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Month: August 2007

Online Research Guides

Published by Iris on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007

As part of my liaison duties, I create and maintain the “subject” and “course” research guides designed for the departments I serve. Subject research guides are meant to give students a grasp of the resources available that most researchers in a given major or concentration will probably need at some point in their research. Course research guides are designed for specific courses that I’m supporting each term.

And really, the course research guides are pretty simple to come up with. They usually either replace or complement any handouts that are appropriate for a class, and they’re almost always tied to a specific assignment or set of assignments, so I generally have a fairly good idea of what those students will need.

Subject research guides are another matter entirely. I have no idea what I’m doing, really. Do I gather things by resource type (e.g. “Finding books,” “Finding articles,” “Useful web sites,” etc.), or do I gather things by topic? (Here’s an example of a page that’s organized by resource-type, and here’s one that’s organized by topic.) Either way, they’re long lists of stuff, and not very interesting, but with our current tools I’m tied to a heavily text-based, straight HTML page.

When you think about it, the idea of breaking things up by resource type vs. topic really comes down to your choice of audience. Am I creating these primarily for inexperienced researchers who need help getting started? If so, topical organization seems to make sense. It pulls together fewer things and makes it so students don’t have to jump around to see if other resource-types will be useful to their topics. But if I’m primarily making these things for more intermediate-level researchers who already know that all they want is the MLA International Bibliography, for example, a page full of topics (where the MLA-IB could appear in any one of the topics, or all of them) would probably drive them batty! If I were using these pages, I’d want to click “articles” and see a short list of the databases and indexes that are relevant to an area of study.

So who is my audience? I don’t really know. But I’ve finally realized that answering this question could make the creation of these subject pages so much easier.

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Fall Publicity

Published by Iris on Monday, August 13th, 2007

I hadn’t really realized before coming here how important publicity is on a campus. Students aren’t naturally equipped with a gene that tells them to visit the library when they have one type of question, the writing center when they have another type of question, the IT help desk when they have yet another type of question, and so on. Neither are faculty, for that matter. So getting ready for fall means thinking up how to explain to new students precisely what we do, and how to encourage returning students to remember us without boring them to death with the same old news. Similarly, new faculty need to know both what we can do for them, and what we can do for their students. And the faculty who’ve always been here still need reminders, preferably packaged in such a way that they think of new and creative uses for us. That’s a pretty tall order for a department without its own publicist! That’d be a tall order for a publicist, I imagine, though I’d really like to find out (hint, hint).

On our task list for this fall we have:

  • New quiet level posters outfitted to represent our new and more realistic food and beverage policy (and with new level names for the 3rd and 4th floors… to be unveiled shortly)
  • New “Survival Guide” for the freshmen (quick overview of services and resources, plus a humorous “Top 10 Reasons to Visit the Libe”
  • Update the New Faculty Guide
  • New poster to hang at various points around the library to advertise the Research/IT service
  • New trading cards (being worked on in the next room at this very moment)
  • New portable maps of the library to reflect updated equipment and such
  • Planning for the beginning of the year picnic for faculty and academic staff (includes designing and making the invitational postcards)
  • Planning for the international student orientation
  • Planning for the new faculty orientation
  • Planning for the new student Academic Fair
  • Participating in the training of new writing tutors
  • Plan for and train student workers who are going to staff the IT side of the Research/IT desk.
  • Update our liaison pages to reflect tweaked liaison areas and new trading cards
  • Update the poster by the Research/IT desk that lists our liaison areas
  • Draft a beginning-of-the-year informational and (hopefully) inspirational email to send to each of our faculty members
  • Read the college Common Reading book so that we can participate in that whole experience
  • … and probably a whole host of things I’ve forgotten about…

Luckily most of these activities are interesting, and some are even really fun.

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Of Stats and Consistency

Published by Iris on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007

New faculty begin their orientation in 23 days. New students arrive on campus 5 days later. But in library world, the school year is nearly upon us. The 6 of us that are here from my department have begun really ratcheting up our productivity to get everything done that needs to be done this summer. We’ve stopped even pretending that the things we just wanted to get done will happen. We’re entering survival mode.

Today we had an important and long-put-off discussion about how best to keep our appointment statistics. That is, what do we record about the hundreds of consultations we conduct in our roles as research liaisons, and how do we do this in a way that’s easy enough that we’ll actually keep up with our record keeping?

Ever since I’ve been here there’s been an Excel spreadsheet on our network space with fields we’re supposed to fill in for each consultation we conduct. But every year we struggle to actually use the thing because it involves several steps, none of which are prohibitive individually, but which put up just enough of a barrier to make record keeping an almost impossible chore. For one thing, there’s the spreadsheet itself. Being shared and on a network, if one person has it open nobody else can add their entries. Then there’s the whole process of remember to open the program, finding your sheet in the workbook, scrolling around to find an empty row in the right area, making sure the formulae we need actually extend to that row, and fixing the formulae when they’ve gone wonky. And did I mention the saving? Yeah. You only find out you can save and that somebody else has the spreadsheet open when you actually go to save your work.

So I figured out a way around the problem. I designed an Access database that helps me track not only my appointments, but also my students and my faculty. Then once a month or so I’d run a query I’d set up to fit that pesky spreadsheet, and export my stats, all in one fell swoop. It worked fine, mostly, especially after I tweaked a bunch of stuff.

But this year we decided we needed a more systematic method that worked for everyone. So we’re going to experiment with an much-shoehorned version of Libstats. It’s not perfect for this purpose, and we don’t have a programmer available to make it work for us. But for all it’s faults, the big benefit will be that we’re all doing something in a consistent way, and it’s all web-based.

And that’s one thing I’ve learned in the last week as we’ve all moved to a new email program. Sometimes it’s worth putting up with some changed or reduced functionality if the program satisfies the needs of a larger group.

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Good Beginnings

Published by Iris on Saturday, August 4th, 2007

I’ve been dreading today. It is going to be a work-filled day. Now that we’re ramping up for fall term to start, there are time pressures that sometimes make for long, work-filled weekends.

I didn’t help things when I stayed up way to late in the LSW Meebo room having a grand old time with the others who were there. And my cat didn’t help things by waking up me several times throughout the night, probably to tell me about the rain, but who really knows.

So I was, as I said, quite prepared to hate today.

And then I realized that the steady rain was falling straight down, that my porch was relatively dry under its overhang, and that I could turn this into the best morning of the summer. So here I am, sitting on the porch, listening to the rain hit the wilting trees and the dried up grass. To make things even more comfortable, I have a sweater and blanket on (it’s actually chilly out here! welcome after a three-week heat wave), my laptop at hand, and a book. I figure an hour or so of this kind of bliss might just make the rest of the weekend seem less onerous.

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