On Saturday, Z. Smith Reynolds Library’s first annual Wake the Library 5K and 1 Mile Fun Run took place under beautiful sunny skies along with cool fall temperatures. Over 150 people participated in either the fun run or the 5K race. The great weather contributed to 40 people coming out and registering that morning.

The race was started by Student Government president, Jermyn Davis. The Demon Deacon made an appearance and awarded all the children in the fun run with Chick-Fil-A stuffed cows.

Runners and walkers alike enjoyed the campus route that started and ended in front of the library and wound through the cross-country trail for 3.1 miles. Awards were presented for men and women in overall and age groups for first through third places. In the Fastest Greek contest, Delta Zeta won the sorority honors, while all the fraternities slept in.

The race was successful, thanks to the many individuals and organizations that supported our event: ARAMARK, Frank L. Blum Construction, SAFE, Fleet Feet Sports, Lenovo, Metabolic Effect, Gold’s Gym, WFU Campus Recreation, WFU Office of Multicultural Affairs, WFU Office of Student Life, Alibris, The Garage, Lowe’s Foods, Harris Teeter, Paceline Bicycles, SunTrust, DataMax, Chick-Fil-A, C& K Bagels, Village Tavern, Mark Welker, Earl Smith, WFU Bookstore, Kineticsware and the Student Government.

Thanks go also to all the ZSR Library staff who worked in the days leading up to the event, and to those who gave up their Saturday morning to help execute the many details that assured a safe, fun event for the WFU and Winston-Salem community. Many of our student assistants volunteered as well.

Take a look at the pictures of the event and of the contestants who came out to spend a gorgeous fall morning running and walking through Wake Forest while they supported ZSR Library’s programs.

Last week I gave a session on the what, why, and how of the project. And I’m giving another one tomorrow at 4:00 in 476. Wanna come? You can still register here! Want to see what we’ll cover before attending? Here it is:

Are you interested now? You can still register here! Seriously, though, if you’re interested in the project, or would like to contribute, let me know. I’m happy to talk with you one-on-one if you can’t make the session.

The ZSR library hit the bricks today to help support the Brian Piccolo cancer research fund. Eight hours of fun, walking, and Krispy Kreme doughnuts! Susan led the team off at 11am and currently Carol Cramer is braving the headwind and clouds to keep our baton heading around the quad!

To get us off to a good start I though I’d go with something that people in the library would be interested in personally, might find relevant for work, and would show that emerging technologies can be fun. The topic? Social Software built around books and reading. You might have heard of some of them: GoodReads, LibraryThing, Shelfari, Amazon’s profiles, Google’s My Library, and My Worldcat. I ran through a quick presentation just to get everyone on the same page, then we talked about some of the similarities, differences, strengths, and weaknesses in each of the options.

If you’re interested, here’s the presentation:

We’d like to host on of these workshops once a month, so if there’s a new technology that you’re curious about, just let me know! We’ve already had requests that next month we talk about some of the things that Google is doing (the Chrome browser and the move from Google Pages to Googld Sites) and some of the things that former Google employees are doing (the Cuil search engine and Friendfeed).

On Friday night, the students prepared dinner in the condo units (pringles, spaghetti, chips ahoy cookies) and then brainstormed issues on campus that students were concerned about. On Saturday morning, we had a series of presentations: academic update by the Provost, possibilities for Deacon Village, diversity check, and future of technology for WFU students. I gained lots of good insights from the latter and felt gratified that students feel the library is a leader on campus for things like collaborative technology, Google Docs, blogs, Smart Boards, training, etc. Students showed receptivity to the idea of e-books (especially for textbooks) and confessed that if a journal isn’t electronic, it isn’t worth having. One student lamented there weren’t enough e-journals linked from the MLA database.

At lunch, President Hatch shared his insights on leadership in general, and then how he applied them to Wake Forest. We had free time Saturday afternoon so my suitemate Nancy Crouch and I took a walk around the resort and then I watched a lousy football game (no comment). Saturday night we were back at it, choosing an issue from Friday night and then crafting a solution.

On Sunday morning, each group presented their identified problem and proposed solution. They were amazingly creative!

1) Bike paths both on and off campus

2) Group lunches between students and university leaders

3) Fostering class identity and unity (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th year) to build community

4) Pro Humanitate community service honor roll

5) Friday/Saturday night social programming as an alternative to “partying” (my group)

I was very glad to be a part of the group and got to know a number of student leaders that I had not yet met. One guy came up to me at the end and thanked me for all the changes in the library and how much he enjoyed them. That was worth the weekend, right there.

Lynn

One thing that I have heard from many people at our library is the need to have an easy to use online reporting tools for our information systems.  Every year we run EOY reports, general statistics, fund accounting reports in addition to lots of disposable queries.  Right now we are limited to using MS Access to design our queries and pull this information.  There are more sophisticated tools out there though.  Some of you may remember a brief period when we were using Cognos in conjunction with our departed ERMS.

In the last few years, a few companies that serve this purpose but in an open source environment have come along.  I was curious about what this market currently looked like and wondered what sort of functionality we would be looking for specifically so I created a short page in our Wiki to start gathering ideas.

If you are curious about what BI software does or want to add your thoughts - hit the wiki page.

By the way - more to come soon on evaluating Open Source Catalogs….

Wake Forest University’s Museum of Anthropology launched its Online Artifact Database (www.wfu.edu/moa/database) at a reception on September 9, 2008. Erik Mitchell and I attended this event.

Museum Director, Stephen Whittington informed guests that the digitization of its collections and the production of an online database was a project four years in the making. The Museum was awarded two Museums for America grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), one at the beginning of the project and one to continue the project. Wake Forest students from various academic disciplines assisted in the development of the database by photographing and assessing the artifacts. This database is accessible to universities, scholars, public schools, and the general public.

Recently, the Museum was awarded a third Museums for America grant to continue its digitization work. This award will allow the Museum to digitize its archival records and include them in the database. The addition of this information will assist users in understanding the cultural and environmental context of the artifacts.

• 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/