I am starting to become comfortable with the fact that I cannot accomplish everything that needs to be done in the time that I expect it should be done (excepting those action items with deadlines). The devil of productivity has decided to take longer lunch breaks and given me a reprieve from his incessant tapping (“did you do that yet? did you do this yet?”). So I’m more in inclined to spend time chatting with colleagues and my student workers than before and I’d like to think I’m better for it… though I’m told I still come across as “antsy.”
At The Source Cafe
Lemon date scone with coconut milk au lait
The IT department has some explaining to do
Apparently, I am working at the wrong campus. I had 5 students signed up for one of our drop-in workshops on Evaluating Resources this afternoon. No one showed. So while I was killing time, I took a look at the enrolled students’ profiles in the CMS. Turns out they all attend Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa (about an hour away). Some digital detective work discovered that my all-student email went out to both campuses by mistake. It also went out to the Board of Directors of the college… who are welcome to attend, if it please them. =)
Rubrics for evaluating resources
When I started teaching library instruction classes, I stuck to the ubiquitous CRAAP model for evaluating resources. Then I learned about BEAM and switched to that acronym for a while. Then I discovered the Edited/Peer-Review/Self-Published x Static/Syndicated/Dynamic grid and kept that discussion alive for as long as I could. Now I use them all (sometimes in very quick succession) and try to convey the more essential idea: it’s your job as the student-writer to tell me why this supports your argument. By placing the ball in their court, the game suddenly becomes interesting.
My favorite is “Scholarly Migration & Weekend Strategist”
New to me at least
I will say that one of the most difficult aspects of this new job is the constant task shifting. Whereas before I was single-tasking most of the day, now I shift repeatedly between preparing instruction sessions, working the reference desk, collection development, locating possible furniture purchases, preparing research proposals, exporting/importing statistical data, creating subject guides, reviewing tutorials, meetings, faculty tours, brainstorming sessions for new services, supervising employees (including student workers), working on professional projects outside of work, scheduling conference trips, and helping out an occasional drop-in student with the CMS.
And that’s just what I did today.
Fooled you
Found a wooden book in the stacks
Whither the college degree?
(via @agwieckowski) While reports of any thing’s death are always greatly exaggerated, the demise of the college degree, at least in the estimation of employers, does worry me. I’m not surprised that it could come to this. IHE’s created a market for alternative forms of accreditation the minute they started using graduate hireability as a rubric for success. However, should IHE’s find ways to illustrate the benefits of a degree that go deeper than employable skills and can successfully market those benefits, they just might stick around to see the 22nd century. I’m still putting money into a college fund for Aletheia.
Find the win in everything
We’re piloting a new series of information literacy workshops at MPOW this month. To my knowledge, these type of non-course-specific sessions have not been offered for some years (perhaps ever… the institutional memory is relatively short-term due to the youngish nature of the staff). That said, it was not a huge surprise when only one person showed up to the first session… but that one person was riveted. If I could get an entire class of students like her, I would never leave the classroom. Well, I guess you could say I DID have a class-full. 😉
The 3rd law
I spend hours trying to connect users to information resources. As a public services librarian, most of my week is spent in front of a classroom or working one-on-one with students trying to connect them to the resources they need for their assignments. Every reader his or her book. But how often do I give time and attention to the third law of library science? One of my goals for this semester is to spend more time finding the right users for some of our resources. Because books want to be loved. And I’m a biblio-match-maker.