As has been the case with my previous two posts in this Library Day in the Life series this week, I’ll leave off indicating all the times that I checked email, Google Reader, online social networks, etc. unless it was tied to some major project or event from my day. It is safe to assume that times spent in between (and often during) the tasks detailed in this post involved jaunts to check messages, respond to threads, scan new blog posts, etc.
Planning for Catalog Outages
The union catalog we share with all the other libraries from the colleges in the City University of New York system has occasionally gone down from anywhere between an hour to a day or more. A colleage from library administration stopped by my office to see what sort of documentation we had in our reference wiki about what front line staff should do when the catalog was down. We talked about two distinct things: how we can continue to assist users in reference when we no longer have access to our catalog and how we should go about reporting any problems to the CUNY Office of Library Services (which maintains the union catalog). As it turned out, the reference wiki already had pretty good info about the first concern (continuing to help users) and not much on the latter (reporting). Add another item to the to-do list.
Sharing Ideas about Writing Assignments in Our Credit Courses
One thing that makes our library notably different from many other academic libraries is that, as a department on campus, we offer not only a basic information literacy course that earns students the standard three credits (which I’ve taught in spring and fall 2010) but we also offer seven other courses and have an information studies minor. This morning, I joined about seven other colleagues in an informal discussion group led by Randy Hensley, the head of information services, in which we talked about the strategies we’ve tried with writing assignments in our credit courses. Aside from the many excellent ideas I got from my fellow librarians about new ways I could craft more engaging assignments, the other high point of the meeting was the idea of the meeting itself. In terms of professional development, I have found that the less formal and scripted the event, the more valuable it tends to be to me. Impromptu office and hallway conversations and regular, loosely planned discussion groups are often more useful to me than some half-day workshop in which I’m lectured at by the sage on the stage (or, increasingly, the star in the webinar).
Brainstorming for a NEH Grant
I was thoroughly flattered to be asked by the director of the Schwartz Communication Institute to join him as he and a colleague convened a group of faculty to talk about a NEH grant in the digital humanities that he and his staff want to apply for. The grant would focus on taking the institute’s VOCAT tool to the next level. As described on the VOCAT website, the software:
is a highly flexible and extensible, open-source web application designed to help students become confident, dynamic public speakers. It enables students to easily access videos of their oral presentations and to review and respond to instructor feedback. VOCAT aggregates videos and instructor comments for each user and offers an informative snapshot of a student’s progress over the course of a given term or even an entire academic career. Since 2007, over 5,000 undergraduates have used VOCAT in a wide variety of courses at all levels.
Developing a LibGuide for Baruch’s Writer in Residence Program
Our college hosts a writer-in-residence program that consistently brings amazing authors to the college every semester (this is probably easier to do at a college located in Manhattan than at a school in a small, rural area). After years of talking about how the library really should create each semester a subject guide page for each author, I finally had a tool at my fingertips last fall that made this ideal easily realized: LibGuides. My guide for last fall’s writer, Richard Price, was well enough received that I started work on the guide for this spring’s writer, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, well before the semester started. I was happily surprised recently to get an email from the author herself in which she offered to lend a hand in suggesting articles of hers to spotlight. Today, I worked on the guide a bit more and emailed her a link to a draft of it. I hope to publish the guide shortly now that the semester is due to start in two days.
Another Retirement Party
One of my favorite people in the library, Stanton Biddle, retired after a long and effective career here at Baruch. Well known and highly regarded in the ALA through his past leadership of the Black Caucus of the ALA and on campus here for his outstanding service as the head of the campus’ recent accreditation process with Middle States, Stanton is the kind of librarian who makes everyone feel like his friend. He’ll be very missed.
Previously…