Library Gazette

As many of you may recall, the ZSR Library has been recycling batteries at the ITC desk for years. This began back in the days of the old Palm PDAs that ran off of copious amounts of AAA batteries. Back then, Ellen Knott and I would make a trip every semester to 3RC the Envirostation in Winston-Salem. Two years ago, when the University made a recycling video, the ITC desk was featured as a battery drop-off location. As staff and student usage of this service has increased, so have our trips to 3RC. We now go twice a semester! Now, thanks to Craig’s excellent signmaking skills, we’ve added a prominent sign to the drop-off box in ITC. So remember, bring your batteries to the ITC desk to be recycled!

First rule of serving food at the Late Night Breakfast? Don’t leave your tongs under the heat lamp! (They get really hot!) On Monday, December 8th, I joined a group of Wake Forest staff and faculty as we served an all-you-can-eat breakfast in “The Pit” from 9 - 11:30 p.m. Entertainment was provided by various campus groups, and there were some great door prizes! I served up an egg and gravy pizza as well as “dessert pizza” which consisted of pizza dough with an apple topping.

This tradition was brough to Wake Forest many moons ago by Chuck Longino of the Gerontology Program and it is managed by Peggy Beckman. The surprise visitor this year was the Pillsbury dough boy!

On Monday, November 17th I attended the Writing Symposium panel discussion in Benson along with what appeared to be 75-100 faculty, staff, and students. The symposium was sponsored by the Department of English, the Teaching and Learning Center, and the Offices of the Dean and Provost. Tom McGohey of the English department gave a background on how this symposium came to be, referring to the results of the 2008 Wake Forest Faculty Writing Survey that expressed a need to make writing more visible across the University. He also introduced the members of the panel, Nancy Sommers, Joseph Harris, David Smit and Elizabeth Wardle.

The message of panel was that a focus on writing should be curriculum-wide, not just in the English department. A message that came across clearly in the writing survey results. The importance of both content and method was discussed as well, citing the importance of different academic disciplines conveying the various writing methods of their discipline to their students in the major.

Elizabeth Wardle was a very colorful speaker on the panel, describing the challenges of managing a writing programs for 50,000 students at the University of Central Florida with 77 writing instructors and 33 adjuncts who are paid only $1800 per course. The writing class at the University of Central Florida has students writing about writing rather than writing about some other topic or issue that is covered in the course.

After the 45 minute panel discussion each panel member met with faculty and staff in breakout groups in Tribble Hall. I was not able to attend the breakout groups but Sharon Snow and i enjoyed the panel discussion before heading back to ZSR. (Sharon may also have taken better notes than me on the panel discussion!) It was a very worthwhile event and interesting to hear some of the feedback from the faculty in the audience. While most were very in favor of more writing in the major, one faculty member in particular was concerned about the idea of focusing students on discipline specific writing at the undergraduate level, saying that perhaps getting into the methods of writing in a specific discipline should not necessarily be applied to undergraduates, but only to those at the graduate and PhD levels. All in all it was a living, engaging discussion on writing across the University curriculum.

Mary Lib Slate came by my office today and asked if I could take some pictures of the sink outside room 401 (old Current Periodicals). I assumed it was to document some mechanical issue. Imagine my surprise when I saw a sink full of ice and Red Bull with signage marketing how Red Bull “gives you wings!”

-Giz Womack

If you haven’t read this week’s Old Gold and Black you will want to check out these two articles! One is an article about the Starbucks Grand Opening and the other is an editorial about innovation at ZSR! Reading them both just made my day!

On Sunday, July 13th, Roz led the 30 new freshmen student athletes through a twenty minute introduction to the Z. Smith Reynolds Library. These students came to the library in three groups, one group every twenty minutes, over the course of an hour. We placed them in the ITC desktop computer lab and had the students spend five minutes searching for answer to three questions about a particular Olympic sport. After five minutes, Roz asked them what they found and how they found it. It didn’t take long for them to realize their trusted Google search didn’t always deliver the best results! This gave us the opportunity to show them how to contact a librarian for research assistance. After answering a few more questions about the library, we signed off on their “Deacon Discovery” worksheets (think “scavenger hunt”) and sent them on to their next destination. Hopefully this fast, fun introduction to the Z. Smith Reynolds Library will encourage these students to come back when papers are due! (We’ve already seen a few with a 10 page Anthropology paper due in summer school.) These students were great, and Roz and I had a wonderful time introducing them to ZSR!

This week, forty high school students from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians attended the MedCat program at Wake Forest University. MedCat stands for Medical Careers and Technology. The program was led by Professor Ulrike Wiethaus and partners Wake Forest University with the School of Medicine to teach these students about careers in the medical field. Its purpose is to give these students a taste of college life and encourage them to attend college while keeping them connected to their traditions and culture.

The students arrived in Winston-Salem on Sunday, and on Monday morning I did a clicker survey of their technology skills and they toured the campus. That afternoon, they began a Problem Based Learning (PBL) exercise related to the medical field. Later that afternoon, Sharon Snow led a Bibliographic Instruction session for the group and they continued working on their PBL projects until Wednesday morning when they gave presentations to the group. Originally Mary Scanlon was slated to work with this group, but dates changed and conflicted with her trip to Venice. All the preparations Mary made in advance made my job and Sharon’s job much easier. After their four-day visit to Wake Forest, these students were off to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and North Caroline State University. I hope to see some of them in our freshman class in a few years!

On Friday, June 6th 250 students receiving recognition for their outstanding Duke Talent Identification Program (TIP) plus their families were on the campus of Wake Forest University to go on campus tours and attend various sessions. The ZSR Library hosted two such sessions, one entitled “In the Know: Rare Books and Archives” and one entitled “Information Technology at WFU.” These sessions were held at 11am and repeated at 12:45pm, each lasting 45 minutes. Megan Mulder led the session in Rare Books and Tim Mitchell escorted the student and parents from the Benson/Tribble patio to Rare Books.

Giz, Caroline, Erik and Barry Davis (our former student and summer replacement for Caroline) escorted their students and parents from the Benson/Tribble patio to room 204 and led the “Information Technology at WFU” session, offering students a taste of Lib100 and clickers, talking about technology, and asking questions about intellectual property, copyright and plagiarism during the 45 minute session. All together there were more than 100 people in the four sessions. Thanks to everyone who made this a successful event!

On Tuesday, May 6th, the new ZSR Journal Reading Group met in the ITC Screening room not only to discuss the article “Participatory Networks: The Library as a Conversation”, but also to organize the structure of the group. After some discussion, it was decided to meet on the first Thursday of each month at 11am to avoid as many scheduling conflicts as possible. The location was set for the screening room, which had a nice casual atmosphere and flexible seating.

Once a regular day, date and time had been set, the issue of how to pick the articles was discussed by the group. It was decided to ask for a volunteer at each meeting. This volunteer would then select the article for the next meeting and send out a link to the article two weeks prior to the meeting.
The next meeting will be Thursday, June 5th at 11am in the ITC Screening Room. Megan Mulder has volunteered to select the article and facilitate the discussion. Our final order of business before discussing the article was a discussion of the goals of the ZSR Journal Reading Group. The group agreed that “sharing, learning, and keeping abreast in the field of Library and Information Studies” was a suitable goal for this group.

Below is the article we discussed at the meeting and a link: Lankes, R. D., Silverstein, J. L., Nicholson, S., & Marshall, T. (2007). “Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation” Information Research, 12(4) paper colis05. [Available here].

Thanks to Erik Mitchell for getting this group started again. (Bobbie Collins reminded us a similar group had existed some years ago.) The ZSR Staff Development Committee is happy to be sponsoring these events. Check out the ZSR Staff Development site to register for the meetings.

On Wednesday, March 25th, 7 members of the ZSR Staff, Rosalind Tedford, Mary Beth Lock, Lauren Pressley, Kaeley McMahon, Sarah Jeong, Christian Burris and myself loaded up in the WFU Student Life van and headed up 421 to visit the ASU Library and Information Commons in Boone. We arrived and started a tour around 10:30am. Four members of the ASU staff who were members of the”Library Internal Building Group” led us all over the building. After an amazing tour, we were treated to lunch by our host and had a discussion about the lessons they learned in this building process. After lunch and discussion we resumed our tour and by 3:30pm were back on 421 to WFU! Our ASU hosts were just amazing as was their facility. To see pictures of the ASU Library and Information Commons, check out the library’s photo set from this trip!

At the ZSR Professional Development Blog there is a post with a list of tour highlights, positives outcomes from the building experience and lessons learned. The seven staff who attended collected these items together in a Google Doc to make this a collaborative report!