Textbook Season

Hi-ho, A Delgado the Librarian here, reporting to you LIVE from a Sunday afternoon at the reference desk. I had a lovely, lovely intersession full of personal time and movie watching. And guess what, y'all? I made a shift trade with a coworker and I have my Friday nights back! I haven't had my Friday nights free for over 2 years. Now I work Thursday evenings instead of Friday evenings. I still have Saturday afternoons.

School started up again on Monday and my first shift of the fall semester, Thursday evening, was SO BUSY! It was anti-cricket time. I loved it. I love being busy. Granted, I also love crickets because I can refuel (meaning I can eat a snack and not have to try being articulate) and read articles on umm... wikipedia. Most of my interactions on Thursday were operating hours questions and textbook questions. Open access period to textbooks starts on Monday morning. I had 1 reference question - sources needed for a 400 word essay about the influences of ancient Greek and Roman music on modern music. I used my fave db, GVRL which had separate articles on music in ancient Greece and Rome. I showed the student Grove Music Online too but I think Zhe will probably use the bulk of material from the GVRL articles.

Saturday (yesterday) afternoon was all textbooks all the time and again it was pretty much anti-crickets all day. The head librarian called me in to work this afternoon (Sunday) so instead of spending quality time on the couch with the kittens and Netflix, I'm sitting at the reference desk. I've had one question since noon. Ooops! Wait, two questions now. No worries though, I'm gonna use today's cricket time to catch up on our latest issue of McNaughton's - they supply our leisure reading section - and I have a personal campaign for my campus libary to include more YA fiction and more graphic novels. Wheeeeee!

Previously Unknown Magical Powers

Hi-ho, A Delgado the Librarian here, reporting to you LIVE from a Saturday afternoon at the library. Yesterday evening I had five questions in five hours. I also took 3 chats because things were so quiet. I had zero AskAcademic questions. Today I've had 2 questions since 1pm. Woo! I've used the abundance of crickettime to read my latest issue of VOYA, eat my delicious leftover lunch, and check out A Carr's Prezi masterpiece Research Success!

Last night my most interesting question was from a student who was writing about Katherine Mansfield's short story Her First Ball. The student wanted help finding resources about women's lives in 19th century Sweden. We couldn't find anything very helpful in Ebsco's World History Collection. I ended up emailing the student articles from GVRL and citations/abstracts from JSTOR. Again, I was foiled by JSTOR's seemingly clunky search engine. Granted, the stuff in the db is pretty awesomesauce and I'm superduper grateful that my public library has a subscription. But it was giving me results that had NOTHING to do with women in 19th century Sweden. And JSTOR also doesn't seem to use Ebsco's hyperlinking subject terms. Grrr... AND I was bitter because it was my intention to send copies of the actual articles to the student. However, JSTOR is probably preemptively wise to my intention and the email recipients get is just a copy of the citation and abstract to the article. They have to log in (meaning they have to have access to JSTOR in the first place) to get the full text.

Another chat I had last night was from a student who needed primary resources on John D. Rockefeller. I sent Hir links to American Memory (sadly, these are mostly images) and we found some articles in Google News Archive. The student thanked me and said I'd been very helpful. Yay snaps!

I believe that I mentioned today that it has been superduper quiet. Even the crickets are sleeping. Of course there are folks in the library checking Facebook and probably watching youtube videos but no one is checking out books or asking reference questions. The closest thing I've had to a reference question was alas very dismaying. A student called in asking for help logging into Blooms Literary Reference Online. Zhe had attempted logging in repeatedly using the same password Zhe used for Blackboard. No luck. I asked a series of troubleshooting questions. Current student? Yes. Tried other databases besides Blooms? Yes. Caps lock on? No. I told the student I didn't know what was going on and of course, this didn't make Hir cheerful because Zhe has a paper due next week. I suggested as a last, sad troubleshooting gesture, Zhe could try another Internet browser and if that didn't work to let me know and I could email Hir articles. I found this troubleshooting guide on the library website that says that students who attempt to log on repeatedly and fail may get their accounts locked. This makes sense (though I didn't think of this when I was talking to Blooms Student) but then it infers that librarians have the ability to unlock student's accounts. This is news to me, y'all. I didn't know I could do that. I don't know HOW I would be able to unlock anyone's account. I haven't heard from Blooms Student so either Zhe got into the library databases or has given up.

So yeah, it's been a slow and somewhat frustrating weekend. This is my last shift of the summer semester so I'll update in 2 weeks. ttfn