Oscar in the Library

Some vintage Sesame Street.

Oscar finds his books in the end, but in many ways this seems to be an object lesson on how not to conduct a reference interaction.

Poor Blog

Dear Blog, I've been neglecting you of late and I apologize. I haven't posted here for some time for a number of reasons.

Reason 1: I've been posting new book lists on my library subject guides pages. Here are the links: New books in Communication, New Books in Anthropology and Archaeology, and New books in Women's Studies.

Reason 2: I am sometimes disorganized. Please don't tell anyone. This is a terrible sin if you're a librarian.

Reason 3: The WSU Libraries have implemented LibGuides for subject pages, have changed the way we take our reference statistics (we used to fill out a spreadsheet & now we use a SurveyMonkey form), and the Research Services parts of the Libraries here at Pullman are undergoing reorganization. We've been having a busy year!

Reason 4: In spite of the activities listed in Reason 3, my life is often boring. Truly. It's part and par of the whole uncool vibe.

Reason 5: After a month of bed rest in January (ugh) and an early, but not scary-early delivery on the first of February, I'm now spending a lot of time worrying over how to protect the world's ducks from my cute baby monster.

Being responsible for the fate of all ducks weighs heavy on a person.

But I'll try to write more faithfully here. The WSU Libraries are going to be doing some great things this year, and I'm looking forward to being a part of them and to posting about them.

Meryl Streep

is going to play a librarian:

http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/currentnews/newsarchive/2008/November2008/streepheartsdewey.cfm

Cat in the morning, a new role model

Hopefully, you've already seen this. If not, here is a really charming illustration of how cat owners all over the world wake up in the morning. And many thanks to Karen Swanson for sharing this with me!

I know - cute, but what has it got to do with libraries, right? Well, librarians, and perhaps especially academic ones, are not unlike a cat in the morning. We want things. We want to integrate library instruction into our university's curricula so that our graduating students really are information literate, we want to expand our services, get funding for new programs and databases, collaborate with our colleagues in other departments, or we just want to remind the communities we serve that we exist, that we can help, that we are valuable.

But with one thing and another, it can be all too easy to stop meowing sometimes. And while I'd never openly advocate for the baseball bat approach (every analogy breaks down at some point), I'd like to think that I could learn from my own cat's approach to mornings, and become a bit more persistent and persuasive. Harriet always gets her breakfast, after all.

One thing I did today...

Librarianship is sometimes looked at as a sedentary profession. Picture a librarian in your head for a moment. Is s/he sitting at a computer, or calmly walking to a shelf to pull a book? Perhaps when you think of a librarian you picture someone who is standing by a patron's computer, offering help with a question.

If you were me, today, you'd be thinking of a librarian who is sweaty and bedraggled (but triumphant), the sort of person who'd just finished hauling donated books (seriously cool donated books, by the way) down four flights of stairs in small but heavy installments, because the building where the books were previously housed has an out-of-order elevator. After 22 times (yes, I counted) running up and down those stairs, I can feel my muscles growing as I type.

Contemporary Technologies: A Proposal

Upon revisiting my conference notes, and wanting to keep conversations going about technology in libraries while not wanting my profession to seem slow, or any more un-cool than necessary, I have a proposal. It will need some fleshing out, and some more thought behind it, but what if we call blogs, Wikies, IM, and Chat "Contemporary Technologies" rather than "new" or "emerging" ones? This acknowledges their currency while also acknowleging that the world moves really fast and that these things aren't really new any more.

Here's my starter list of contemporary technologies.
Blogs
Wikis
IM
Chat reference
Classroom software such as Blackboard and WebCT
MP3 players and files