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Pegasus Librarian Posts

Tag, I’m It

Published by Iris on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

CW tagged me for a meme a few days ago, so here goes. (This is harder than it seems because I could easily list off several dozen books in each category.)

1. One book you have read more than once.
The Lord of the Rings (I know, that’s technically more than one book, but only technically).

2. One book you would want on a desert island
That’s for me to know, and you to find out.

3. One book that made you laugh
The Princess Bride… oh boy did it ever.

4. One book that made you cry
Lots of books make me cry. I cry pretty easily for books. But Where the Red Fern Grows stands out as one of the saddest for me.

5. One book you wish you had written
84 Charing Cross Road. This has got to be my all-time favorite book. I wish I could write like either of those two letter writers.

6. One book you wish had never been written
The Bear. Ugh. And the professor who assigned it should have known better. (I’ve banished the author’s name from my mind, so I can’t find a link for you, but take my word for it, it was bad. It made me feel dirty. It STILL makes me feel dirty, even four years later.)

7. One book you are currently reading
Hmmm, which one? A couple of fluff books, a couple of serious books, and then Carleton’s Common Reading book, Persepolis and Persepolis II.

8. One book you have been meaning to read
The Shadow of the Wind, among about a million others.

9. One book that changed your life
They all have, but cliche as it is to say so, reading Jane Eyre stands out for being the first time that “literature” interested me.

10. Now tag five people:
There must be five people out there who want to do this… step up and claim your tag.

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Here Come the Trading Cards

Published by Iris on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

I had my photo-shoot for this year’s trading cards. We got a couple of good pictures (I promise I’ll let you know when we’ve decided on one), and I had a blast tapping my inner super-hero… until I found out that the entire shoot had been held during the normal staff break time right outside of the windows to the break room. Apparently our metadata librarian turned to my supervisor and asked, “Why is half your team out there posing for each other.” Oh well. At least we had it better than my co-worker who had the president of the college walk past her while she did the same thing yesterday. (Although, I gotta say, to all of the prospective students and their parents who were in that college tour that walked past us today as we tried to figure out the super-est super-hero poses possible, we really aren’t insane. Really, we aren’t. Please keep Carleton on your radar even if it’s librarians are a little out there.)

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Three Cheers for Collaboration!

Published by Iris on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

One of the greatest things about working where I do is the way I get to work with people from our IT department. Or rather, it’s the way that the idea of working with the IT department isn’t a big deal. I absolutely take it for granted that we have a combined service point (which we’ve named Research/IT… yeah, “research it”…) instead of a reference desk. I think nothing of calling down to Matt on the web team if I need something from our content management system that either isn’t there yet, or that is there but I can’t figure out. In any given week, it’s entirely possible that I’ll spend more time working on projects with IT people than I will with people from other departments in the library.

Well, today we had a half-day retreat for all library staff, all IT staff, the archivist, and the slide librarian. The first hour was filled with three- to five-minute descriptions of projects we’ve done in the last year that were collaborative across our department. May I say “Wow”? We’ve done everything from design and implement a new icon set for the different material types in our catalog, to planning for a new concept of data services that will provide much needed support for all the classes that need to find, manipulate, and analyze data sets.

There’s still room for improvement, but if there weren’t life would be boring. So for the next part of the retreat we broke into groups to talk about the future. What do we want to improve? Well it’s no surprise that we want to have a better handle on who knows what so that we can tap expertise whenever possible. We also want to think of ways to improve communication so that we aren’t so dependent on vast quantities email. We’d also like to develop of system of periodic short (half-hour or 45-minute) sessions of presentations and/or discussions focused on what we do, what we think about, projects we’re working on together, projects we’re working on separately, and anything else of interest. Oh, and they would be open to the entire campus. The faculty have this in place already via our amazing Learning and Teaching Center, but we’d like periodic sessions produced by us as well.

I’m so pumped!

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Good Day

Published by Iris on Tuesday, August 15th, 2006

After weeks of working and working all day every day and not feeling like I was making any progress on any projects, to day was great. It felt like every few minutes I could stand up and put a big red line through another item on my white board’s To Do list. I was on such a roll that I ended up staying an hour late! With another hour tomorrow morning, I should be able to catch up to where I wanted to be by tomorrow.

Oh, and tomorrow is the day I get my picture taken for my 2006-2007 trading card. Wish me luck!

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