Library Gazette

Today some of the RITS team members, Kevin, Kaeley, Sarah, and I, traveled to UNC-G to meet with reference librarians interested in technology at Jackson Library. It was a good meeting with a turnout of about 12 library staff members between UNCG and WFU.

The conversation was casual, with short demonstrations of some of the different things we are doing followed by discussion of similarities and differences in our experiences. Here’s Kaeley talking about marketing:

On the WFU side, we talked about marketing, blogs as a CMS, the toolkit, and libguides. UNCG shared their IR project, chat widget, use of Facebook in marketing, and their Blackboard project.

We had a good time meeting our colleagues, and a tasty lunch at Jack’s Corner. It was good to hear what local colleagues are doing, and to know that we’re all looking at some of the same issues and challenges though our communities are quite different.

Hopefully, once the renovations are done, we can have our UNCG friends to come see the improvements first hand!

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!

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!

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 Thursday, the reference department initiated service via txt messaging. By doing so, we’ve joined a small handful of academic libraries making this format available to patrons.

In order to txt the reference desk, patrons should dial 265010, enter our IM screen name “askzaklive” followed by their question and press enter. The question will arrive at the reference desk computer in an instant message window, and the librarian will enter her response as with any other IM. There only two small differences between a reference session initiated via IM and one via txt messaging: instead of the patron’s screen name, her mobile phone number appears at the top of the window and there’s a limit on the number of characters allowed per message. Otherwise the transaction at the ref desk is the same as an IM. With this program, mobile phone users can send text messages to anyone with an AIM screen name who’s online.

We had been looking for a program to integrate text messaging with instant messaging for several months because most Wake Forest students have cell phones and text messaging is growing in popularity among this demographic cohort. We had been stymied in our efforts by a lack of service providers: one alternative provided only an international phone number which would have been prohibitively expensive to users, while another charged a handsome subscription fee. We had decided to wait until a better alternative became available and on Wednesday evening, Lauren found it. While reading a blog she came across an entry from American University describing their recently-launched text messaging reference service. We tested it on Thursday morning, found it worked seamlessly with AIM decided to go live.

We currently receive approximately one third of all reference questions via instant messaging and we’ll be tracking the statistics for text messaging, as well. We’ll report our finding in a later posting.