The librarians here at Carleton (and I’m sure at many other institutions) live right on the border between the world of faculty and students and the world of the other staff on campus. Especially here, where librarians are not faculty but tag along to many faculty functions, and where class schedules are not paced to start at the top of the hour, and where we’re involved with many other campus and library staff, we find ourselves having to juggle everything from vocabularies to schedules multiple times per day.

This term we’re trying something a little new. It’ll probably be a little trickier for us, but we’re hoping that it works better for faculty and students. This term we’re reorganizing our reference desk shifts to match up with the class schedule. This means that some shifts start at odd times (like 12:20 or 1:40), which will be at odds with meetings we have with other staff both here and at St. Olaf but which might make it easier for students and faculty to look at our schedules and see where our free time matches with theirs, and it might make it easier for us to visit classes without finding desk subs for 20 minutes or half an hour of our shifts.

Or it could end up just being a pain in the neck. But figuring that out is what pilot projects are all about, right?

I waited through the summer hoping that an EndNote output style for the new MLA style would become available for download from EndNote. I waited a couple of weeks past the date when I actually wanted to install it on campus.

And then I waited a couple more weeks.

And then I set to work making my own.

As it turns out, EndNote may have stalled because the new MLA style requires a field that isn’t built into EndNote yet. Every single bibliographic citation in the new MLA style requires that you note the medium of publication. So “Print” for things published on paper, and “Web” for things published on the web, and so on. (Here’s an overview of the new stuff in this edition.) Well, EndNote doesn’t have a field for people to say what medium they’re looking at when they create a new citation. After much experimentation, I co-opted the “Label” field for this purpose, but I can see why EndNote was reluctant to do that. Labels are really supposed to be used for other things… hopefully things that my lit majors won’t need too much, but we’ll have to see.

Two other annoying things about this field are that there will be no way to populate them automatically with the other bibliographic imports from our databases (there’s just no way the database will know if the researcher ultimately sees a print or web version) and that it’s far, far down the field list in an EndNote record, so there’s a lot of annoying scrolling involved for every citation.

These drawbacks aside, I have a draft style that I’m willing to share (zip file). It’s definitely still a draft, so help with testing and troubleshooting is much appreciated.

I spent a few moments today adding a new section to each of my subject research guides. Our CMS doesn’t allow for things like Meebo widgets, or any other embedded stuff like that, so I added the next best thing: a bunch of ways to reach me from within each page.

Here’s what it looks like:

(From my French & Francophone Studies Research Guide)

Frankly, I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me until today, but now that it has, I look forward to seeing if I get any increased traffic. (Of course, the other part of me is asking if I really want increased traffic… but of course, the answer is always yes.)

Point of need research assistance: the holy grail of every research services department.