Now I’ve started hearing this drum loop everywhere. I’ve heard it in everything from commercials to NPR transition music. Fascinating.
(Via David)
1 CommentLearning in Libraries and Loving It
We’re already at mid-term. Even saying that I can’t really believe it, but wishing it weren’t so doesn’t change the facts.
It’s been kind of a rough Fall term so far. More project work and less student interaction than I’m used to. The college approved a new set of graduation requirements, and we’ve got this year to figure out how to implement them, which seemed like a long time for about the first 10 minutes after the proposal passed. I’m also planning a review of our Research/IT service now that it’s been up and running for a few years, and we’re going to look seriously at changing our catalog. The library has merged with the college archives. We’re down by two staff. I’m heading up a project to help all of us keep up with the wider world of librarianship in a way that’s both easy and fun (keep your fingers crossed). We’re getting used to LibGuides and MetaLib… And that’s just the bigger stuff that impacts my life. There’s a whole lot that others are working on, too.
On top of it all, I’ve been sick. Missing a bunch of work sure isn’t helping with the deadlines, lemme tell you. Though honestly, I’m still too tired to feel any emotional pull behind that last sentence. Intellectually I know that there’s a fan pretty close by, and I’m hoping nothing hits it, but it feels for all the world like I know this about someone else’s life and not my own. So my current plan is to get as much as I can done while I’m still in this detached zone so that by the time I wake up and realize that this is my life that’s about to explode, most of the hard work will already be done.
That’s the plan, anyway.
My plan for the next 10 minutes is to convince myself that standing up and getting ready for work is a good idea.
Comments closedWorking at a small school with deeply ingrained vocabulary and a student population of only a couple thousand, you get pretty used to the way email questions look and feel when they come from students. So this morning when I opened a message and it just felt off, somehow, I took a minute to do a little investigating. The email I’d received said:
Dear Ms. Jastram,
I am doing some research on colonial Latin American literature for my honors thesis and I came across a book that just came out this year and our library does not have it yet. The title is: __El discurso colonial en textos novohispanos: espacio, cuerpo y poder__ by Sergio Rivera-Ayala (Tamesis, 2009; ISBN:9781855661790) Is it possible to purchase it?Regards,
[name],
Senior Student
Carleton College
First of all, our seniors do “comps” not “honors theses.” Second, they tend to assume that we know them by their senior years (which we generally do), so the signature seemed odd. And finally, it’s very rare for students to request books here, just generally, unless we’ve already exhausted our InterLibrary Loan options.
The kicker came when the registrar confirmed that we have no such student enrolled here.
Apparently someone is hoping to drum up sales for this book by impersonating students. And here I thought those handwritten letters from authors were a bit much… This is another whole level of “a bit much.”
10 CommentsThe 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?
3 Comments