Creative Reference Promotion

I caught up on my American Libraries Direct and there was a great post on a library who takes famous movie posters (Mary Poppins, Jaws, Wizard of Oz, Sopranos, etc.) and puts the librarians' faces on it, turns it into a postcard to send to students before each semester. They are so funny, but they have noticed a big improvement in reference appointments. You can see the gallery here.



I had a great class last night. It was the business practicum students. They are currently doing an internship, but also meet weekly for various topics. I covered career and interview resources, and briefly touched upon Linkedin and blogs. They were very excited about the blogs, or at least they were clearly paying attention at that point. The professor was thrilled with this idea, and may have future practicum groups post their internship journals as blogs. Then the business Web site could link to them, and the students could use them to prepare for jobs and interviews. So they serve many purposes. Several students said they planned to come to our presentation next week. A communications professor requested 70 handouts to give to her students, and I plan to pass them out to my upper-level class this morning. So maybe we'll get a small turnout after all!

Bad day got better

Today started off very badly. I got a cavity filled and the anastesia took four or five hours to wear off. So by the time I got back from the dentist, I grabbed a bowl of chili from the cafe and tried to walk quickly to a lunch meeting... only to trip on the four steps up to the business department, sending chili flying EVERYWHERE. It was all over the steps, all over my coat (including splatters down the back!), and went straight up my sleeve staining the nice shirt I wore today since I was teaching a business class. I went back to the cafe to get napkins to clean up and three people asked me what happened and if I needed them to call help... they thought the chili everywhere was blood!

This afternoon I had a phone interview with someone from Paratext. We were invited to be the first case study of a baccalaureate institution for the Reference Universe database. I spent a lot of time telling her about iGoogle and the Reference Universe gadget I made for it. She was having a hard time understanding what I meant. So I just sent her my login (after changing my password to something generic) and I think she had fun with it. I really need to start promoting this to faculty, it is such a great tool. I also discovered tonight that I can feed my cyber tiger little cyber steaks. It's so cute.

Blogs of Others

I love catching up on other people's library blogs while sitting at the reference desk (I was just shyly approached by a sociology student who asked if I was busy). Unlike me, some other librarians are excellent writers. I am currently enjoying a blog called Attempting Elegance. Here is a good post on the hopeless, crazy questions librarians deal with.

International Political Science Abstracts

Upon closer inspection of EBSCO's International Political Science Abstracts database, which we now have on a trail, I believe there is something seriously wrong with this database. I have run a small number of searches on "negative voting," "elections," "France," "Asia," and whatever else came to mind. The first results are always very sloppy, missing subject fields, old articles from the 70's and 80's appearing at the top in random order even though it says articles are sorted by date, sometimes the date is missing, or the year has additional numbers tacked on (like 19832). These do not have LinkSource links appearing. Once you scroll down a little, the results seem to stabilize, LinkSource is appearing consistantly, dates and subjects are consistantly entered. I have not yet discussed these problems with EBSCO.

Overwhelmed

Today is one of those overwhelming days when I'd love to just say "I quit" and go home and put my jammies on. Instead, it's 7 pm and I'm still at work. I taught through lunch today, too. Weird tech stuff keeps happening. Sue and I have been unable to post Office 2007 documents on our server, but IT had me download some compatibility thing, and that seems to have resoloved the problem. But I haven't tested a public computer yet to see if students will be able to open an Office 2007 document without this download. It's on my list of things to do tomorrow. We also have two new trial databases and International Political Science Abstracts wasn't showing LinkSource links (these help you find the full text if this database doesn't provide it), nor was it showing subjects if you did a keyword search. It did show them if you typed a keyword and then asked it to only search the subject field. Fortunatley, that seems to have been resolved. EBSCO didn't send the URLs for these two new databases, so I didn't know how to link them to our home page. Fortunately I called before wandering around, lost in cyberspace, for too long. I have had recieved excellent customer service every time I have called them.

I did a program last semester on identity theft for the FYRST program (freshmen) and told people they really needed to check their credit report histories frequently. Finally, my fiance said it was time I looked at mine since we're planning to buy a house soon. I discovered that when I consolidated my student loans, most of the old accounts did not get closed. So my report says I am in twice as much debt as I really am. I really need to start practicing what I preach. Until then, I'll just hope that this isn't too difficult to clean up.

Blogging for Jobs

I just talked to Janet (the director) who approved a new program idea. The program, which will be in less than 2 weeks will be on using blog technology to create a positive Web image and promote yourself in order to get a job. I'm presenting job finding resources to the Business Practicum next week, and will touch upon this in that class, but hope they'll come back and bring friends the following week.

I will post the handouts and links here once they're done.

Google Gadgets for the Snowden Library

I was finally able to get my catalog gadget to work yesterday. It will not go to Aquabrowser, our catalog interface, but it goes to our "classic" catalog. Which is fine. If I had thought of that earlier, I could have done this a while ago. To create a gadget, you just go to the Google Gadgets editor and cut and paste HTML code inside the "" tag. The trick is that you can't have code that needs scripts in the header. It's very easy to do, and the editor allows you to preview before you go into publishing and stuff.

Links to my gadgets can be found here: http://snowdenatlyco.blogspot.com/

You do have to add some "attributes" in the ModulePrefs tag such as author and e-mail before you can publish. You can just e-mail me at snyderm@lycoming.edu and I will send you my code so you can see what it should look like.

Now it is time to convince faculty they really need iGoogle. I hope that will get people to look at the library's blog through an RSS feed, so I see this as accomplishing multiple goals.