor thought it had a very good chance of getting accepted, and I allowed myself to become overly optimistic. How do you wait for two months while your proposal is being reviewed, without allowing "might" to become "quite possibly" in the back of your head?

As for Mid-Winter, I would so love to present. If it was anywhere this side of the Mississippi, I might make an effort to go. I really want to be professionally active, and I do love Reference Universe. But it's in Denver. When I went to tell my director about it, she thought I was asking to go, when I was really asking if she would present in my place. I have no interest in Mid-Winter other than presenting and seeing the vendors.

On the bright side of the conference news, though, my best friend who is in the process of changing jobs was asked by her soon-to-be employer if she wanted to go to ACRL and is now officially registered. I am very excited to attend a conference with my best friend, and with someone who is such a good librarian. I know I will get so much more out of it with her there.

Isn't it grand

2008-12-08T15:35:00.003-05:00

I love those moments when I open my e-mail and find something like this waiting for me:

I want you to know that, thanks in large part to your efforts in designing the ***class name*** citations online tutorial, this year, for the first time since I've been teaching ***, I had no major incidents of plagiarism. In addition to my usual instructions, I assigned your online tutorial as a required homework before the final papers were due, and I checked all the final papers using turnitin.com. Although there were a couple of students who didn't put quotes around extensive direct quotations, everyone gave at least some form of attribution where it was needed. YOU have made my exam week much, much simpler by doing this!

Library Game

2008-12-08T11:25:00.003-05:00

I came across an e-mail on one of my listservs that pointed to Ohio State's online library game called Head Hunt, that is meant to be an introduction to incoming freshmen and their families. The game part is Brutus (the OSU mascot) is missing his head. For each part of the tutorial you complete (mostly trivia, some matching, one puzzle), you get a letter that helps you figure out where Brutus's head is.

I really like using the school's mascot as the central part of the game. That symbolically brings in the bigger picture of the campus and draws in a wider audience (what athlete or sports fan doesn't care about fixing the mascot?). While at first I was annoyed by the different uses of multimedia (it first struck me as disjointed), I later came to appreciate the variety in the activities.

My biggest complaint is that I can't figure out where the head is because I'm awful at word scrambles. That has nothing to do with library skills, and it's disappointing to someone who completed all but the last step. I really want to know where the head is.

But the more serious criticism I have for this particular game is that it doesn't encourage discovery. There are no links to outside resources to help the user figure out the answer. The crossword puzzle offers "hints" that outright give the answer. This is something I'm really working on in my own tutorial.

Overall, I thought this was a good game, I just wish I could have finished it.

Educational Game

2008-12-03T19:56:00.003-05:00

I found a Web site that listed games with a social impact. Only one of the games is still available, and it's pretty cute. It was done by the government of Seattle to help educate people on ways to save water. It's hokey and very, very easy (it's obviously meant for a younger audience), but I'm thinking I could use something like this for the tutorial part of my games and followed up by questions, matching, etc. This could be fun.

Students' stories

2008-12-02T14:46:00.003-05:00

I've been hearing and reading about the importance of "telling stories" a lot lately, esp. in relation to Web 2.0. I was much more involved with student activities my first year, though I'm trying to change that this year. Some students have fascinating life stories... though sometimes these are very said stories.

My favorite student worker (who let me tag along with her to see the midnight Twilight premier) told me last week she was staying on campus because she's a foster child. I bought her a very small Christmas present at the mall on Sunday.
I overheard some students discussing a friend of theirs only pays $600 a semester because her mother died and her father abandoned her. I wouldn't trade all the student loans in the world to swap places with that student.
And to end on a happier story, my husband has a student whose uncle owns Mrs. T's frozen pierogies (a personal favorite).

Many of the stories are happier ones. Even at young ages, some of our students have accomplished incredible things, like playing on the all-Canadian high school lacrosse team, or serving in the military before going to school. And you just never know which students will go on to do incredible things after they graduate.

I like being a part of their stories, even if it's just as a supernumerary.

Generations

2008-12-01T14:35:00.002-05:00

Since professionally entering the field of academic librarianship, I have heard a lot about the Millennial Generation. The dates of who is included in this group vary, I've settled on people who were born in 1982 or later because I don't want to be included in this group. I don't recognize myself in the students I work with, nor do I recognize myself in what I have read about the Millennials. I don't recognize myself in descriptions of Generation X either. But I'm working my way through Prensky's Digital Game-Based Learning and he uses the phrase the "Games Generation." It includes Gen Xers to present-day college students. I do recognize myself in this group even if I did not grow up playing video games (my mother wouldn't let us have one and I eventually lost interest).

He says that members of the Games Generation see everything as a game. We can process more than one item at a time (hyperlinks vs. linear thinking); focus on graphics first and text second; see everything as connected; like to be active and hate being passive; look for payoffs with little patience; tend to have an affection for fantasy; and see technology as a friend. The more I think about seeing everything as a game, the more I agree with him. I want my job to be "fun," to enjoy coming to work. If I work hard, I want to see the results. I'm trying to lose a few pounds without spending any money on Weight Watcher's online tools, but I'm craving the game-like environment it would provide me. I even view my personal finances as a game-like challenge... now that I have a shared bank account with my new husband, that game even includes another player.

It's hard for me to imagine how my parents think if the Games Generation is really so different from previous generations. I know my parents had more patience than I did between rewards. I can now blame my disorganized thinking on having grown up with hyperlinks.

Librarianship in other countries

2008-12-01T13:18:00.002-05:00

I often wonder how different my job would be if it were in a country other than the U.S. or Canada (I assume Canada is very similar). One day I would like to participate in a job swap or temporary job abroad. My French is decent, though I think academic librarianship requires an excellent understanding of the language and I don't have that. You would also have to understand the education system, or at least what type of research your patrons are doing. I never figured out French high schools when I lived there, and they didn't have to do any research at that level... the high school library consisted of two shelves of literary books. I am intimidated by my imaginary limitations, which make me stop looking for any opportunities before I even start.

I sometimes look at Andrew Eynon's Library Blog, which often specifically focuses on UK libraries. I can only imagine how frustrating it is to have the literature stuffed with stuff from the U.S. And as I often think the stuff in these UK library links don't pertain to me, I suppose most of the rest of the English-speaking library world must feel that so much of it doesn't pertain to them.

So I wonder how much of it is very different. Is public librarianship very different between here and, say, western Europe? Are the skills I learned in library school relevant anywhere else?

Poster ideas

2008-11-25T10:50:00.005-05:00

I spent a few hours browsing the Web for advertising ideas for the big LibQUAL promotion. A few weeks ago, I looked at the response rate of other participating libraries, and they're pathetic (probably because the darn thing is so darn long to fill out). I do not want our library to spend that much money and then only get 50 or 60 responses.

I'm thinking that students won't care all that much about helping the library out. So my focus will be on them, with phrases like "Express yourself," "You can make a difference," "Be heard (we're listening)," and "Your voice does count." I'm striving for trendy graphics. Thank goodness for Flickr Commons. There are many talented photographers who generously offer their work for nothing but recognition. Here are some of the ideas I have come up with (or stolen) so far:

Irony, thy name is Azete

2008-11-24T14:32:00.002-05:00

I just visited a new professor's office, who is trying to figure out Turnitin. She was able to upload the papers on her own, but wanted me to come over and look at the results with her. In one case where the student's paper was a 60% match, 19% of that was from a Web site called azete.com. It is a papermill site... but wait, they have redeemed themselves by including a lengthy page on what plagiarism is and links to Web sites on how to avoid it.

Map games

2008-11-21T09:12:00.002-05:00

Word got around to a student who wasn't at my focus group on Monday night that I had talked about doing some kind of games with maps. One of the games mentioned in Trefry's presentation on Big Games is to print a map of New York on one side of a piece of paper, and a map of Baghdad on the other side with landmarks marked on it. People hold the map up to the light and find how those points line up in NYC, then go to that part of the city to learn something about the landmark in Baghdad.

The focus group had suggested using fictional maps like Gotham City, Narnia, or Middle Earth with campus or even all of Williamsport. People could then go to these cites and do something. The students seem to be really excited about this, and it would be a great outreach event, and the student I just mentioned caught me in the caf yesterday to talk about it. But I'm not sure what to put at those sites that would be exciting... Plus the only one of these places I know anything about is Narnia. I'm not sure which of the three has the broadest interest, I know our campus has a popular annual Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit each year that pits faculty against students.

This will take some pondering.

What is an "expert"

2008-11-19T19:10:00.002-05:00

I had seen Meredith Farkas's blog post on experts, and now the Liminal Librarian has added to the conversation. I've already left a comment on Meredith's post, but I want to address it here since it's a topic that gets me wound up.

After almost a year of professional experience, I went to ALA. That was my first conference. As I made my way through the vendors, I came across a vendor's booth that had some type of encyclopedia. It touted its list of librarian "experts" that was involved in the production and approval of the encyclopedia. At least two of these "experts" were my LIS classmates.

I have serious issues with someone who has only a year or two of professional experience being labeled an "expert" to promote publications and deciding the fate of more experienced librarians when it comes to their posters and presentations being accepted to conferences and journals. I admire people who dive into the profession head-first. Furthermore I agree with Meredith that it's all how you position yourself. But these believes are not in conflict with my feelings towards experts. You start by publishing, presenting, and getting a reputation on a certain topic. Once you have a body of accoplishments, you then become an "expert."

My mentor has assured me that librarians are not faster to label "experts" than other branches of academia. This is both assuring and disturbing.

Focus Group Heaven

2008-11-18T09:14:00.006-05:00

Last night I organized a focus group of students to help me brainstorm ideas for developing my instructional games. In exchange for their help, I made them chicken Marbella (my favorite!), mashed potatoes, and chocolate fondue with fruit.

I had 8 or 9 students from the Creative Arts Society (CAS) show up, and it was sooo much fun. I wish every focus group could go so well. They actually enjoyed the games as they were, which amazed me. They loved the "Secret Agent" story. So here are some of the ideas and suggestions they came up with... and I did encourage them to say whatever came to mind.

Have laser tag in the library and when you find certain library resources, you get several seconds of immunity

If you want the students to be more active, you could have a central, physical place to get maps and other resources.

Add "Your mission, if you choose to accept it..." message to the secret agent theme. Along that line, I think I'll add "this message will self destruct in 5 seconds" and then an explosion animation.

Add video clips and sound clips from James Bond, Carmen Sandiego, Q (the Bond weapons guy?), or Frankenstein for the monster game

Allow teams to choose a name

For freshman orientation, do a themed (pirates?) scavenger hunt. Could involve points, keep score with tokens, passbook, or big board to award prizes at end.

Again for orientation, split each cluster of students into groups, each group with a different color of handouts. Each color will be a different track, where one clue will lead to the next.

Reminisced about the "Temple of the Hidden Monkey" where contestants had to build monkey statues while avoiding guards. In this case, library staff could be guards that deduct points if they catch students running.

Involve having them get video clues in one of the screening rooms

Have some kind of lock box they're working to open, which will contain small prizes like lollipops at the end (going along with the secret agent theme)

They liked the Web evaluation part of the game, they called them "real and fake sites"

Have the "correct site" unlock something (I don't remember the context here)

More on databases, they wish they had known about them earlier

They were excited about "Choose Your Own Adventure" type games. I've done simple HTML games along these lines, there is potential for more here. They particularly focused on scholarly vs. popular journals here... we went off about turning in a paper based on articles found in Vogue :)

They really liked the idea of animating the Boolean operators sequence. Right now it's tutorial-like, but eventually I'd like to give students AND & OR buttons where pressing on those buttons will rearrange objects that fit the search (like only the spies wearing yellow coats AND red pants).

Could make author-themed games, like Poe (ravens, grave yards, tombs by the sea, beating hearts, pendulums, etc.)

They think we can assume students have cameras with them, esp. on cell phones. Could use those for photo scavenger hunts.

They thought the ideas of Big Games were really cool. I told them about juxtaposing maps of campus or Williamsport with some other map and asked what map? They suggested Gotham (if it exists), Narnia, Middle Earth, or Eragon

Games I need to look at:

"Escape from the Basement" (series of places to escape from)

"Myst" - puzzle game where you have to click on objects in your area

"Escape Artist"

"Trapped" - this involves talking to characters you meet, which determines the outcome of the game

"Oblivion" - there has already been discussion on how people could reorganize this game for their own needs. They suggested talking to a student named Ian Shepard (a.k.a. "Shade").

So you can see it was a productive night. I'm going to include the nice picture I took of them now because I liked both pictures so much and couldn't choose between the two.

Director support

2008-11-17T13:57:00.002-05:00

It's so nice to have a director who supports you. In my new-found interest in game-based learning, my director has agreed to buy cheap speakers for me to use in the instruction classroom. Sound makes such a huge difference in the gaming experience. She also gave me $40 for groceries to make a home-cooked meal for the students who are coming in tonight for my focus group. I hope we can come up with some creative ideas for making my "games" more game-like.

BTW, our football team won their conference on Saturday and we're going to the playoffs! I'm hoping to find someone to go with if my husband goes with the team. No one could have convinced me two years ago that I'd get this happy about football.

Word of Mouth Marketing and High School Reunion

2008-11-14T15:16:00.003-05:00

I'm not sure that word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective tool for gathering together alumni for a high school reunion. I officially graduated high school the summer of 1998, though I had spent my senior year as an exchange student in France. I had been wondering if they were holding a reunion, but figured someone would notify me; they've found me in the past and I updated my information in their online directory.

A high school aquaintance of mine found me on Facebook and asked if I heard about the reunion coming up in two weeks. Coincidently, we'll be driving through the area the day after on our way back from a family Thanksgiving, so I'm very tempted to go. I just wish I knew who was coming so I knew if it was worth missing an evening with my family. Most of the people I hung out with either live out of the country or their family doesn't live in that area anymore.

What does this have to do with libraries? I guess Web 2.0, and word-of-mouth marketing. I'm a big fan of word-of-mouth marketing, but sometimes it's just not the best tool!

Citation, citation, citation

2008-11-13T14:39:00.002-05:00

I've been working with the head of the Writing Center for a while now preparing for a presentation we were going to give our faculty on the citation tutorial we created. Both of us have been really nervous, not so much about the public speaking as about the actual content. We don't have the be-all-and-end-all answer, no one does.

I think might have done things in a slightly different order than Shanna expected (oops), but everything went very smoothly. The reception we got was better than either of us could have expected and we nailed the timing (something we have both had issues with in the past. We had ten minutes of questions and discussion after our official presentation. We got lots of cheering for the actual tutorial, but also great compliments on the actual presentation. One professor said it was the most useful teaching effectiveness lunch so far this year, and when I got back to my desk I had an e-mail from another professor saying:

Thanks for the great presentation on citing and the demonstration of the online tutorial. I gained several ideas that I can immediately implement in my W courses. Excellent work!

I think we can both write off the day as a huge success. Though it makes me feel like my work today is done and that I should be able to go home now!

Bonding with students over vampires

2008-11-12T20:38:00.002-05:00

I've been amazed in the last two weeks how much I can bond with (female) students over the Twilight books. One of our student workers was lamenting about not having a car to drive to the mall for the midnight movie premier. I told her I was happy to drive if I could have some people to go with. So she's found at least one other person who wants to come, and now I don't have to go alone. My husband actually wants to see this movie, but he's not geeky enough to want to go at midnight. I'm in it as much for the cultural experience as anything else, I had such a great time at the last Harry Potter premier. But I did buy my "All Star Vampire Baseball League" shirt which arrived yesterday.

Colleges paying for public libraries?

2008-11-12T20:29:00.004-05:00

Here's an interesting library story... Worchester (Mass.?) wants to ask local colleges to help pay for the public libraries. This seems ridiculous to me, though I was very disappointed to see how short the article was. There was a study that showed the city spent $1.5 million responding to local colleges and fraternities... how much of that was library services? I rarely used the public libraries when I was in undergrad or grad school, and I think very, very few of our students use the local public library even for its excellent (and free) movie collection, and it's only a block and a half from campus!

I do think that colleges and universities should consider voluntarily paying local taxes even if they are non-profit institutions. We do draw on the city's police and fire services, snow clearing services, trash removal if that's a government service locally, etc. I know our college pays a certain amount voluntarily. But higher education is in a financial crisis in the same sense that health care is. Tuition jumps 6-10% every year and most administrators are really doing everything they can to prevent this exorbitant inflation. I love libraries, but unless someone can prove our students are using the local public libraries, I think it's silly to ask the colleges to pay for them.

Wish I had a camera

2008-11-11T10:47:00.005-05:00

Some days you just wish you had a camera with you at just the right moment. I went out to help a student with Interlibrary Loan. I don't know if he was particularly excited or what, but when he was done, he jumped up and ran out of the library and ran straight into the sliding glass doors... they're a little slow to open if you're walking too fast. All of the students on the first floor looked at him and burst out laughing when he left. He knocked one of them off its hinge, but I think I was able to pull it back on.

Diving into the literature

2008-11-11T10:09:00.002-05:00

Adcock, A. (2008). Making digital game-based learning work: An instructional designer's perspective. Library Media Connection.

This was a very short but useful article. Digital game-based learning (DGBL) uses a combination of:

Play theory or learning through engagin play
Problem-based learning
Situated Learning
Challenge

It's important to keep the game from being too confusing or too hard. I've been seeing this in several other cases of library instruction games (i.e. ASU's Quarantined). You also need to give the students continuous feedback and scaffolding. DGBL should also be avoided on its own, instead it should be used with other methods such as a verbal introduction and a debriefing/review session. Students should be given the chance to practice what they have learned in the game as much as possible.

This also points me to other resources I've seen mentioned before but now sound really great, like Prensky's Digital Game-Based Learning, and Lave & Wenger's Situated Learning.

Who knew?

2008-11-10T11:53:00.003-05:00

Who would have thought that being a shy person would make it difficult to perform certain functions of librarianship. I have always known I have a problem finishing projects and my cluttered desk is a sign of how cluttered my brain is. I work hard to overcome these faults. But part of the reason I became a librarian is because I thought it was a good career for me as a shy person.

I think the thing I struggle with the most in my current job is faculty office visits and anything that requires me to systematically walk up to students and ask them for something. I really hate the lead-in to things like this, and know it makes me very awkward. But I love the "during" and "afterwards" part!

My director gave me some good, simple ideas of what to promote during faculty office visits, so I went around quickly before lunch and talked to three professors. Since I think these are good, helpful things for them, it definitely takes the edge off of the approaching part.

Funny citing question

2008-11-10T08:51:00.003-05:00

This one is all me, not something I can blame the reference desk for. I'm presenting my citation tutorial on Thursday to the faculty, and I'm summarizing the notes I took on articles talking about teaching citation. I came across a blog entry called Why I Bother to Teach MLA Style Even Though It Makes Me Want to Slit My Wrists by Dr. Crazy. There's some interesting stuff in this post and I want to include it in the handout I give to professors.

So my question is, when someone "publishes" something under the pseudonym Dr. Crazy, how do you include that in the citation? Would it be "Crazy, D." or just "Crazy" with no first initial?

Beyond the Computer

2008-11-09T16:04:00.002-05:00

The three instructional service librarians here have weekly meetings to talk about various instruction topics. This week it will be my turn to lead. I'm really looking forward to this because we haven't done anything very enlightening lately. However, I'm also nervous because I want to make it really good. I want to do something with game-based learning, but everything I'm finding in the literature revolves around video games.

I have been working with online games and will continue to do this. They have an advantage of giving the points fairly and keeping students focused on one task at a time. However, my colleagues can't create new games or even tweak the ones I already have. It seems like the term game-based learning shouldn't only apply to video-game-like instruction. Librarians somewhere have to be doing things along the Big Games line that doesn't require a librarian to have any special technology skills, just a lot of creativity.

I'll have to give this more thought.

Self-direction in libraries

2008-11-06T13:44:00.002-05:00

There is an editorial in the latest edition of AL that strikes me as curious. I agree there is a "push" in libraries to move towards "the self-service model." She is talking about public libraries, which I am less familiar with. Certainly we have improved our signs and try to take advantage of technologies that allow students to do things without asking for help. However, we do this not because we don't want to help, but rather because they do not want to ask for help. Indeed, I'm at the reference desk this afternoon and just a little bored. I want to be either making rounds in faculty offices, or figuring out how to edit a sloppy Camtasia tutorial I created. I can't do the later because it's the sound that needs cleaned up and I don't want to make noise or be seen wearing headphones...

...but if only people would ask me for help, how I would be happy to stay late to get that other stuff done. I could make their lives so much easier, and their papers so much better, and often what's tripping them up is something fairly simple. I hate knowing people walk out of the library never to return because they didn't know how to read a call number.

I don't expect much to change at the reference desk soon, despite our marketing efforts. So until then, I will be looking for ways to help students find things on their own as I sit at the desk next to my big green sign that says "Please interrupt me. Your request is more interesting than what I'm doing."

Serialized Stories

2008-11-05T19:44:00.002-05:00

I seem to get strange cravings when I work on Wednesday nights...

Many books and short stories used to come out in serialized form in journals. Sweeney Todd was originally published that way, and I have an aunt who published her first horor novel that way back in the 70's (and got a lot of money for it, too). The anticipation of each part must have been like a print soap opera or hit TV drama. There are probably some magazines that still do this, though their popularity is obviously questionable.

It seems to me that there must be some good creative writers out there using blogs to serialize stories. I really want to find one, but can't think of any good keywords. It seems like a blog would be a good place to share stories with the world, though difficult to find. I'm sure plenty of fan fic writers do this, but I'm not too interested in that...

Though I think this all stems from having just finished the last Twilight book and being disappointed in the silly ending. Actually, the whole last book was incredibly silly, even in comparison with the first three. I wanted a happy ending, but expected something to happen first. Maybe online fan fiction is just what I need, someone must have written a better ending somewhere.

Congratulations are in order

2008-11-04T12:45:00.003-05:00

One of my best friends, also named Mary, just officially accepted a new job offer. She'll be leaving cold PA for sunny Atlanta Georgia. The new job is at Oxford College, which is part of Emory. How impressive is that... like anyone who knows her would expect anything less. I will miss her, but thank goodness for e-mail and Facebook! Congratulations Mary, I'm so happy for you!

2.0 Cliques

2008-11-04T07:35:00.003-05:00

I talked to my director yesterday afternoon about our Web 2.0 workshop last week. She mentioned being interested in the administrative issues of Web 2.0. One thing she mentioned was the divide between people who have & have not bought into it, and the cliques that must form at larger universities.

This hits a soft spot because I often get frustrated with this being the only "twopointopian" in my library, though several other librarians are heavily involved in keeping up with other technologies (that I don't want anything to do with). I think all of my grad school friends are twopointopians to some degree or other, and I often feel I communicate with them better than I do with the people I'm with face-to-face daily.

I don't think that you have to start your own blog, breathe Facebook, have a Meebo widget on every Web page, and carry around your Blackberry so you can update your Twitter status every 20 minutes. However, this is just a taste of what the future is for libraries. I'm not sure where I draw the line, but I don't understand librarians who stick their head in the sand and don't do anything at all with technology. I guess I don't feel sorry for the people who get left out of the 2.0 cliques unless they're off doing something equivalent, and in that case, they've probably formed their own cliques.

I'm Back!

2008-11-02T12:19:00.003-05:00

I'm back! I feel like I haven't written in forever. We hosted a regional workshop on Friday on Web 2.0. Here's the program's Web site. Jody Fagan was incredible. I was lucky enough to get to go to dinner and breakfast with her. I was so impressed by her online CV, and it's not even entirely up to date. It's 16 pages long, and she's only a few years older than I am (a.k.a. not close to old). Yet she's very personable and down-to-earth. Most importantly, she's easy-going, which was important because we kept having stuff pop up... our entire campus scheduled an emergency preparedness day for the same day as the workshop and it included sirens, fake shooters and hostages, police in full S.W.A.T. get-up... then two days before she was to arrive, Palin and Biden announced they would both be in little 'ol Williamsport on the same afternoon, and Biden was on campus!

I think my poster and panel session went well. I accidentally set off an audio file during my panel presentation... that was a little embarrassing, at first I though it had something to do with the emergency drills outside! I would have liked to walk around to see other peoples' posters more, but kept keeping an eye on my own poster (for any visitors), so didn't focus well on what they had to say. But I was so impressed with what I saw other people put together and hope to catch up with the handouts I collected and any electronic files they send me to post on the Web site.

One of my best friends from grad school drove 2 hours to present and help out. She is a great public speaker and her lovely personality comes out when she does public speaking. However, she got intimidated by a previous panel session and said in her introduction it made her "scared shitless"... I'm sure more than a few faces turned bright red. Jody thought it was bold, I thought it worked with the rest of her talk (though I'm biased as my husband swears like a sailor at home). She says she didn't notice it until she sat down at the end, then was quite embarrassed!

I'm so glad October is done. I still have a presentation in two weeks that I'm nervous about. Our campus has these "teaching effectiveness" workshops once a month where different faculty share things they're doing that have been successful. I have been involved in one in the past, where I presented a Flash tutorial on plagiarism. It was very well-received. I'm ganging up with the head of the Writing Center to present an interactive tutorial we've created on citation. Professors are so frustrated with students not knowing how to cite, so this is meant to help the utter citation newbie. The thing is, we haven't yet done much testing on students to see how effective it really is, though she will in her freshman comp classes in the next week or so, and I'm really hoping it's enough to be a real teaching effectiveness workshop. I did base it on lots of articles I found on teaching citation, so if I bring that stuff in...

But no matter what, now that this Web 2.0 workshop and Harry Potter Night are done, my life is becoming soo much easier. I have finished the third Twilight book (TEAM EDWARD!), and will soon go home and spend the rest of this Sunday afternoon working on the fourth. My wonderful husband cleaned the house for my friend's visit so I could read the books I've been obsessed with. Now if that isn't prince charming, I don't know what is.

Numbering a series

2008-10-27T11:17:00.002-04:00

I really wish all publishers of series would follow the example of Harry Potter and clearly NUMBER THE DARN BOOKS. I hate having to go do research to find out which book to read next if I liked the first one. Artemis Foul does this, too, though I wasn't thrilled with the first enough to run out for the sequels.

I decided as a librarian, I wanted to find out what all the hype was about the Twilight series. So I picked up the first book at the local indie bookstore a few weeks ago, and when I finished the book I'd been working on for a while, I dug in. And wasted one of the last precious, beautiful days of the fall yesterday... wasted in that I didn't go out to enjoy the beautiful weather. I'm ashamed to admit I enjoyed the book, despite it's high cheese factor... I hate "cheesy" things, a phrase I taught my French host family who couldn't figure out why being full of cheese was such a bad thing. So I find the main character a little unbelievable. I'm going to ask some of our student workers if they use the words "blouse" and "slacks" because I attribute these words to people older than myself. But the author is certainly good at capturing sexy, seductive moments, and that is why I couldn't put the thing down.

So I'm going to run over to the public library tonight and see if they have the next one. If not, I'll go buy it. I'm hooked. I just wish I hadn't had to spend five minutes on the Internet trying to figure out which book was next. It's New Moon... I think. Oh, how I should not be publicly admitting to all of this.

HP Night Reflections

2008-10-27T10:13:00.004-04:00

How else do you measure success in outreach programming other than attendance? If this is the only measure, or at least the one that matters the most, than our Harry Potter Night utterly failed. If it is how much fun those who did attend had, than it was very successful. Unfortunately, I'm too disappointed with the first to revel in the second.

My estimate is that we had about 25 students. Last year we had about 100 show up, about 70 stayed. I normally attribute low attendance to either a bad program, or bad marketing. I don't think this was either. Two of us librarians even dressed up in costume for the whole day and passed out programs around campus (yeah, I set up for this thing wearing a floor-length, high-collar black dress!), had a musical animation on the library home page, and posted fliers everywhere. No one could say they didn't know about it. I think it was just a bad night. So many students were going home for the weekend, even though this coming weekend is Long Weekend, when people are supposed to go home. We were also competing against the Creative Arts Society's haunted house.

I did get some great pictures. I got many complements on my costumes and the Horcrux Hunt was a lot of fun for the students. If I ever find the responses to the last Horcrux event, I'll have to post them. I'm always amazed by the creativity some people can come up with on the spot. They were asked to pick a bad guy and write what their punishment should be. One involved tickling Belatrix Lastrange for the rest of eternity so she would be forced to laugh, another was forcing Voldemort to listen to "A Cauldron of Hot, Burning Love" while making pink heart cookies for all of eternity, and the final winner (yes, there were three) was to force Malfoy to wear hand-me-down robes and attend bi-weekly muggle-appreciation seminars for the rest of his life.

We had a house activity that involved finding "bowtruckles" (see picture). Whichever house gathered the most was going to win the house cup. Unforunately, one of the four children in attendance decided to practice some unsportsmanlike behavior... ironically stealing from the Slytherins. I'm pretty sure Slytherin would have won, but not sure if I should declare them the winner, or just say it was null & void. I was also going to put up a display on the program, but since there were so few people, I'm not sure if I really want to.

We will do it again next year, but probably confined to the classroom, and maybe not on a Friday night.

Hell for librarians

2008-10-22T20:21:00.002-04:00

A former student who is now working on a master's degree at another school offered her user name and password so I could use their Web of Knowledge subscription. I was so tempted, but the little white librarian on my right shoulder reminded me of how unethical that would be. Sigh, I'm such a goodie-two-shoes.

I responded that I would be sent to librarian's hell if I did that. Then that made me wonder what librarian's hell would be like...

I've had nightmares of being smothered by catalogs or programming code, forced to drive snowmobiles down icy slopes to help a patron, library school professors towing tractors with a bicycle, being forced to go back to high school (usually naked) despite having my MLS, &#%@'ing-off my director in various ways, and lots of strange things about the professors I work with here.

Throw in some stuff like:

Standing in front of a class and getting halfway through it only to realize you thought it was intro to psych and it's really a 400-level class.
Realizing the professor didn't explain the assignment or the subject to them before sending them to you.
Having a practice search completely fail during the class your director is observing and not being able to save it.
Realizing as students are leaving your class that you needed another 15 minutes to finish (again while being observed).
Spending tons of time and some of the library's money on a program and then having no one show up.
Your first night handling things on your own and a student bursting out crying that she's neglecting her children because she's been studying so hard and she doesn't know how to do this research assignment that's due tomorrow.
Finding out a student is suing your school because of the reference service you provided.

These have all happened to me in reality. I'll just add the lawsuit quickly fell apart due to the fact it was ridiculous.

You could throw in some reference questions that disprove the theory that the only stupid question is the one unasked. These would include:

Can I highlight in an interlibrary loan book?
I don't know how to get to the third floor (from a man standing in front of the elevator).
Who do I talk to if I want to argue about being written up for licking a smoothie machine at my job here on campus?
Can you come down from your lunch break to unjam this copy machine?

So mix all this stuff up together with some visuals Hieronymus Bosch, and between reality and my nightmares, I think that about covers it!

Checking out people

2008-10-21T08:43:00.003-04:00

There's a neat article from Santa Monica's public libraries that they offered live people that could be checked out for a 30-minute conversation. These people talked about topics like Buddhism, veganism, nudism, and homelessness from their own experiences. It was an effort to promote tollerance and understanding. I wonder if this could be done on an academic campus? We could find staff and faculty who have unique life experiences that are willing to be "checked out." Or perhaps find people in the wider local community. Would students be interested in this? I don't think the article mentions how successful the program was.

I downloaded Camtasia's free 30-day trial to see how suitable it is for creating the games I've been working on. It's definitely much better for how-to tutorials than Flash. It does have a quiz feature that offers multiple choice and text entry. If it offered "hot spot" questions (having to click on the right part of the picture) and drag & drop, we'd really be in business. It also greatly limits your design as far as I can tell from the five minutes I played with it. I don't think this is necessarily bad, as long as you word your questions to keep with the story of the game. I'll play with it further and report back.

Please, please, please

2008-10-20T14:38:00.002-04:00

I just submitted my poster proposal for the 2009 ACRL conference. My director looked over my poster in its current state and read over my proposal that I had worked on over the weekend and thinks I have got a fair shot at being accepted. I really want to get into presenting and publishing. Not hard-core, I'm not that ambitious, but I want to be a contributing part of the community. I'm very excited about this project and where it can go next.

Four days and six hours to Harry Potter Night. Snape had to back out a few days ago, which left us one person short for our scavenger hunt, and it doesn't help that the faculty Halloween party got scheduled for the same night (we picked ours months earlier!). Fortunately, one of the library workers was planning to be there anyway and is happy to wear a green robe and librarian glasses to be the Hogwart's librarian, Madam Pince. She is our savior of the week!

I finished the costumes last night, now I need to finish painting the bricks on muslin. I can't tell if my husband is really mad at me for accidentally painting the basement floor red or not... I didn't realize it would go right through the canvas drop cloth (which is also red, but that was to be expected).

A success

2008-10-18T10:53:00.002-04:00

My experiments with video games in the classroom payed off yesterday. I lengthened the activity considerably and it took them about 30 minutes to complete. That left us with time to go over a few things, this time it was mostly review.

I have to write up a poster on this and get it to the printer by Monday, which is why I'm at work today. I think my poster is coming along nicely, my husband has promised to go over it with me tomorrow since he has experience presenting his biology research.

The current poster is for our regional workshop on the 31st. I really want to submit a proposal for ACRL, which is due on Monday. I don't know if this project is good enough, but I just have to get over my inferiority complex and accept that I will never get anywhere if I don't try. I really think I'm on to something great here, even if I've only seen the tip of the iceberg. Interestingly enough, I don't think students mind the simplicity of the program. They genuinely seemed to have fun, and teased me about being a spy, or did James Bond impressions while finding their books and during the review.

What needs more development is the story. This seems to be more important than sophisticated technology. If it can seem less library-like and more roll-playing, I think the students will have even more fun, which means they will learn more.

I have been reading books and articles on related topics, though for a poster session I don't understand how you back up the project with past research. My brain is craving to sit down and do this so I can understand where to go next. I am excited that I have one more freshman composition class in a few weeks, so there's still time this semester to work on this, though not before the regional workshop. That's okay, I am very excited at how well the class went yesterday and think what I have is more than just "good enough."

Book Review

2008-10-16T09:57:00.003-04:00

Title: What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

Author: James Paul Gee

Published in 2003

Cited by 1,088 in Google Scholar

I just finished this book last night and I highly recommend it to any librarian, whether or not you have any interest in video games. It is more about how people learn and why video games engage people more than traditional education systems do. It discusses active learning, critical learning, and is closely related to or even part of inquiry-based learning.

Gee has a background in theoretical and social linguistics. The book is heavy on theory after a lot of reading and playing games. However, even for people like me who don't always get theory, it's easy to read and there is much to learn from him. Indeed, I took eight pages of notes, but I will condense them for this post.

A "semiotic domain" is a set of practices that communicate distinctive types of meaning. You can learn facts without learning a new semiotic domain. This involves a) learning to experience the world in new ways b) potential to join this group/affiliation c) gaining resources to prepare for future learning in that and related domains. These three things make up active learning, but you can go beyond active learning to critical learning. This involves thinking about the domain at a "meta" level as a complex system of interrelated parts, and how to innovate meanings within the domain.

Identities are very important to learning. Students bring in their identities including what type of learner they are (i.e. "I'm not good at science), you strive to make them see themselves as a type of mini-scientist or historian (etc.), and there's the relationship/transition between the two. This is like a gamer's real-world identity, the virtual identity, and the relationship between the two. This last one is called the "projective identity," and is how you project your real-world identity onto the virtual identity, or how you project your past identity onto your identity as a scientist. If the learner can get to the projective identity, they learn they have the capacity to make the virtual identity part of their real-world identity. He points out this is more magical than any video game. All learning involves taking on a new identity.

Video games are good at creating "psychosocial moratoriums," which are important to learning. They are spaces where the real-world consequences of mistakes are reduced while they learn how to move or interact with the new material. Learners must be enticed to try, put lots of effort into learning, and achieve some meaningful success. Video games offer lots of opportunities to practice, while schools don't. This practice is often repetitive, but it forces players to apply knowledge to new situations (called "transfer"), and punishes players who have a "routinized mastery." Learners should always be required to operate at the outer edge of their resources, that way the tasks will be doable, but very challenging.

Good games offer and accept multiple solutions to each problem. Players get clues, make hypotheses, test them out, then reform their hypotheses and apply them to new situations. This is how they form patterns, which is what all learning is.

Practice needs to be carefully mixed with overt telling. You can't just let the students go off on their own and expect them to learn. You can do this by periodically assessing their progress, give feedback/lecture, then let them continue.

Learning is a very social activity, just like gaming. While seeking patterns, a person asks other people, reads books, interacts with tools/technologies. They usually share what they have learned, eventually with a group. Otherwise that person has no way to know if the patterns they have formed are real. who will normalize or police their views if they deviate too far from the norm of the group. When there is a disagreement, there is a dialog (more social sharing of information). This interaction and ability to use tools is important in the real-world, yet our schools test what's in the learner's brain rather than what they can do when the use the tools.

Good video games not only allow for consuming, but producing as well. Players can modify worlds, create maps, post on online bulletin boards, and communicate tips and opinions.

Instead of saying video games are a waste of time, we should be looking into why people will spend so many hours learning how to play a game without feeling the same enthusiasm for school. In video games, "hard" is often good, while "easy" is often bad. The argument in this book isn't that good things are necessarily being learned, rather that good learning often occurs during video game playing.

Online/In-Person Instruction Activity

2008-10-15T16:20:00.003-04:00

I had two very interesting classes today. At first I wasn't sure how to feel about these two classes, but the more I think about it, the more excited I am. I just talked about this yesterday, but now I actually have two classes under my belt.

I developed an online activity using Macromedia Flash for students who are in our instruction room. It mixes virtual and real-world activities. They have to go upstairs to find a particular book which contains a code required to continue with the activity. The computer gives them a "home base" and has the advantage of giving points more easily/fairly than if the professor and I were scrambling to grade.

The part that I wasn't so happy about at first was they finished this very quickly. I had them for an hour and some groups finished in less than 20 minutes! I have one more section of the same class on Friday, so I have time to work on that. But I stuck to the bare basics and they really seemed to get it! Nine out of ten groups had very good scores and were proud of those scores. I was blown away by how fast they found books upstairs. And on top of it, they really seemed to have fun. I observed this, and then asked if they had more fun than they would have if I had lectured. Their resounding "yes" was very convincing.

I will report again on Friday afternoon about how the last class goes with the upgrades.

Games in Libraries

2008-10-14T10:19:00.002-04:00

I'm finally back from a wonderful four-day weekend with a friend from grad school who visited from Bloomington, IN, and my parents, who were up here from Georgia to visit and work on the house. It feels a bit strange to be back, and I just spent 2.5 hours catching up on the e-mail that accumulated during that time. Now there are no more breaks for the rest of the month :(

A former student sent me this link which discusses library video games being developed by Carnegie Mellon. That first link seems to be the blog of a serious gamer, who thinks libraries are stupid, and they shouldn't attempt video games. The comments are very interesting.

I have been very interested in educational video games in the academic library setting. I'm working my way through John Paul Gee's book called What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. It's facinating and every librarian should read it as it directly relates to going beyond "active learning" and striving for "critical learning."

I developed my own library game over the summer. I don't intend for people to think it's something students will want to play on Friday night, but I am hoping it's more fun than a regular BI lecture, and offer it to professors who end up not having time to bring in their students for BI (this happened with several classes last semester because of snow). I'm scrambling to adapt it a little for classes that are in the library, so they have to go find a book in the stacks, which will contain a code to continue with the "game." I really want to be reading more and finding other library games to work with.

I am not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination. I really admire many creative and asthetic aspects of video games and comic books, but they don't hold my attention. I'm too old-fashioned, I guess. I think I need to find some gamer students who would be willing to work with me, though I don't have much to offer in compensation. I'm really regretting my gaming friends Jen & Lynnette have moved away...

Libraries as "Essential Services"

2008-10-14T09:31:00.002-04:00

A friend of mine was visiting this weekend. She had a brief stint as a public librarian in the northern Miami area. During that time, she got hit by hurricaines Wilma, Katrina, and Rita. During the evacuation, they said all county employees had to stay. By the time they were allowed to leave, it was too late

At our library, the college administration thinks the library is an "essential service." Even if classes are cancelled (which they almost never are at a campus-level), the library is still expected to be open with full services offered unless the governor of PA declares a state of emergency. Our director is of a slightly more practical opinion, thank goodness, and I have so far not had to take advantage of this.

It is flattering to be considered an "essential service," but I don't understand the job requirement of risking one's life to provide library services. Libraries are essential to our society, but a temporary lapse in services for occasional, very good reasons isn't going to hurt anything!

It's too close!

2008-10-07T12:21:00.005-04:00

I just realized how fast October 24 is coming up. That's our Harry Potter program, I know I've talked about it enough before. My co-worker whose potter-mania exceeds mine exponentially turned an old book cart into the Knight Bus. She just brought it in yesterday afternoon. Isn't it great? Notice the working chandeliers, you can see the one on the top floor in this picture.

We've decided to give up on dry ice. We found a local place and it's surprisingly inexpensive, but it only creates fog for 10-15 minutes before the water becomes too cool. It bubbles for a while longer, but someone would have to be changing out not only the dry ice but the water as well. I don't think anyone has time for that.

I'm scrambling to get my advertisements out on time. This year we have two professors giving scholarly talks the week of. The German professor is going to talk about the modern use of fairy tales, particularly in Book 7. One of the religion professors is going to have us watch the video of J.K. Rowling's talk at the Harvard graduation (she's a Harvard alum), then discuss it in terms of religion.

We're also doing a huge Horcrux Hunt which requires a lot of planning. It will be a cross between an obstacle course and a scavenger hunt. Students will have to do silly little activities to get credit for having found and destroyed each Horcrux... which in the stories is required before they can kill the bad guy.

On top of that, I just got a request for three freshman comp classes next week. I really want to make it game-like, and I really want to do a great job... but my creativity runs a bit short when I'm rushing... and my parents and a friend are coming this weekend. They live 10-14 hours away, so I will be giving them my full attention for 4 days... other than sewing on a few buttons so I can tell myself at least the costumes are complete.

It was a success

2008-10-05T13:51:00.002-04:00

I received a total of 136 votes for favorite banned author/book. The winners were J.K. Rowling for favorite author... that's no surprise. Favorite banned book was Catcher in the Rye (To Kill a Mockingbird and Harry Potter were out of consideration because they won the past two years). Of Mice and Men, The Giver, and Go Ask Alice were also very close.

Tomorrow I will worry about choosing winners for the drawing. I'm so excited to have received so much participation!

Opinions, please

2008-10-03T11:34:00.002-04:00

I just got an e-mail this morning from someone I have met in person just once or twice. We had e-mailed back and forth a few weeks ago about her starting a blog. It's now up and running, and it's very good. I don't want to mention who because I don't have her permission and I'm hoping she doesn't take this as criticism.

The thing I want opinions on is this. She has a number of years of experience as an academic librarian. But she has taken a few years off to take care of her two very young children. I respect that. I think parenting is the most important job in the world, even if I am not a parent myself. If the profile says she is an academic librarian, should she state she is taking a few years off and not currently working? This is not an obligation, this is an issue of transparency, something that is highly valued in the Web 2.0 world.

I had advised her before she started the blog to write first for herself and to be a part of the library blog community. It's amazing the stuff you learn when you're looking about things to write about, and how writing about them shapes your beliefs about them. Every library blog I read includes stories that come up while the person is at work, and I'm wondering if potential readers will ever get suspicious about why she never talks about work.

This person definitely has interesting things to write about and to contribute to the library community. Should she be honest about not currently being employed because she has more important things to do at the moment? That seems like it would help readers understand her perspective, which is more often from the other side of the reference desk, and something we don't get to hear about much. Am I making this into a much bigger deal than it is?

Delighted

2008-10-03T11:01:00.002-04:00

I had the second half of the class I was frustrated with... meaning I'm frustrated with the whole class, and half of the class on Wednesday and the other half today. I was dreading the class even after preparing for it better than I had been on Wednesday. I found a chapter of a reference book that discussed the subject, made copies of it for everyone, and passed it out first thing in class. I talked about what it was a little bit before starting into the resources. I also was informed of a better database for the subject. It was a major database, but I didn't realize this subject was covered so well in it.

Anyway, this made a WORLD of difference. It was like night and day. They were not so resigned to failure, they had no problems finding examples in newspapers, nor finding scholarly articles. They asked good questions and left with a pile of sources to use over the weekend. They still may not know how to write the paper, but at least they have good resources.

I sent an e-mail to the students who had been in the Wednesday class and invited them to pick up copies of the reference article at the reference desk. I don't know if any have, the pile looks as big as it did yesterday. But at least I have done what I could to make up for not knowing everything I needed to know. Not that it was my fault. I have to remind myself of that. I was raised Catholic, I'm always feeling guilty about something.

Banned Book Talk...

2008-10-01T20:47:00.003-04:00

... was a huge success. We had just under 20 students... most from the education class that was required to come. And they TALKED! It was a discussion rather than a lecture. Every single person was engaged and had something to say.

They enjoyed the food. Each item I brought in was from a banned book:

Strawberries from Snow Falling on Cedars
Red appples from The Giver
Pumpkin pasties from Harry Potter
Bubble gum from The Great Gilly Hopkins
Peanut butter sandwiches from Where the Sidewalk Ends
Chocolate-covered ants (Raisinettes) from The Pigman

It was a good end to a long day.

Banned Books Week 2008

2008-10-01T13:53:00.003-04:00

The votes keep coming in, I must be over 120 by now, even after taking the sound off of my animation on the library's Web site... the other librarians and my husband complained about how annoying it was after the sixth or seventh time. I have the filling done for my pumpkin pasties, and I'm anxiously awaiting our discussion tonight, it should be a lot of fun. People have stopped me and other librarians asking, "why was this book banned?" in front of the display. They can't believe their favorites appear on the list. I have never received so much attention!

Appreciated

2008-09-29T15:27:00.002-04:00

Here's a picture of the lovely flowers that arrived today from an English professor. She was at a teaching conference over the weekend, and we took her two classes and discussed Web evaluation. I had a great time with the classes, but it's so nice to know we were appreciated. We're leaving them at the library reference desk to share their beauty with all who pass by.

Banned Books Week 2008

2008-09-29T08:06:00.002-04:00

This is so incredible, I can't get over it and I can't account for my own success this morning. I came into work for a few hours yesterday and assembled my Banned Books Week display and Web site. I sent out an e-mail to all faculty, staff, and students inviting them to vote for their favorite banned book on our Web site. This morning I had 95 e-mails waiting for me, 90 of them were votes. I thought maybe one person voted many times, or that we had gotten spammed, but almost all of them are unique votes by our own community. I have never had nearly so many votes in an entire week, let alone a single day. The highest number was two years ago when I got 72.

The only think that I can attribute to myself is the animated advertisement I put on our Web site in addition to the e-mail I sent out with the subject "Sex, profanity, and immorality at the Snowden Library!" But can that make all the difference?

Coming together

2008-09-26T14:46:00.003-04:00

I have held back on this blog the past few days because I feel I have so much to complain about (...grrr LibQUAL is all I can say about that...), or sad news to tell about deaths and health crises among our faculty and their families. It's the first time in a long time I haven't looked forward to Friday since we're going to a funeral tonight... I'm nervous about crying as hard as the family even though I don't know them well just because she was way too young to die.

But today there are a few things that are a positive. First is how much I love my office-mate who took over reference for the entire day as I covered for one late-scheduled class and helped cover for another librarian who is at the hospital taking care of her daughter. I had asked her to take over just while I was in class, and without asking she took over the whole day.

Second is I had some good classes today that were enjoyable with lots of participation.

Third is that I just got one more person to sit on my panel and two people asking if they could bring posters to our SLC workshop next month. Oh can you ever! I am so excited, their topics sound great.

Fourth is I got a call saying my pre-ordered copy of Inkdeath arrived at our local indie bookstore. I didn't think it was coming out for another two weeks.

And the fifth thing to be happy about comes from a conversation I had with my mentor yesterday about what women students lives were like even when she went to college. I can't imagine my father not being able to help me move into my dorm room, or having to be back in my dorm by 9, or not being served dinner because I was wearing pants rather than a skirt, or not being able to go to Harvard just because of my gender. I know it's not really equal yet, but I was reminded how much progress has been made even in my parents' lifetime. I'm grateful for my parents and teachers who said I could do whatever I wanted and wasn't limited by my gender.

Censorship in healthcare

2008-09-25T08:39:00.002-04:00

My cousin sent out an e-mail about a scary health care bill that would allow medical professionals to object to proceedures that go against their conscience. According to the comments going around the Web, this goes beyond the abortion proceedure to not informing a patient of what their options are, or possibly witholding any treatment if the medical provider doesn't agree with their lifestyle choices. While there is information in newspapers in LexisNexis about the bill, it sounds vague as to what proceedures beyond abortion count.

While no one should be forced to perform an abortion, you should be forced to treat a lesbian fairly, or give referal to services that will give comprehensive information on AIDS or prescribe birth control. In short, every patient should get full, accurate information regardless of what health issue is involved, which is a separate issue from whether that particular doctor or nurse is willing to perform it.

Mixed feelings

2008-09-25T08:06:00.003-04:00

How should a good reference librarian feel when the student worker calls him/her for help in the break room at lunch or on an evening/weekend when she/he is not scheduled to work but is in his/her office? I suppose an excellent one is delighted. When people actually ask for help, reference is my favorite part of being a librarian. I am very happy to help when called during the day, even if I'm not the person on call. But lately I have been working later in the evenings and coming in on weekends to try to catch up on all of my projects without the usual disruptions, and I am being called to come out for not only reference help, but to un-jam printers and figure out computer questions as well. I'm only mildly and temporarily annoyed with the requests for reference help, I am less gracious for technical problems.

Should I feel guilty that this annoys me? Does it make me less than a good reference librarian?

Reimbursement woes

2008-09-24T21:15:00.002-04:00

The hoops that one has to go through to get reimbursed are incredible... and heaven forbid you forgot the right procedure... I used my own credit card to buy my plane tickets and registration for ACRL, then submitted the forms to the business office. They're throwing a fit and saying since I didn't use a company credit card, they might not reimburse me until 30 days before the conference... that's a lot of money to go without for six months...

I'm tired now, I hope to have something more intelligent to say tomorrow.

IM Frustration

2008-09-23T11:19:00.002-04:00

I have gotten so frustrated with how often Meebo isn't working (like last night and today). I think it's time to switch to something else, but it needs to be something that doesn't require users to login. I got so confused with Hab.la because their instructions are so vague. I found AIM's WIMSI widget, which seemed great until it started displaying that I was offline even though I was online and carrying on a conversation with myself.

I can't easily see if Pidgin has a widget, or if it's just an aggregator and you need a Meebo account to use it, like what Hab.la seems to be. I don't like Hab.la's widget anyway, it's almost invisible.

Help, if you have any advice!

Mary

Book Review: Library 2.0 and Beyond

2008-09-23T09:44:00.002-04:00

I just finished a new library book and want to share my notes about it. This book is an anthology of articles on different aspects of library 2.0. Each article has a different author with a different focus and different style, some practical, some theoretical. There were three chapters of this book I got a lot out of, two that had good information that didn't seem relevant to me, and many that were not very memorable. Here are my notes:

Library 2.0 & Beyond: Innovative Technologies & Tomorrow’s User
Edited by Nancy Courtney
Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited (2007)

The term “Library 2.0” first appeared in 2005 and, to put it simply, is a concept where the trends and tools of Web 2.0 are applied to libraries. Web 2.0 is broader than just the tools we associate with it. A comprehensive definition is hard to achieve, but it includes:

wisdom of crowds
age of the amateur
many people contributing just a little to get impressive results
participation; constant change; collaboration
self-service
two-way flow of information between the people and the organizations
**democratizing of communication

These virtual communities support physical ones. For libraries, this means we should make the library available at all points of need, and integrate the library with services outside of the library’s walls.

Here are the highlights of the book:

Chapter 4 on podcasting by Chris Kretz
It explains the difference between a mere audio file and a “podcast,” which must include RSS. Things you can do with podcasts include

book reviews
highlighting collections
reading books (one library read the entire Frankenstein in 27 podcasts over a month, featuring different faculty members’ voices)
leading a treasure-hunt exercise
“Library Audio to Go” (focuses on specific information resources and topics related to research in a conversational manner)
“Computer Tips” at Providence PL (hands-on tutorials for stuff like Google Earth, Flickr, Craigslist, and go with screen shots)
live programs hosted at library
local history, story time, teen show

Of course there are legal issues involved. You must get signed permission from speakers, permission from authors/artists, podsafe music, copyright of books, etc. To promote podcasts, you should submit the RSS feed to a podcast directory (Ed. Podcast Network, iTunes, Podcast Alley), include information in the ID3 tags, add graphic or logo to the ID3 tag. Also be sure to make it clear at the start of each podcast who/what will be presented.

Chapter 8 on user-based tagging by Ellyssa Kroski
This was also a good chapter, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of letting the masses “tag” items on the Web in order to organize it. She argues there’s just too much information on the Web to be cataloged by professionals, so why fight the amateur organization?

Advantages- inclusiveness (no bias), currency, discovery potential, nonbinary nature (no one preferred term for all synonyms), self-moderation/democratic, shows what users want and insight into their behavior, community, low cost, usability, and resistance is futile.

Disadvantages- non synonym control, lack of precision, lack of hierarchy, lack of recall, susceptibility to “gaming” (like spamming).

Advanced features are making tagging more useful.

Chapter 9 on learning from video games by David Ward
This had some great stuff in the section on “Games as an Education Tool.” I think most library educators agree that straight-out lectures don’t work anymore, you have to get them active. Video games involve learning; the players have to learn to solve problems and will spend hours doing so. We should use off-the-shelf games or make our own that get students simulating the research process to give them practical albeit virtual experience.
The definition of a “video game” is:

visual digital information to 1+ players
takes input from players
processes the input according to programmed game rules
alters digital information based on input

He writes that you don’t need to use actual video games, just characteristics of the games, where players learn by doing and discovering… a.k.a. “active learning.” You must keep telling to a minimum, to allow for discoveries. Allow them to get feedback from environment to inform them for their next action.

Furthermore, 2.0 involves collaborative relationships. Try to provide opportunities for “peer-to-peer creation and transfer of knowledge.” This provides newbies a stronger support system. Let students build their own research guides.

Less memorable chapters for me included: Virtual Worlds (Second Life), Social Networking, Mashups, Handheld Computers in Library (including cell phones), Wikis. The chapter on future catalogs was good, but not of personal interest as we can’t build our own catalog. But much of what it suggests will be available in Indigo, which I hope we will switch to over winter break. The chapter on digital storytelling was very good, and written by academic librarians, but I found it difficult to see how it would be applied to our library. I would like to see examples of this.

Phone Books

2008-09-22T16:09:00.004-04:00

The latest edition of the Williamsport phone book arrived, as did the big bins for recycling the old phone books. I stopped using phone books for a few years, instead looking everything up on Yahoo Yellow Pages. But I've come back to them. I like that we don't have to pay for it, nor any other service to allow us to use it. I like that it's limited to our geographic area, and that it allows you to browse if you didn't spell something right (a common problem with me). It also always seems to have more options for any given Yellow Pages category than the online version seems to.

Of course there are advantages to the online one, like links to Web sites and maps and full mailing addresses. Plus it doesn't kill as many trees. But I still love quaint, old-fashioned phone books.

Taking 2.0 to the Faculty

2008-09-19T11:00:00.004-04:00

We read a good, brief article called "Taking 2.0 to the Faculty" for our instructional librarian meeting this morning. I thought it was a great article, and particularly relevant to me since I'm the 2.0 person of the group.

I think every public services librarian should make time for blogs. I don't understand how you can run programs and improve on instruction without reading what other people are doing. I find blogs to be so much more helpful than formally published articles. You miss so much of the practical stuff that doesn't get put into the scholarly literature. It makes me sad for people who don't create the time to browse other librarians' blogs from time to time.

Helping faculty

2008-09-19T11:00:00.001-04:00

One of the biggest faculty users of Turnitin.com just called because she forgot the class password and can't find it on the new interface. I can't find it on the new interface either, but as the administrator, I could look it up. I read it off to her. Her response was, "Who the f&#% came up with that?!"

I cracked up. It wasn't the response I had been expecting.

So Let Just Not Talk About It?

2008-09-17T16:46:00.009-04:00

This is an old example of censorship, but illustrates previous points I have made on the issue of censorship of books like Huck Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird. It seems to me that the teacher led an excellent discussion of the book and the use of racial language. Yet a student wants to take this discussion out of the classroom and never be able to talk about it. How is anyone (particularly Caucasians) ever supposed to learn when you censor the hard truths of the not-so-glorious past? And if 1/3 of their school is African American, they must hear racial slurs over and over again in the hallway and in their community. Shouldn't they know the history of those words?

I'm sure I have many ideas that are offensive to other people on the issue of race and ethnicity... maybe even just the fact that I'm white. But why can't we push forward with open, un-censored talks so that we can all learn what's offensive, why, and take the fear out of the issue? How can we move on from where we are now to something better without these talks? How is this desire controversial? It's a sincere question that begs for comments from any readers who have more experience than I do.

Reference Question Stumper

2008-09-17T16:46:00.008-04:00

I just had a student at the reference desk whose professor is offering extra credit if they can figure out what the significance of the number 39 is in the movie Blow-Up. He said there's a book in the library that will tell them. She had already searched out a dictionary of symbols, and we looked through some others. I also used Reference Universe. When I write out "thirty-nine," it returns several reference articles on the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. She read about them in one of our reference books, but doesn't see the connection. I didn't know what else to try, and am not having any luck on the Internet either...

A little while later...
With some tweaking of the search terms in Google, I found the number thirty discussed in a book called After Hitchcock. It's either a reference to Hitchcock's 39 Steps, which has similar themes in its plot, or that Antonioni was living in Europe in 1939. Long live Google Books. Now if they'd only let me print a page or two...

Countdown Begins

2008-09-17T16:46:00.003-04:00

I set up a countdown widget for myself to remind myself how much time I have left before Harry Potter Night. It's my big event for the year. This clock goes onto my iGoogle page, which I use as my home page. I may put it on the library's Web site, too, but I'll have to wait until the week of for that...

I need to pick a topic for a panel on Web 2.0 technologies. I'm thinking of talking about widgets, and how they do really cool stuff without needing to know any programming languages or even much about Web sites other than where to place your code.

First step to Seattle

2008-09-16T15:05:00.003-04:00

I bought my plane ticket to Seattle for ACRL in March. There was a flight for $300 including taxes, and I know if I waited until a reasonable time to buy the ticket, it would cost $900, which I couldn't afford. I got some money from the provost's office, and it will cover my plane ticket now and early-bird registration, with just $5 coming out of my pocket so far. Everything else will be my expense, but I have a place to stay in Seattle (and people to see!) and that's the biggest expense.

So ACRL, here I come... though it would be nice if you would let me register to keep our business office happy...

On a side note, I'm a little disappointed on something. One of the other librarians runs the local chapter of the honor society Phi Kappa Phi. It seems to be a big headache for her, so I contacted the Miami U. chapter to see if I was eligible. Each chapter has its own rules, and Miami doesn't allow alumni to join. That's fine. But I hate that the national standard is the top 10% of graduating class, but Miami's chapter says only the top 5%. I wasn't in the top 5%, but I was probably right around the top 10%. IU's cutoff for Phi Beta Mu was higher than the national cutoff. Though satisfying that was not a problem.

Thinking about this, I just realized I don't have any of these on my staff page...

Quiz Night at the Snowden Library?

2008-09-15T15:47:00.002-04:00

I haven't run this by anyone at my library yet, but it sounds like a good idea. Sami from the Sprylibrarian wrote about her library's Big Brain Bash event recently. I asked her for the materials, and this morning I had a big, wonderful e-mail telling more about the event and the various Word and PDF documents associated with it. I am so excited to pitch this to our director and other librarians.

We have two big outreach events at our library, but both are in the fall. Harry Potter Night will take place on October 24, that's as close as we can get to Halloween this year because the 31st is Long Weekend and we won't have any students that day! The other big event is Snowden 'til 2. This takes place the last day of class, and runs from 9 p.m. until 2 a.m. (hence the name). Professors come give review sessions while we order enormous sheet pizzas, serve cookies and coffee, hire professional massuses, coordinate video games on projectors, Play-Doah smashing, and pictures with Santa. This draws 400+ students on a campus of 1,400.

Perhaps there is enough in the spring to draw their attention... spring is so busy, and I get the impression that students don't take anything as seriously that semester as they do in the fall. But this event seems labor-intensive, but inexpensive, and if it was successful there, then it should be successful here.

Productive Weekend

2008-09-15T08:42:00.002-04:00

I had every intention of putting a few hours in this past weekend, and I didn't. But I was productive, anyway. I am nearly done with this year's batch of Harry Potter costumes for Harry Potter Night in October. I finished the Grey Lady's costume, made myself a new black Victorian walking skirt to go under my green robe, and the green robe got some improvements... well, actually minor simplifications that make it look soooo much better.

My birthday is coming up and I told my husband I can't handle not having a digital camera anymore. We're going to look for one this week, so soon I will be able to put pictures up of the new and improved costumes.

The next project will be sponge-painting bricks onto a huge piece of muslin to turn into the wall leading towards Platform 9 3/4. We plan to hang this over the front door to the library... though we'll have to remember to lock the sliding doors open so people don't slam into the glass... though it would be appropriate for book 2, wouldn't it?

What would a librarian superhero look like?

2008-09-12T08:11:00.003-04:00

I was catching up on Google Reader and through Please Be Quiet, I came across yet another fun avatar site, this one helps you create your own superhero avatar. It's called the Hero Machine. I played with it for way too long yesterday afternoon, considering that I have plenty of other stuff to do. I've added another 30 minutes to the time I will be coming in this weekend.

Anyway, as I was playing with what I wanted to be a superhero librarian, I started to wonder... what would a superhero librarian look like? I was really stuck on the eyes and eyebrows. Comic book heros are always scowling, angry at all of the evil in the world. A quizical or inviting look is just wrong, but we don't want librarians who scowl!

And what would she wear? I do think my superhero librarian is a woman... and I do think she needs purple hair that blows in the wind. Beyond that... I'm just clueless. What conveys smart, helpful, and yet still powerful as a guide to the universe of human knowledge?!? How about angel wings? A cat companion is a must, and if the superhero can fly, then what use is a companion who cant?

Anyone else have any opinions?

Classes

2008-09-11T14:34:00.002-04:00

I had two really good classes. This is good, since I got evaluated by the library director and a co-worker today. I hope they think the classes went as well as I did, even if I ran out of time at the end of the second one.

The first class had six theatre students in it. They were very engaged and happy to participate. At the end, I had some review questions and told them I would divide the small prizes in accordance with how much they participated. I didn't tell them what the prizes were, but it was enough of a motivation that almost every one of them raised their hand for every question. Not every answer was what I was looking for, some were better than I was looking for, some answered to their interpretation of what must have been a vague question. But they all participated, and they all did a great job. I passed out $1 coupons to the campus coffee shop, and they said, "this isn't a small prize, this is great!"

One student asked about why I wrote AND instead of using the ones EBSCO already had. I had been waiting to add an OR statement and was explaining why you want to keep OR words all in one line. I told them funny things would happen, and they'd probably not even know those funny things were happening. I asked them if they had seen the original Ghostbuters, they all nodded enthusiastically (which is good, considering that movie is older than they are). I said "Mixing AND and OR can be dangerous, kind of like how they kept saying in that movie 'don't cross the streams.'" Okay, so it's a bit of a stretch of an analogy, but they all got it. When I tried to clarify by saying it was like Math where addition and multiplication are mixed... they interrupted and said they were theatre majors and didn't get math analogies. So I asked if Ghostbuster analogies worked, and they all agreed that it had.

As they were leaving, one girl said, "This was my favorite library session ever." I had to be honest with her and said it was one of mine, too.

Library's role in student retention

2008-09-10T20:36:00.003-04:00

Our director passed out the latest issue of Library Issues. The article is entitled "Keeping Them Enrolled: How Academic Libraries Contribute to Student Retention" and is written by Steven Bell. Retention is a big issue here this year because we have a very small class and don't know when the general economy will recover. Fortunately, we're in good financial standing due to very conservative trustees and president. But we still need to make an extra effort to all do our part in student retention. I doubt that we are alone in this issue.

I have been wondering since Monday's faculty meeting if we shouldn't explore how the library could get involved with prospective student days. Don't ask me how, but would it make any difference? The administration wants us to think about what makes us stand out, and we have an exceptional library. My husband, a biology prof., doesn't think that's really a big draw to students. It wouldn't have been with me 10 years ago, I just liked the pretty brick buildings and lots of trees (and being the furthest state school from my parents helped, too... I love them, really I do!).

In the article, Bell says the most commonly stated reason for leaving (or probably for staying) is the people. Some studies have been done that link library spending per student to successful retention rates. But it's difficult to argue. One of the big names in retention research is George Kuh, who writes that librarians can help by being involved in freshmen orientation, teaching 1st year seminars, collaborating with faculty, and getting involved with students in other ways.

One suggestion he makes is to work with the parents in various ways. To at least get them to contact us when the student is calling them for research help (and studies show they do!!!).

Librarians should do what they can, along with other campus employees, to help new students establish roots. Libraries should host social activities and programs to allow librarians to reach out to students.

There is a call for greater study, particularly a survey to graduating seniors on how much contact they had with librarians, how helpful the librarians were, and if that led to their academic success.

The suggestion that libraries should give preferential treatment to upperclassmen is ridiculous, though. I really doubt such unfair treatment will entice freshmen to stay at the college longer, and it breaks every code of librarianship. If anything, we should be more indulging to freshmen as we try to help them "establish roots" and encourage them to come back to the library. However, this article is of great interest and I recommend it... and it's short!

This is an interesting opener to a discussion I hope will bloom on our campus and in the library community.

Left Out

2008-09-10T16:04:00.004-04:00

Again from LISNews, Walt at Random is making a list of librarian blogs (and NOT library blogs). I want to be included on that list. I fit all of the criteria, except he wants at least one post from 2007 and I started this blog in January 2008. Oh, and I guess I'm not "visible" enough according to my Technorati rating... and I was so proud I was up to a 6.

I'm happy to have this list of library-related blogs, but I feel so left out :(

Harry Potter Decision Explained

2008-09-10T15:51:00.005-04:00

I love LISNews for such things as pointing out this wonderful summary of the Harry Potter decision by Chris Meadows. It all came down to the fact that the Lexicon copied or paraphrased too much, including almost all of the two small books that Rowling wrote on Quidditch and magical creatures.

The decision does not prevent another lexicon or any other reference book. It clearly states (according to Meadows, I don't have time right now to read the original) that Rowling cannot ban reference books on the topic of Harry Potter to protect sales of her own future encyclopedia. She can only protect her original works from being overly copied.

The NPR story can be found here, but I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet.

Finally, a satisfying explaination.