Skip to content

Category: Services

Let the Pilot Begin!

Published by Iris on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

I spent a good portion of today working out the logistics of a new pilot program we’re trying. I’m so excited to see if it works, it’s not even funny!

But first, the background. Our writing center contacts professors who will be teaching WR (“writing rich”) courses across the curriculum to see if these professors would like a writing assistant assigned specifically to their classes. So, for example, a bunch of English courses and a handful of sociology/anthropology, PoliSci, and History classes promise to provide their students with a portion of the intensive writing experience that’s required for graduation. And professors teaching these courses have the option of working closely with a single writing assistant who will shepherd enrolled students through all the writing assignments.

Well, last year the director of the our writing center and I began scheming ways to make our two operations work together more closely. I attended a writing professionals’ mini-conference with her. She invited me to start training new writing assistants. And this winter we’re taking it a step further.

She provided me with a list of courses that have a writing assistant assigned to them. Each week at our departmental meeting, I’ll check with the other librarians to see if they’ve been asked to work with any of these WR courses. If they have, they will contact the writing assistant for those courses in invite the assistants to the library session. That way the writing assistant will understand the research process and options when working with each of the enrolled students. They’ll also be encouraged to send students our way when they read drafts.

I’m going to choose one course to take this set-up one step further, just to see how it goes. I’m going to have one writing assistant take down the names of student that could use a librarian’s help and (with the students’ permission, of course) hand that list over to me. I’ll then initiate the contact with the students. I’m curious to see if overcoming that initial shyness of approaching a librarian for help makes a significant difference. On the other hand, I’m a little worried that this might be more of a workload than we can handle. Hence the pilot within a pilot… and zero publicity. It’ll just be between me and my writing assistant (and a few thousand of my closest internet buddies).

So today I got the list of courses and their corresponding assistants and spent some time creating a new section of the Moodle space we use to collaborate within my department. Hopefully with courses listed, contact information easily at hand, and spaces for noting our impressions of the process we can keep this thing moving forward smoothly and effectively. Goodness knows that if the process isn’t as easy as falling off a log by the time classes start (tomorrow, by the way), the scheme will never fly.

Wish us luck!

Comments closed

Maybe the Easiest Virtual Reference Set-Up Ever

Published by Iris on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007

I’ve been playing with Meebo Rooms today in between student appointments and crazy-hard research questions. For the two or three of you that haven’t heard of these things, they’re a brand new feature of Meebo and you can read more about them on the Meebo blog. Basically, it’s a free and easy chat room where you can also push links and video and you can embed the room on a web page (such as the Research Help page of your library?). What’s not to like?

I can easily envision this on the library site. We could be logged into meebo and hanging out in the room in case anyone had a question. This would alleviate a problem we’ve been facing: how to make it easy for students to ask IM questions even though we all have separate IM addresses and are not considering having a single “reference” account that we’d all log in and out of. And yet, students could ask questions without having an IM account. Perfect.

Except… We’d have to figure out what to do about the fact that anybody looking at the embedded room could see the questions we were working through, and anyone who logs in can see the last 50 or so lines of chat history. I’m the least privacy-concerned librarian I know, but even I think we’d have to have a warning about this posted prominently.

And then there are the ads. Every so often we are asked to “please enjoy this sponsored video,” which stinks. We could turn the media area off, I guess, but that seems like a kill-joy.

I can also not choose any options other than “only You can add video” and “anyone can add video.” I’d like to be able to authorize people to push video out onto the library site… just cuz I work on a college campus with, you know, college students.

But I’m still thinking we might be able to make this work. I’d love to make this work. Even if we only do the text part of it at first and save the cool media-pushing-thingy for later.

[Update 5/16/2007: I’ve embedded a few sample reference chat room configurations here. One cool thing is that people can copy the code for the room and paste it where ever they’d like, so they could easily add it to their own pages and have us right there in their own space if they wanted. The magic happens if you click “Copy Chat Room.”]

3 Comments

Possibly Impossible Idea

Published by Iris on Friday, January 19th, 2007

Walking in to work this morning, musing on staffing and service models for liaison librarians and fumbling for my keys with mitten-encased hands, I decided that our liaison model is doing just about precisely half of what it could do (time, money, and staffing aside). Currently, there is a liaison for each major on campus. Freshmen and Sophomores are encouraged to meet with the liaisons as well, but before they declare a major they may have to figure out new people for every class they take.

Now I’m not saying that it’s bad for students to go to the person most suited to answer their questions. Far from it. But I remember being too intimidated to figure out who the people were who could answer my basic questions when I was a pre-major, let alone re-figure for each class.

But what if each freshman were assigned a librarian at the same time that they’re assigned a faculty adviser. This librarian could be “their” librarian who could do anything from answer basic questions to directing them (and personally introducing them) to the liaison most suited to answer specific questions.

Here’s the major hitch in my plan: 500 freshmen… 7 librarians… Not a good ratio, especially if any of them still needed their personal library adviser by the time they got to sophomore year. We could end up with as many as 1000 students per librarian, plus our students who have already declared majors.

Of course, many students wouldn’t sit down with us more than once (and they’d only come that once if we required it). So it might not be that much more work. And it might be a nice way to personalize the library.

I just don’t know. It was an interesting thought, if nothing else.

Comments closed

Gould Goes Multi-Media

Published by Iris on Thursday, December 28th, 2006

At the very beginning of Fall term here at Carleton, two other librarians and I recorded our first podcast: an audio tour of the library. But then the term hit with such force that we didn’t have time to figure out the technicalities of putting it up on the library’s web site. Turns out, we had to get the college’s web team to turn on a media page type in our CMS and then everything worked great, but it takes a certain amount of futzing to figure out what we aren’t able to do and then ask to have that done. It only took the web team a matter of seconds to fix the problem, but what with one thing and another, it took us until this week to get things figured out.

You can go here to listen to a tour of our library (and follow along on the tour map found in the blue “Related Documents” box). I take you through the bottom two floors (First and Second), so for those of you dying to know what I sound like when I talk… have at it. I kind of hope that’s not what I sound like in real life, but I’m afraid it probably is.

We’ve also loaded our “Library Survival Guide” onto that page, as well as a video we made just before graduation last year. It’s a really big file, but there are some pretty funny bits.

2 Comments