“Wow, so much for the staid librarian,” they start off, and then use examples from our trading card gallery to talk about what we’re doing and what other people with similar cards are doing. Fun!

Here’s mine:

And here are the rest of the gang’s.

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!

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?

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.

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

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.