All Quiet on the Library Front

Things were pretty slow last night at work. However, a super sweet student who works in our media lab asked me to help proofread his English paper.Granted, this is a duty that's out of scope for my job duties. I would normally refer a student to our learning center where there are trained individuals that proofread and offer tutoring. BUT, since it was so very, very quiet I agreed. I had one AskAcademic question about a library's operating hours. That's pretty much all I did.

Today, I stapled small cards promoting library services( including Ask a Librarian - woo!) to snack-sized Nestle Crunch bars. Because it's the "Crunch Time!" of the semester, get it? I also wiped down tables and study carrels. Do I dare hope that things get busier? I don't want to get slammed but a citation question might be fun right about now.

AskAcademic Adventures

ACC participates in AskAcademic, this super cool collaborative virtual reference program. It started out as AskColorado but its offshoot is AskA. Since the main part of my job at UT was virtual reference I said heck yeah! when ACC got onboard the chat train. Well, we already had a chat train in LiveChat but the super duper totally awesome thing about AskAcademic is that ACC students can chat with a librarian when the library is closed. ACC staffs LiveChat only when the libraries are open BUT if a student gets stuck with a tricky citation or needs help finding a drug interaction guide, then a librarian can point them to a good resource at midnight.

Last night I had 2 chats back-to-back. This was nothing unusual when I was at UT because our IM service could get insanely busy but I hadn't gotten that much reference action for awhile. I'm out of practice. One poor student was waiting 5 minutes before I noticed that she was waiting for me to pick up the chat. So embarrassing! She needed help finding her reading assignment online and we had no luck at all. It was very frustrating. The other student started a chat session with me but I'm not sure if she had stepped away from her computer or not because at first I thanked her for her patience and asked her to wait while I assisted Reading Assignment Student. No response. I suggested places where she could look (she asked for help finding resources on the history of public schools in the US and why schools are so important) but got no response. To make matters worse, I was finally able to help Public School Info Student when we had 5 minutes to close the library. I feel very guilty when I have to leave a student in the lurch like that.

Crickets....?

Hi-ho, A Delgado the Librarian here. I know, I know, it's been crickets from me for the past few weeks but that doesn't mean I haven't been busy. I've gotten some super fun literary criticism paper questions. One memorable stumper was how to cite (MLA 7th edition) a google book written in Farsi but translated by the student who was writing the paper. I couldn't find an answer in my trusty blue book so we ended up hybridizing two citation examples. Sometimes a gal has to make an executive decision when citing stuff. The student never came back to fuss at me so I'm assuming that all went well with her paper. Hurrah!

My head librarian gave me a special project where I have to provide instruction on using Xtranormal and its possible uses in accessibility. Honestly, I'm kind of drawing a blank on how to string these two concepts together though. So far I've settled on: Xtranormal can help create on-the-fly instructional videos! And then.... nothing else. I really did think that Xtranormal could easily create captions, hence making it a really good teaching tool for Deaf or Hard of Hearing students. But no. I found their forum page that basically says that in order to caption a movie you've made on Xtranormal, you have to upload it to YouTube, then use the YouTube captioning feature which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't work. Yay (that's sarcasm). So grrrr.... I'm back to thinking about how I can tie Xtranomal and accessibility together. Sigh.