September 2010 – Page 3 – Pegasus Librarian

I love the day new students arrive. We all know they’re scared and kind of shell shocked, so the people who organize these first few days go out of their way to make everything incredibly upbeat, and it’s infectious! Now I’m utterly exhausted, but it’s been a good day.

Here’s how it went…

These students dance and cheer at the entrance to campus all day, and particularly when anyone walks or drives past them. I’ve decided that I love being cheered as I step onto campus. (And they said they loved me! *sniff*)

The Northfield senior center owns this popcorn stand, which usually sits in downtown Northfield. Today they moved it to sit right in front of the student center and handed out free popcorn all day.

I led a tour of the library for students and their families. Here’s one of the brand new spaces that I think I’m going to really love. Comfy couches. Tables and chairs. Big screens to plug your laptop into. It’ll be grand.

There are several other places in the library that got updated with similar trappings this summer. I can’t wait to see how they get used.

Then I took my turn staffing the Welcome Tent. Students check in, get their room keys, get ethernet cables (from the IT people at the table next to us) hear about the library (we hand out trading cards that match their Fall term classes), and generally get all of their arriving-at-campus information in one place.

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After all that, I hid in my office and frantically made research guides. I figure you don’t need a picture of that. :-)

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This just in, Wikipedia is the single most dangerous site on the web. Don’t believe me? It’s all right here at the Ban Wikipedia petition site. I reproduce their reasoning here in full:

Wikipedia is the single most dangerous site on the web. It is living proof that a few individuals with a sinister agenda can change the way millions of people view the world and world history. It puts itself forward as an information resource, but a quick look through any of its articles shows that it is almost 100% entirely inaccurate. Much of the ‘information’ is created in the minds of at best mischievous, and at worst despotic individuals or groups who seek to create chaos and spread lies throughout the world. Much of it is aimed at young people seeking knowledge, and it is thus particularly despicable and especially dangerous. The site and those that run it – and lets not forget they are paid handsomely to keep the site prominent – should be banned from the world wide web and all references to Wikipedia should be removed.

With such stellar reasoning as it’s articles being “almost 100% entirely inaccurate” who can resist adding their names to this petition?

I have to say, though, that the messages included with the signatories are a little bit disheartening. It appears that people aren’t taking this situation seriously enough. Take this one, for example: “Obviously any process capable of banning a website as influential as Wikipedia from the web and completely expunging it and all references to it must necessarily possess limitless power and boundless evil. So on the off-chance that this works, I want to get in on the start. I salute our new petitionist overlords!” This isn’t the message of one who believes that Wikipedia sucks. How dare he add his name to this petition? Isn’t that fraud or something?

I think tomorrow I’ll start a petition to ban Google. It gives me far too much access to inaccurate information, and it occasionally flashes inappropriate sites on the screen when I’m doing live demonstrations. Who’s with me?

(Thanks to Catherine for drawing my attention to this worthy effort.)

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Month: September 2010

New Student Week: A day in pictures

Wikipedia Sucks!