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Category: Carleton

Planning for New Trading Cards

Planning for New Trading Cards

Published by Iris on Monday, July 30th, 2007

Today was the first of three solid days of meetings for me. We’ve blocked off these three days for my department to work on the collaborative summer projects that have been stacking up and not getting done. And today, we didn’t do so badly. We learned to use the “Create Lists” function in III’s Millennium interface, saw our departmental profile in Blackwell’s online collection development interface, developed our departmental goals for the coming school year, and took care of several other conversations that needed to happen but haven’t really had a proper venue. What’s more, that’s exactly what we said we’d accomplish today, so that felt good.

Tomorrow we’re going to talk about citation management software, make decisions about databases we have and want, and train each other on some of our new databases or on databases that have changed platform (so, for instance, the social sciences librarian will introduce us to a couple of new social sciences databases that might be useful to us and that we might want to know about as we work at the reference desk).

And then on Wednesday we’ll talk about our new trading cards. This meeting always makes me uncomfortable.


The first year I was here it was uncomfortable because I was afraid it’d be hokey. Well… it kind of was, but in the best possible way. I absolutely loved my first trading card. I didn’t know how we could top it. So last year I was worried we’d change to a new design or color scheme or… whatever, that’d ruin it. I’d grown really fond of my card. But last year’s card turned out even better than the year before, so that fear was averted.


This next year, there’s talk of changing our theme. So this year I’ve started mourning my current card again. I really love my current card. I’ve grown used to it. I feel like it fits me well… like a well-worn pair of jeans. Only way cooler. How could a new design possibly be better, I wonder?

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Introducing High School Students to a College Library

Introducing High School Students to a College Library

Published by Iris on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007

Every summer a group of high school students, gleaned from high schools all over the United States, comes to campus for a week-long program called CLAE (the Carleton Liberal Arts Experience). There are various courses they can take (everything from “how to apply to college” to “the Harlem Renaissance”) with the dual purpose of introducing them to the idea of a liberal arts college and giving them a little bit of experience living and studying on a college campus. The emphasis is really on empowering them to think that college is possible, doable, interesting, intense, and fun.

And every year, one of the classes brings all the kids to the library. For the past three summers I’ve worked with the history librarian to prepare the students to engage in a modernized Washington/Du Bois debate. But this year the class and professor changed, so the history librarian and I started from scratch to build a class for students studying the Harlem Renaissance.

My part of the class preparations was to develop an exercise that would introduce the students to the 5 reference sets they’d need to navigate as they prepared for their final presentations. But the big question was how to make it easy for them to pick their sets out from the shelves and shelves of unfamiliar reference books, while still letting them see the sets in context rather than pulled out and put on a cart just for this assignment. Well, to ease this particular rub, I made signs for each set that had a full scan of the cover of the one of the set’s volumes, and then a cut-out image of the set’s place on the shelf.

Then I put these signs up on the shelves above each reference set.

That way, when the students came back to do their research after all of the librarians had gone home for the night, they’d be able to go back to the sets we’d shown them in class. I hope it worked for them.

Oh, and the exercise itself sounded great on paper, but would need more clarification next year. I still like the idea of it, but there were some recurring questions I should have anticipated.

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Firefox Search Plugins for All

Published by Iris on Thursday, July 5th, 2007

One of my co-workers has started experimenting with custom search plugins for Firefox. So far she has several ready to go, and they’re listed on her site. Searching our catalog and A to Z list right from the browser are my two favorites.

She made these using SearchPlugins.net, which apparently makes creation, editing, and other maintenance of plugins pretty easy.

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Appreciation

Published by Iris on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

Every year, the Dean of the College sends a small note of appreciation to each academic staff member on the anniversary of the day they started working here. It’s a sentence or two on letter-head note paper, signed by the Dean, and expressing appreciation for that staff member’s work over the past year.

And by all reasonable standards, this shouldn’t be something to get so excited about. And yet, as my anniversary approached I found myself looking forward to getting that note. It’s funny how such a small thing can be so heartwarming.

Of course, it helps that I really like our Dean. He interviewed me before I came and has always done and said those small things that make me feel he actually knows and cares that I exist. But beyond that, I enjoy being part of an organization that takes even a small amount of time to pat people on the back and thank them for working hard. It really is the small things that make a difference.

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