Here’s mine:

And here are the rest of the gang’s.

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I finally got around to scanning my trading card for this year. We changed up the theme quite a bit, and my coworker surpassed herself in photoshop fu when she designed and executed these cards.

Each librarian has a different banner across the very top (clearly the science librarian wouldn’t want to be involved in Daring Literature Quests), and each has a different set of inset pictures down the left side. Only the question mark picture remains the same in all 8 cards.

One thing I’ve noticed is that these cards seem to appeal to a wider age-range than our previous cards did, which is fun!

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Tomorrow we’re going to talk about citation management software, make decisions about databases we have and want, and train each other on some of our new databases or on databases that have changed platform (so, for instance, the social sciences librarian will introduce us to a couple of new social sciences databases that might be useful to us and that we might want to know about as we work at the reference desk).

And then on Wednesday we’ll talk about our new trading cards. This meeting always makes me uncomfortable.

The first year I was here it was uncomfortable because I was afraid it’d be hokey. Well… it kind of was, but in the best possible way. I absolutely loved my first trading card. I didn’t know how we could top it. So last year I was worried we’d change to a new design or color scheme or… whatever, that’d ruin it. I’d grown really fond of my card. But last year’s card turned out even better than the year before, so that fear was averted.

This next year, there’s talk of changing our theme. So this year I’ve started mourning my current card again. I really love my current card. I’ve grown used to it. I feel like it fits me well… like a well-worn pair of jeans. Only way cooler. How could a new design possibly be better, I wonder?

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Last night a student approached my co-worker at the reference desk to invite her to the comedy show, and my co-worker got on IM and told me about it, and next thing I knew I was driving back to campus (for the third time that day, btw) to attend the 10:30 showing. Man, oh man. The general outline of the skit was as follows.

Student brings food into the library. SuperLibrarians pool their super powers in the hopes of discouraging such disrespectful behavior. SuperLibrarians unfortunately incapacitate each other by inadvertently triggering each other’s vulnerabilities. By this time, the student with the food has finished what he was doing and left.

My favorite touch was that as the librarians transformed themselves into SuperLibrarians, they took the poses that we took on our cards. Actually no, that was my second favorite touch. My favorite touch was that the show’s programs each had pictures of our cards on them, and when my co-worker and I arrived they made sure to give us programs with our own cards on them. They also seated us in places of honor and introduced us at the beginning of the show.

Now I’m sleep-deprived and contemplating an extremely busy next 72 hours, but it’s Friday and I’ve been spoofed. Life doesn’t get much better than that.

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It’s way past my bedtime now, but I’m too revved up to sleep just yet. Morning will come all too quickly…

technorati tags: cil2007

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An admissions guy stopped me and two of my co-workers on the sidewalk today to tell us that he had recently read an application he thought we should know about. In this application the prospective freshman wrote about the librarian trading cards and their accompanying superpowers as one of her three reasons for applying to Carleton. Very cool. I say, admit that girl. She’s obviously a highly perceptive candidate.

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My co-worker, Heather, presented at the Minnesota Library Association conference on using social software to keep up with government documents (ppt here). Then she brought Jenny Levine back to Minneapolis with her so we could all meet for dinner. What fun! [Update: Here's a picture of us having fun with Jenny.]

We also discovered the William College Liaison Librarians must have liked our 05-06 trading cards. Wow.

I’ve become a del.icio.us convert. I’ve even received a link from Steve in that oh-so-cool “Links For You” section. Now I wish all my co-workers were on del.icio.us so I could send them links. I still haven’t imported my links from Furl yet, but already I’ve more than doubled the number of links in my collection. Two things I’d like from del.icio.us: an easier to type name, and more than 255 characters to describe my links. (Two things I’d like from Furl to make me go back: faster/easier bookmarking, more social features like “links for you.)

And now… Why I Have a Headache.

Because it’s been a rough week, that’s why. I haven’t had the time or energy to blog at all, so the backlog of things I want to blog about is getting distinctly overwhelming. (I’ve started using the toread bookmarklet and in only a week I’ve accumulated 60 unread items! Yikes.)

I relearned how evil Elsevier is, though I’m not sure I’m at liberty to discuss their new act of extortion and peevish tantrum-throwing just yet.

I also spent almost all of three days trying to help one class of students answer impossible questions only to be told by a professor (not the professor class I was helping, btw) that I was doing their homework for them. Oh, and he copied the professor I WAS working for. He’s not even a professor in my liaison departments. Coming at a particularly vulnerable and tired time for me, this criticism completely shook me. I kind of expect to be told that I could do more, and I generally welcome constructive criticism, but the only two times I’ve been completely and utterly shaken by criticism at work were times when I’d worked extra hard only to be (figuratively) patted on the head and told “that’s nice, dear, but we didn’t want you to work that hard and we don’t really think the effort was worth it.” I guess it comes with the territory.

Basically, I’ve had one of those weeks a librarian dreads: all impossible questions with no sense of accomplishment. I even made people mad over the fact that we have electronic access to the Chronicle of Higher Education but aren’t allowed to give out the password or copy and paste articles. No, it’s all freely available, but you have to come “all the way” to the library and have one of us log you in. Yes, I realize that you might as well just read the paper copy we have at the library, but that’s life (and our license agreement).

Oh, and I’m facing a 6-day week since this is my Sunday to work and there’s no time for a comp-day next week. Bwah-ha-ha-ha.

But, I resolve to get to some of my backlog of blog stubs.

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