Library Gazette

If the folks in Research and Instruction have looked a bit like deer caught in headlights this semester there is good reason. Our statistics are through the roof for both library instruction ‘one shot’ classes as well as one-on-one personal research sessions. So far this semester we have taught 124 one-shot library instruction sessions to 1928 students. That is 81% of sessions (75% of students) of the TOTAL number we did in the entire 2008-2009 year!! And the same is true of Personal Research Sessions. So far this year we have done 305 Personal Research Sessions which is 73% of the total number from all of last year. (Last year we nearly doubled the number of personal research sessions from the year before). And we still have two weeks to go and many sessions scheduled in those weeks. And it has not just been the Research and Instruction folks who have been participating. Carolyn McCallum, Leslie McCall, Cristina Yu and Erik Mitchell have all taught classes.

We’ve had lots of discussions (around the pots of very strong coffee we brew each morning) about why this is the case, and we feel that it in some way goes back to the new kind of students and faculty Wake Forest is attracting and developing who are not only willing to seek out help, but who are eager to take advantage of help when it is offered. That, coupled with the fact that we are good at our jobs, means faculty keep asking us to teach sessions, and students come back time and time again and tell their friends about us. The long hours, late night emails with students to schedule meetings, hours of prep for instruction sessions and the time spent on creating LibGuides are all worth it when we see the light go on in the eyes of students when they find the exact sources that will help them write their papers or when we have faculty thank us for the help we give their students. We feel this is one of the critical ways we help our students and faculty succeed and it is the heart and soul of our jobs, but we’ll all need a break come the holidays to gear up for it all again in the Spring!

ZSR Team 2 vs. Provost’s Office

Last night the two ZSR teams went 4-0 in their matches in the faculty/staff QuizBowl tournament! The teams were: ZSR I (Giz, Mary Beth, Heather, Roz) and ZSR II (Beth, Lauren C., Chris and Carol). In their first match, ZSR II went up against a formidable Provost’s team consisting of the Provost, Rick Matthews, Jacque Fetrow and Kline Harrison (nothing like playing your boss in the first round). They shined through and answered amazing questions seemingly without thinking. Their second match was against a mixed team of Political Science, Biology, Math and Communication faculty. Again - they amazed us all! With amazing answers like ‘Borneo’ and ‘Tobit’ ZSR II stormed through the rounds and lived to play again on Monday.

ZSR Team 1 vs. Computer Science

ZSR I then took their seats against a Computer Science team and the match was much closer. A bonus set of questions all on computer coding terms didn’t help us much. But we were tied going into the last question which began ‘Portia disguises herself as a judge…’ and I rang in to answer “Merchant of Venice.” Once again, Shakespeare saves the day! We got the bonus questions, too and moved on to face a team from Campus Ministry. I have to say they were some of the funniest people in the world and we had a blast playing against them. We came out on top again, and now the great irony is that ZSR I will face ZSR II in a match at 6pm Monday night in DeTamble Auditorium in Tribble Hall. If the loser of that game then wins its next match, we’ll face each other in the final game on Wednesday night! The winner of that game will go up against the winning student team for fun (if you call getting your tail kicked fun!)

It was a fun time and we loved hearing from the other teams how much they dreaded playing the librarians! We found that funny because we were saying the same thing about the faculty. Just goes to show that a broad knowledge base, lots of reading, NPR listening and a good sense of curiosity really pays off when it counts!

Hope you will come out and see us play!

Yesterday for our LIB210: Social Science Research Sources and Strategies class, Bobbie, Carolyn and I planned a variation on the library tour. We divided our students up into three groups and sent them to different areas of the library. They had three questions to ask:

• What resources or services would a WFU student find here?
• What resources or services do you provide to help with research?
• What is one thing about your department that you think students should know but don’t?

They also took along cameras Carolyn had checked out from the ITC and they took pictures of the departments.

When they returned to class each group told the other students about the departments they had visited. While they talked I uploaded the pictures into a Flickr page. Then this week they will be going in to name the pictures, put in a description and tag them. This will then lead us nicely into our discussions next week about search terms, controlled vocabularies and the benefit of using the subject terms within our electronic products.

We were thrilled with how much the students enjoyed the exercise. They were all excited about going out and learning new things and we heard a lot of “I never new that” and “that’s cool!” from the class as different areas or services were discussed. It worked so well I’m going to do it for my LIB100 class in October.

Many, many thanks to those on our staff who met our students and discussed our services with them. Mary Beth, Mary Reeves, Erik, Kaeley, Mary Lib, Sharon and Vicki. The students all commented on how nice the folks they had met were and how eager they were to help students.

If you want to see the pictures, here’s the site and toward the end of the set some pictures have been named and tagged already. I’m sure they would love to have some comments!!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zsrlib210/

At 2pm this afternoon I placed the last of the Current Periodicals on the shelf with its shelf tag — and there was room to spare. There is still a lot of clean up and many loose ends to tie up, but at least they all have a home.

Thanks to everyone who helped make this merger a success! Mary Scanlon for being right there with me throughout the entire project; Laura for her planning help; Chris Burris and his team of Linda Z. and Jane for coordinating the new labeling process (thanks goes to Erik on that as well) and for fielding my numerous questions about the intricacies of serials; Mary Lib for lending her book trucks; all the liaisons for being willing to relocate and weed in the Reference collection; Carol for signing off on the weeds (and for keeping me honest!); Judy and Brigett for the countless relocations and weeds they processed; Charles, Scott and their students for the off-sites and recycling they did; our amazing group of student assistants who did lots of very mundane work like filling out the purple and green slips ad infinitum, dusting shelves and shifting for endless hours; and all the rest of the library for your support!

I think this will really be a good thing for our users one all the dust has settled.

Come visit!

Our total weight loss this week was 10.5 pounds — which brings us up to over 18 pounds!! And now Erik has joined us, so we’ll be raking in the lost pounds! Thanks for all the support we’re getting!! Of course we have family trips, vacations, birthdays coming up so we are not promising to continue the big numbers lost trend forever but we’re doing our best!

The six of us from ZSR who are participating in Weight Watchers at work (Heather, Roz, Mary Beth, Julia, Megan and Susan) are keeping a log of how much weight (collectively) we lose so we are accountable. This was a great week - We are 8.2 pounds lighter then we were last week!! GO US!!!

Just to update everyone on the merger of Reference and Current Periodicals. Over Spring Break I started to shift the Reference collection to take advantage of the space we have made with relocations and weeding. We are consolidating our collection much more than in the past and are not leaving an enormous amount of room for growth. It is my hope that as new titles arrive in print, there will older titles that can then be relocated or weeded. I’m also banking (pun intended) on the purchase of some electronic databases over the next few years that will allow us to weed some print titles (let’s hear it for Reader’s Guide Retrospective!!) .

So with help from our students Heather and Dan I made it up through the Es. This has cleared out about an entire range of books - come see!! This coming week is perhaps my busiest of all time, so I probably won’t get back to shifting until next week, but I am hoping then to do it for an hour or two in the mornings and have the shifting complete by mid-April. This will let us do the quieter parts of the project (like filling our 2000 label holders with the labels for each title that is coming over) during the heaviest study times at the end of the semester.

Our goal is to begin moving the journals out of Current Periodicals on the Friday after exams end (May 9th) and have the shelves moved over the week of May 12th. I’ll keep you posted!! My thanks go out to everyone who has helped on this project — Brigett for doing our relocations; Judy and Charles for taking care of the weeds; Carol for signing umpteen green slips; All the liaisons for taking a good hard look at our collections and making some good, if sometimes hard, decisions (and signing umpteen green slips); Laura for helping me think through the best ways to handle the actual transfer of materials…..and the list goes on and on and on…..here’s hoping that by May the 23rd or so the project is complete!!

On Wednesday April 25th the Blue Sky Committee presented the results of their work to a packed LIB204. We based our report on the four major areas identified by the Environmental Scan Committee. We presented ideas about Library Resources, Library as Place, Library Services and Library Technology. We also listed personnel issues that will need to be considered along with the final strategic plan. Along the way we used our new ‘clickers’ to get Library Staff feedback on each area we proposed. This data will be taken along with all of the other things that have been presented to Graylyn on Thursday, May 3rd for the Admin Council Retreat. Then Lynn will spend the next few weeks locked away working on the final report for Dr. Hatch which will be presented on Thursday May 24th. All of our documents are available to Library Staff on the Strategic Planning wiki. Thanks to all the library staff who contributed such great feedback on each area we considered. And thanks to the Blue Sky Committee: Wanda, Chris, Elise, Kevin, Lauren and Renate.

Well, we are wrapping up another successful semester of LIB100 classes. We taught 10 classes this semester. That’s 137 students (24 Freshmen, 50 Sophomores 22 Juniors and 41 Seniors). A few classes branched out to use group projects for the final project, some of us even used Wikis! I taught EndNote Web to my classes and used our snazzy ‘clickers’ during many of my classes. The students seemed to really like them and whenever they came in and we were not using them, they always asked about them. I will be gathering up feedback from all instructors in a wrap-up meeting on Wednesday, May 31st at 1pm in room 476. Anyone else in the library is welcome to attend. This summer we are testing the waters with two LIB100 sections during Summer II (thanks Susan/Erik and Sharon/Vicki). If they don’t make it, we may not offer them again. I’ll be updating the template class this summer to include the options of group projects, wikis and clickers. A HUGE THANK YOU to all of the instructors who spend endless hours preparing for class and grading assignments and final projects. When you get comments like “I enjoyed every class and left every session with a wealth of new knowledge that I am really glad to have gained.” we know it was worth it! As always, anyone wanting to know more about the class, or who is interested in participating as an instructor, assistant or grader is welcome to come talk to me! Not everyone that works in our classes does the teaching - so if that is not your forte, but you still want to be involved, feel free to come discuss it.