Category: Random Thoughts

Monday:

• Printed out signs for the new always-on computers
• Set up greeting table in the front lobby
• Sent out a plea to please sign up for greeting shifts (only 6 of the 21 had been filled)
• Answer about a million emails
• Take a shift at the greeting table
• eat lunch
• answer about a million more emails
• go to opening convocation
• skip the post-convocation reception to go back to my office and work, but realize that if I sit down at my desk I’ll explode from overwhelmedness
• go home… answer about a million more emails

Tuesday

• Class prep
• email
• lunch
• Reference shift
• class (The Shakespearean Film Scholar’s version of the library)
• Greeting shift
• Fix one of our microfilm machines (turns out the poor library technologist and our IT department had been working on it for quite some time, but I’m the only one on campus who knew the fix. Too bad I hadn’t come over earlier to see what was up.)
• Plan evening student worker training (yes, that was last minute) and throw together some illustrative stats for them so they can see what they do here.
• Set up for training
• Train student workers
• Snacks with newly trained student workers
• Dinner with some friends followed immediately by bed

Wednesday

• email
• get to work
• more email
• class prep
• course research guide creation
• greeting shift
• lunch
• more class prep
• Marvel that it’s not Friday. All of a sudden if felt like Friday. I so wish it were Friday.
• class (The German Literary Scholar’s version of the library)
• prepare for student worker training
• Talk to co-worker about her upcoming class
• more email
• train student workers
• snacks with newly trained student workers
• Go home, keep all the lights off, and watch a DVD of Big Bang Theory in bed. Supper? What supper? Supper requires sitting.

Thursday

• Departmental meeting, at which we learned that the network had gone down the night before, which meant that the evening shift librarian had to call the emergency on-call guy and be walked through the process of bypassing fried systems and their fried back-up systems.
• email
• class prep
• lunch while playing Carcassonne on my iPod (lovely brain break)
• email
• Course research guide creation (only 3 more requests to fill!)
• Run around helping people close down the 4th floor computer lab (all the computers in the reference room) because the IT department has to swap them out for the computers in the language lab (long story).
• Class (team-taught with the media librarian — finding sources on Shakespeare and film)
• Meeting with an English prof to discuss learning goals for his class and how I can help his students meet them. And plan a course guide.
• email
• Research guide creation
• Wait, it’s not Friday yet? Longest. Week. EVER.
• class prep
• Write a thank you note to the library staff for helping out with our greeting project this year
• Hear that the print management system also crashed this evening — be glad I don’t work for IT
• Dinner with a couple of other friends — bed

Friday

• Finally. Friday. Whew.
• Get to work via the detour around a broken gas line and milling crowds of evacuated college staff.
• Class (importance of scholarly book reviews, finding book reviews, and why citation is more fun than it seems)
• email
• research guide creation
• lunch
• Evaluating a potential online resource
• class prep — so tired of class prep… But yay for generous colleagues who take my reference shifts for me so I can prep
• omnipresent email
• Pub night with friends! Followed by BED … I think I’ll sleep for the next 48 hours.

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Our friends across the river have come up with a nifty video about their library. Fun!

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Standing in the coffee line this morning, a cheerful first year student turned to me and asked, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” Thinking it highly unlikely I told her I’m Iris, one of the librarians here. Her already animated face did backflips over itself in her excitement: “You were teaching with the professor when I visited a linguistics class as a prospy last year!!”

I’m facing a busy, busy day, and I’m kind of nervous about it, and my socks chose this day to be the one where they sink further down into my shoes with every step and clump painful under my instep, and my whole body aches from all the running around that’s involved in new student week and preparations for classes. But this one first year student was interested enough in what I had to say nearly a year ago that she remembered my face today. I love 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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