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Category: Libraries and Librarians

Well THAT’S Inconvenient: Academic Ebooks Strike Again

Published by Iris on Thursday, May 23rd, 2013

A researcher here found a citation to a book she needs. There’s nothing else like it, it’s by a prominent critic about a VERY obscure author from the early decades of the 1800s, and it could contain the one nugget of information that she needs for a massive research project she’s undertaking. What if her conclusion completely match or completely contradict this other critics conclusions? She’ll look the fool.

So I looked high and low for a copy, but it turns out that the book is only available as one ebook in a package of ebooks. So that’s a bummer. Nobody will be allowed to interlibrary loan it to us, so now we’re left with the choice of either saying “sorry, that’s just something you can’t see unless you take a field trip to one of the (few) libraries that bought that package” or else buying a whole package of ebooks, which would make this one of the more expensive books in our collection.

Please tell me this isn’t the wave of the future. It breaks my poor librarian’s heart.

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Classes and Appointments over the years

Classes and Appointments over the years

Published by Iris on Thursday, March 14th, 2013

I’m currently writing my annual review document… or rather, procrastinating on writing my annual review document. In the process I made a graph:

appointments and classes

For the last three years we’ve been making a concerted effort to help students understand that they can ask many of their questions at the reference desk (especially students in first year seminars). We’ve also gotten more involved in curricular initiatives on campus, using more of our time to work on curricular-level projects than we used to. I think both of those changes are reflected in the downward trend in appointments. (And really, not a ton of change over time if you disregard that one weird year where apparently EVERYONE needed me.)

I think that curricular-level work, plus slow but steady relationship building with the faculty in my departments accounts for the upward trend in classes. This year I’m more than a standard deviation above the mean.

I’m sure my colleagues have very different graphs since our departments fluctuate in different ways. But I found my graph interesting, so I thought I’d share it.

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Bad Term Paper Math

Published by Iris on Monday, February 25th, 2013

So, you’re assigned a 20-page paper when really you’re only used to 5-page papers. That’s pretty daunting. It’s a lot of space to fill. Therefore you’ll have to fill it with a lot of stuff. Four times as much stuff. Four times as large a topic. Four times as significant a claim!

Except that that’s not right at all. That’s the wrong multiplier. Go down that road and you’ll start trying to develop new theories of renaissance post-modernism, or a comprehensive description of the minority female healer in the modern consciousness.

A better multiplier is nuance or detail. Four times as much nuance is a wonderful thing.

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