Library Gazette

Person Recognized

Giz Womack

Given By

Lauren P

Reason

Thanks for helping me move!

Person Recognized

Mary Scanlon

Given By

Lauren P

Reason

Thanks for helping me move!

Person Recognized

Heather Gillette

Given By

Lauren P

Reason

Thanks for helping me move!

Person Recognized

Erik Mitchell

Given By

Lauren P

Reason

Thanks for leaving a clean office for me!

Person Recognized

Giz Womack

Given By

Sharon Snow

Reason

Giz helped a bunch in getting furniture to Rare. Thanks ever so much!

Person Recognized

Scott Adair Dedicated Deacon Winner

Given By

Sharon Snow

Reason

Scott was so helpful in moving file cabinets to and from Rare. A big thank you to Scott!

Person Recognized

Craig Fansler

Given By

Sharon Snow

Reason

Craig was so helpful in taking pictures of old furniture and in moving one piece out from Rare. Thanks, Craig!

Person Recognized

Carol Cramer

Given By

Giz Womack

Reason

For her excellent documentation of how to do a screen capture with Microsoft Office Picture Manager on the new Thinkpad T61

Person Recognized

Craig Fansler

Given By

Sharon

Reason

For once again cheerfully driving his Ford truck and packing and picking up boxes of books - - this time from Dr. Mandlebaum's apartment.
(Barry in IT helped him.)

Person Recognized

Linda Ziglar

Given By

Kristen

Reason

Thank you so much for filling in for the Administrative Office when all 3 of us were gone for 3 days. We really appreciate it!!

Person Recognized

Kevin Gilbertson

Given By

Mary Beth Lock

Reason

Kevin worked incredibly hard writing, re-writing and re-writing again the webpage changes we needed in order to implement the changes to E-Reserves for this fall semester.

Person Recognized

Giz Womack

Given By

Wanda Brown

Reason

Lending a hand while moving 12 ft tables. THANKS!

Person Recognized

Erik Mitchell

Given By

Wanda

Reason

Lending a hand while moving 12 ft tables. THANKS!

Person Recognized

Craig Fansler

Given By

Wanda Brown

Reason

Lending a hand while moving 12 ft tables. THANKS!

Person Recognized

Prentice Armstrong

Given By

Wanda Brown

Reason

Lending a hand while moving 12 ft tables. THANKS!

Person Recognized

Chris Burris

Given By

Wanda Brown

Reason

Lending a hand while moving 12 ft tables. THANKS!

Person Recognized

Cristina Yu

Given By

Wanda Brown

Reason

Lending a hand while moving 12 ft tables. THANKS!

Person Recognized

Tim Mitchell

Given By

Wanda Brown

Reason

Lending a hand while moving 12 ft tables. THANKS!

Person Recognized

Mary Lib Slate

Given By

Susan

Reason

Congratulations to Mary Lib for her successful perseverance over the last 3 years in the Government Documents Weeding Project. This week, she has completed cleaning up the back log of lists that were pending from UNC all this time. It's been a daunting, enormous project and Mary Lib deserves a round of applause for all of her work on it!

Person Recognized

Charles Bombeld

Given By

Sharon

Reason

When I asked just this morning if Charles could take pictures of the wreath for Dr. Hearn at the Quad Arch, Charles immediately went over and got good photos for Archives and Dr. Hearn's papers. Thanks so much for your consistently good help and professional skills, Charles!

It is with much joy that the ZSR library shipped the first set of our orphaned microfim off to a new home today.  In recent years the library was able to replace these collections with online versions of the material and we were excited to learn of a library last week who was interested in this set of Early English Books Microfilm!

Many thanks go out to library staff and students who helped get this shipment out including Barry, Roz, Giz, Craig, Dan, Chris B, and Steve for helping move the microfilm out the back door.

If you missed out on this one, don’t worry - we have lots more to come!

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!

For the past three years, an ongoing weeding project has been taking place in ZSR Library’s Government Documents Department. As more resources go online, efforts are being made to convert to electronic and reclaim much needed shelf space by removing out-of-date and out-of-scope materials. We work with the Regional Depository at UNC to ensure that only appropriate materials are removed and that we send UNC any titles that are needed for the regional collection.

In conjunction with this effort, similar activities are taking place in the Microtext Department. We are assessing where we have exact duplication of microtext collections with archival electronic versions. We are offering the microtext versions to other schools who may not be able to afford the electronic purchase.

When both collections have been downsized, the Microtext Department will be moved into current Government Documents space. This will reduce the number of service points on the 4th floor, improving our ability to serve our patrons effectively. The space vacated by Microtext can be repurposed for other essential needs.

This project will be under Mary Scanlon’s leadership. Joining her in the core working group are Steve Kelley, Carolyn McCallum, Lauren Pressley, Mary Lib Slate, and Susan Smith. Consulting members are Erik Mitchell, Laura Spear and Roz Tedford.  As this sizable project proceeds, we plan to share our progress with you in the Gaz.

Today was the final competition for the 2008 WFU Staff Summer Olympics. The challenge was a relay: Prentice and Mary Beth formed a human wheelbarrow (Prentice started out holding up Mary Beth as she walked on her hands, but they switched off midway). Then, when they arrive at the pie table, Prentice had to eat a whole apple pie (no hands allowed). Next, Susan bobbed for an apple. Erik finished up the relay by throwing on/carrying a variety of pool accessories (inner tube, noodle, kick board, etc.) back to the finish line. It was a noble effort by all, particularly Prentice who had eaten lunch prior to showing up for the “mystery” event. Weight Watchers Erik, Mary Beth and Susan all refused to eat a whole pie!

However, the effort was enough to secure the ZSR Zephyrs 2nd Place in the team category for the entire summer - especially since we were one of only 4 teams who turned in all the participants’ lifestyle points (librarians always follow the rules of the game!). And Erik nabbed 1st Place in the Individual Male competition (lifestyle points + individual competition points).

Overall, it has been a fun-filled summer with the Wednesday competitions being a nice mid-week highlight. And it’s always a great way to interact with fellow WFU staffers in other campus departments.

Way to go, Zephyrs!

Zephyrs’ Croquet Team

The 2008 WFU Summer Olympics is drawing to a close next week. But there are still competitions and lifestyle points to be accumulated!

This week, croquet was the contest, a first for the Olympics series. None of the Zephyrs were ringers for this sport, one that dates back to the middle ages. The goal was use a mallet to put your ball through wickets with the least number of strokes.

The team had fun and quickly excelled as they learned the best techniques. Maybe we’ve found a new game for next year’s Employee Recognition Event?

Over the past few months, Kevin and I have gotten together with a few sets of students to conduct some informal focus groups. The students we have spoken with, though a small group, have been from all years and from varying majors. Our aim is to better understand how our students find information, how they use our website to do so, and what we can do to make it easier for our students to get to the best information more quickly. As one of the participants said, “I mean, we live on our computers,” so understanding what they do on their computers can help us do our jobs better. These conversations have proven to be really valuable, so I thought we could share some of the themes and interesting ideas here.

The first thing we found was that the students don’t clearly separate the library as a place from the library as a web presence. We’d start talking about something on the site, only to find ourselves talking about the building a few minutes later. One library fact that a student shared was that “the state of the atrium defines the state of the library.” She said that if you walk in and the atrium is crowded, that you know there won’t be an outlet anywhere. The popularity of this (and other) space shows how much the students value the library as a place. Across the board the students we spoke with also valued serendipity, and liked looking as books shelved together. We also heard positive things about the periodicals move: one student even said, “now I will use them!”

We found that students often are confused by library speak. As we know, many of the terms we say, or write on the website, make sense to us, but not to all of our users. One group continued to come back to interlibrary loan, first asking what it was, then asking several follow up questions. Once they knew what it was, they were really excited about it, but it showed us how even a term that sounds like what it means might still be confusing to users.

Once we were able to address the design of the website, we heard pretty clearly that there are too many links on the homepage. People look at the main tabs, but are overwhelmed by the amount of text on the page. One student said “design is content” and in this sense, we heard that the design obscured the content. We also heard that the catalog is one click away rather than no clicks, which would be preferable. Students also said they’d like to see library and technology news displayed more prominently, even news about the new Firefox or Zotero. Across the board they love the covers in the catalog and the new text message call number feature.

We also learned that the students would like a more simplified way of getting started. They suggested a Getting Started button on the website for those who have never written a college level research paper before. Hopefully, we’ll be able to easily do this with the Toolkit. We also received a request that librarians compile top research blogs and think tanks in a wiki, letting the students contribute as well. This student found many blogs by professors in their field and use them in their academic work. He thought a list of these blogs would have been very helpful when he was getting started in the field.

The students also spoke to a need to make things very easy and well publicized. One student described her classmates as “very intense, they need simple information and lots of marketing.” Over and over we hear a need for simple, bulleted news. Students like what we have to offer, but want an easy way to find out about it.

And perhaps the best quote of them all: “The library going 24/5 was the most beautiful thing that ever happened.”

These focus groups have given us a lot of work to do, but they’ve also given us work that we know will help our students. We hope to do more of these types of meetings, but first we need to create a Getting Started page… list some relevant research blogs… find a way to market library news……

During the past several weeks since the Research, Instruction and Technology Services Team was formed, efforts have been underway to establish its structure.

Initial organizational structure was announced last week. Two team sub-units have been established to facilitate daily operations. Roz Tedford has been appointed Assistant Head of Research and Instruction Services and Erik Mitchell has been named Assistant Head of Technology Services. Two “bridge” positions were identified that already span functions of  both units: Giz Womack (Technology Training Manager) and Lauren Pressley (Instructional Design Librarian). To assist with team integration, Giz and Lauren have switched “home” units - Giz will be with Research & Instruction and Lauren with Technology. Other functional changes may take place as the team identifies ways to improve its effectiveness.

Part of the integration process includes physically placing people in office locations where they will be close to their unit colleagues. To accomplish this to some extent, we have moved some of us to new offices.  Giz has moved to the 4th floor Reference Office Suite. Susan, Erik and Lauren did the “Big Move”, a circular office switch! Susan is now in 457A (Lauren’s old office), Erik is in Susan’s old office (258B), and Lauren has moved into Erik’s old location (302A). Stay tuned for an open house to show off the new offices, but in the meantime, please come visit!

Susan’s New Office

Erik’s New Office

Lauren’s New Office

Giz’s New Office

The process of developing a job description for the open team position (the one vacated by Mary Horton) will commence this month with a projected search to begin in early fall. We will revise the position into one on the Technology side so that we can address our need for the additional programming skills required for us to migrate to more open source systems. But we will look for a person who also can contribute to the library instruction programs.

The largest project for RITS during the next academic year is the consolidation of our Government Documents and Microtext Departments. This project will require the talents of many people within the RITS team, as well as from other Library Teams (Resource and Access Services). Mary Scanlon will lead the task force that is being formed to manage this project. Details on this important initiative will be shared as we proceed.

Person Recognized

Scott Adair Dedicated Deacon Winner

Given By

Mary Beth

Reason

Thanks to Scott for helping immeasurably with the walk through of the library, to prepare us all for the Fire Marshal visit at the end of July. He also undertook the final walk with Scott Frasier while I was vacationing. Thanks, Scott!

Person Recognized

Prentice Armstrong

Given By

Roz & Susan

Reason

Thanks for helping us redecorate the Government Documents room with better furniture!!

Person Recognized

Patty Strickland

Given By

Roz & Susan

Reason

Thanks for helping us redecorate the Government Documents room with better furniture!!

Person Recognized

Craig Fansler

Given By

Roz & Susan

Reason

Thanks for helping us redecorate the Government Documents room with better furniture!!

Person Recognized

Lauren Pressley

Given By

Roz & Susan

Reason

Thanks for helping us redecorate the Government Documents room with better furniture!!

Person Recognized

Kevin Gilbertson

Given By

Roz & Susan

Reason

Thanks for helping us redecorate the Government Documents room with better furniture!! And especially for your mad power drill skillz!!

Person Recognized

Sarah Jeong

Given By

Roz & Susan

Reason

Thanks for helping us redecorate the Government Documents room with better furniture!!

Person Recognized

Giz Womack

Given By

Roz & Susan

Reason

Thanks for helping us redecorate the Government Documents room with better furniture!! And thanks for keeping that power drill on hand!

Person Recognized

Mary Scanlon

Given By

Roz & Susan

Reason

Thanks for helping us redecorate the Government Documents room with better furniture!!

Person Recognized

Giz Womack

Given By

Mary Scanlon

Reason

When a schedule change prevented me from participating in the MedCat workshop I’d helped organize, Giz eagerly substituted for me and supported the Cherokee students in their research.

Person Recognized

Sharon Snow

Given By

Mary Scanlon

Reason

When a schedule change prevented me from participating in the MedCat workshop I’d helped organize, Sharon eagerly substituted for me and supported the Cherokee students in their research.

Person Recognized

Patty Strickland

Given By

Chris Burris

Reason

Patty gladly stepped in to help with periodical check-in during Jane’s absence. I’m grateful for her assistance!

Person Recognized

Craig Fansler

Given By

Sharon Snow

Reason

For his quick willingness and sturdy pickup truck to retrieve Kate Barrow’s collection of manuscripts

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!