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Month: July 2006

Being a Patron

Published by Iris on Saturday, July 22nd, 2006

Note: If the title sounds an awful lot like titles of much more thoughtful and useful articles you’ve read in the last couple of days, it is purely … um … thievery. But the title fits.

I went to my local public library this week, as I do quite often. It’s a small library, but they have a decent collection of books and quite a good collection of videos, dvds, and audio books (good for those long drives to other towns, through corn fields, which still mess with this city girl’s head). I had just gotten back from the wedding and family reunion week, and I knew I had a book on tape checked out (Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, part 2 of 3), but I thought it was due the next week. It wasn’t. It was already three days overdue.

“Did you bring back “Atlas Shrugged” today?” asked the circulation lady.

“No,” I replied, still wondering why she’d want me to bring back a book that was due next week.

“Oh, because its a little overdue, but let me just renew it for you,” the circulation lady say, without any hesitation at all.

Just like that, she renewed my overdue book. It made my day. Kudos to the Northfield Public Library for putting customer service over ILS messages. (And btw, she did the same thing for the three overdue videos of the family in front of me.)

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Games in the Library

Games in the Library

Published by Iris on Thursday, July 20th, 2006

One of the first things I noticed when I came to MPOW to interview last spring was a table, four chairs, and shelves full of puzzles and games. It was all just sitting there, near the entrance to the library, inviting students to come and have a few minutes of fun in the midst of their work days.
Throughout the school year, it’s so much fun to walk past this spot and see students working on puzzles or playing Monopoly together.

This nook made a lasting impression on me when I interviewed, and I’ve seen it make similar impressions on prospective students. Now if I could just figure out how to make lists of databases this inviting… I can see it all now: students huddled over a computer monitor, fiddling with search parameters…

Yeah, the heat’s getting to me.

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It Was Only a Small Project…

Published by Iris on Thursday, July 20th, 2006

The other librarians and I are going to experiment with online calendars next year. We’re moving away (possibly) from paper sign-up sheets for individual appointments with students, and instead we’re each going to use a Google calendar to display our availability to everyone on campus. We’ve decided that it’s probably best to embed the calendar in an HTML page, to keep our personal email addresses less visible, and to provide some instructions on how to request an appointment. So today I thought I’d through up an HTML page and see how this embedded calendar thing looked…

Now, to most people, this would be a project that might fill that down-time between your last big project and lunch. You know them, those few minutes after everything else is ready for you to go to lunch, but before it’s actually time to go. Yeah, that’s how long it should have taken. But then it looked so blah.

I know! I’ll jazz it up with some CSS! Great, only I don’t know CSS, like, at all. I understand that the HTML looks at the CSS when deciding how to look and where to put itself, but that’s about it. So I spent basically the rest of the day teaching myself CSS. I now have a page that has a header, a footer, a left-hand sidebar, and a right-hand sidebar. The middle even re-sizes itself depending on the width of the browser screen. I’m pretty pumped. Still no calendar in there… but that’ll come tomorrow.

Oh, and for any of you wanting to do ANYTHING with HTML or CSS, get yourself the Web Developer Firefox extension. It lets you look at, manipulate, and save HTML and CSS from any page you visit online.

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