The Un-Cool Librarian

2011-03-22T13:58:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wanted to learn to use EndNote? The WSU Libraries can help! Check out our line up of Spring Semester EndNote classes.

All classes are held in the Holland 105 computer lab. Please register ahead of time through HRS.

For instructions on how to register go to: http://hrs.wsu.edu/Library Instruction Page
or call 335-4521 or email: hrstraining@wsu.edu.

For more information on class content, contact scales@wsu.edu.

SCHEDULE
Tuesday: 3/29/2011 @ 10:00-12:00
EndNote: Beginners Class

Tuesday: 4/5/2011 @ 1:00-3:00
EndNote: Using Databases with EndNote

Tuesday: 4/12/2011 @ 10:00-12:00
EndNote: Cite While You Write

Tuesday: 4/19/2011 @ 1:00-3:00
EndNote: Open Workshop

On the Un-Cool Soapbox with Huckleberry Finn

2011-01-05T11:41:00.000-08:00

As everyone has no doubt heard by now, a new edition of Huckleberry Finn is eliminating the N word (and also an I word, though the replacement of "injun" with Indian hasn't been discussed nearly as much).

I could talk about the dangers of ignoring the past, of sweeping the uglier parts of U.S. history under the rug, or even of teaching certain "classics" to grade school students who may not be ready to explore the themes of those novels.

But I think that the heart of why I cringe at the bowdlerization of Twain's novel is that I was once faced, in my pre-librarian life, with a class of drama students, August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and a group of white students who were going to act out a scene from the play involving the N word. There were black students in my class, too, and a few of them approached me about feeling very (very) uncomfortable with this. The white students weren't swimming in comfort, either. I was a TA, and a novice; I was scared. But the days of discussion we had in that classroom before the scene was acted out probably comprised the best and most meaningful classroom experience I've ever had. We talked about language and power, about language appropriation and re-appropriation, about history and exploitation and music and about how Wilson brought these issues into focus in his play. Perhaps most importantly, we discussed what we all needed and wanted to do with that history and language now, in our own lives. And you know what? The answer wasn't to ignore the fact that all of this history had happened.

My students and I learned a lot that wasn't only valuable for understanding American theater. But it almost didn't happen. I almost didn't teach the play, almost avoided the scene, almost excused myself because of my inexperience and fear. It would have been much, much easier, and would have felt much safer. And that's why the "new" version of Huckleberry Finn makes me want to scream. It's just so easy to give into the fear of facing and discussing painful issues. It's just too damned easy to deny ourselves real and valuable learning, to try (and fail, incidentally) to whitewash history, and to let the looming issues of racism and language become more looming by feeding them with fear and avoidance. And we need novels like Huck Finn (and plays like August Wilson wrote) to remind us that it really isn't easy and that it's not supposed to be easy but that we need to have these discussions anyway.

Off my soapbox now, but, seriously, I thought we knew better than this.

New Books in Women's Studies

2010-12-30T12:01:00.000-08:00

Happy almost-New Year! Here are links to the most recent new books list for Women's Studies at the WSU Libraries.

From the Women's Studies LibGuide: http://libguides.wsulibs.wsu.edu/content.php?pid=87466&sid=838124
*Tip* You will also find older new book lists on this LibGuide page.

The list is also available from WSU WorldCat: http://washingtonstate.worldcat.org/profiles/eacarlson/lists/2187021

If you have Women's Studies titles to recommend, please let me know. I'm always glad to receive suggestions.

New Books in Anthropology and Archaeology

2010-12-30T11:53:00.000-08:00

Here are links to the last new books list of the calendar year for Anthropology and Archaeology at the WSU Libraries. Look for more new books lists in 2011!

From the Anthropology LibGuide: http://libguides.wsulibs.wsu.edu/content.php?pid=88408&sid=842267
*Tip* You will also find older new book lists on this LibGuides page.

The list is also available from WSU WorldCat: http://washingtonstate.worldcat.org/profiles/eacarlson/lists/2186400

If you have Anthropology or Archaeology titles to recommend, please let me know. I'm always happy to hear from you.

New Books in Communication

2010-12-17T15:38:00.000-08:00

Here are links to new books list for Communication. There are some very interesting new titles now available at WSU Libraries!

From the Communication Studies LibGuide: http://libguides.wsulibs.wsu.edu/content.php?pid=83396&sid=838182
*Tip* You will also find older new book lists on this LibGuides page.

The list is also available from WSU WorldCat: http://washingtonstate.worldcat.org/profiles/eacarlson/lists/2169380

If you have Communication titles to recommend, please let me know. I'm always happy to hear from you.

End of the semester tips for using the libraries

2010-11-17T12:43:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again, the time when you may be realizing that you have four papers due (and three exams to study for) and only a few more days in which to write them and get in your studying time.

As I sit at the reference desk in the Holland and Terrell Library, I can feel the tension mounting as the days go by. I remember my own experiences with end-of-the-semester stress (it was ugly - there was blatant abuse of caffeine, hysterical laughter, crying, and at one point a really unfortunate experiment with cigarettes that I don't want to get into), and I sympathize. But my sympathizing and witnessing your pain won't help you much, so here are six tips to make your library work, be it researching, writing, or studying, less stressful.

Recognize that stress makes research harder. When people are under stress, they are more likely to forget things, and also more likely to have a hard time following directions, reading signs, or doing normally easy things like typing passwords. If you find yourself panicking, remember to breathe and (I'll be saying this again) ask for help.
Back up your work. Please, please, please for the love of all that is good in the universe save any paper you're writing on a library computer and save it frequently. Then back it up by emailing it to yourself of putting a copy on Google Docs. The library computers don't automatically save your work, and the TempStore drives on our computers are wiped clean every night. If you lose your work, we will want to get it back for you, but we won't be able to.
Please remember to make sure you have everything you need when you leave the libraries. The last thing you want to do after sweating out a search for peer-reviewed journal articles is to have to hunt down the flash drive you've saved them to. Or to hunt for your cell phone. Or iPod. Or wallet. And while we do have a lost and found at the Circulation Desk, it's a sad truth that sometimes things are stolen in the libraries.
Ask for help. I know I've said this before, but it's really important. We have people at the Circulation Desk and Reference Desk whose job is to help you, who are glad to help you. If you get confused, stuck, or frustrated, let us know and we'll do our best to help you find what you need. Plus, most of us are friendly types, even if we look a little scary at first.
When you're under stress it's easy to take it out on those around you. Try not to. Your fellow students (who are all working with their own loads of stress) will appreciate this and it will get you better help. I try to do my best for every person who comes for help at the reference desk, but I'm much more likely to go the extra mile for those who are respectful and polite.
Okay, admittedly this one is partly to decrease my stress load, but please return things like staplers, scissors, or the three-hole punch to roughly the same places you found them. We like them to be available to anyone who needs them, and sometimes people get quite upset when they can't staple their papers. Also, the old and cranky staplers we sometimes have to resort to have wounded people who attempted to refill them. Seriously. There was blood. There were bandages.

Good luck, and hang in there. May your computer never crash, especially while you're writing. May your research be as painless as possible, and may your study sessions never be so exhausting as to make you sleep through your exams. May your holiday travel be smooth and uneventful. And may you learn enough that is useful and true and important to make all of this work worthwhile.

Oscar in the Library

2010-10-15T15:26:00.000-07:00

Some vintage Sesame Street.

Oscar finds his books in the end, but in many ways this seems to be an object lesson on how not to conduct a reference interaction.

On piecing together new clothes from old, or, purchasing databases in this economy

2010-07-01T13:50:00.000-07:00

There's a part of Louisa May Alcott's An Old Fashioned Girl, where the heroine, Polly, helps her friend Fanny, who has recently fallen on hard times, to remake a dress by turning it inside out so the unfaded fabric on the inside can be reused. Sometimes I feel like this is a good metaphor of what we try to do with library resources - find the undersides of things we already have and try to make them useful in new ways. Sometimes this works well and sometimes it doesn't; sometimes we don't have much choice.

A researcher doing very interesting and valuable work recently asked me about purchasing a very specialized (and very useful) database to help with this work. I'm looking into it, but with our current budget, it's not easy to make substantial purchases like database subscriptions, especially if they may only be used by a few people. This isn't surprising; it's the case in academic libraries across the country right now as we compete for funding in our still struggling economy.

"You are there to help the researchers," my researcher tells me. "Otherwise we can't go on." He is right of course, but part of me resents being told this, because I know he is right. The Libraries know he is right. We are trying to stretch our limited budget to help as many of our researchers as we can, as well as we can. I understand that he feels as though we aren't serving him as well as we could, but I get frustrated because I haven't been able to convey to him how hard we are trying. I am looking to see if I can drum up more interest in this database, if I can make a good case for getting it in the face of our current budget.

If not, I end up trying to help him track down the information he wants the hard way, through databases not designed to give us information or access to the particular type of information he wants. He's already good at this, but it's labor-intensive, takes time away from what he really wants to be doing, and it would be nice if we could give him better tools.

It seems like it may become harder and harder for institutions like mine to provide these tools, even as more and better become available. This is depressing. How much time can we really spend piecing together new dresses out of our old silks? Am I looking at a future in which we have to cut something every time we get something new? It can be tiring, having to explain that our budget can't keep up with inflation, that we're trapped in a failing model of scholarly communication which means that we keep cutting resources and vendors keep raising prices to make up for money they lose (or just for new money they aren't getting) when libraries cut resources.

To drum up an old sentiment I've heard often since I started work as an academic librarian, it would be very nice if universities seriously considered library funding when proposing new programs, colleges, departments, or centers. New areas of research and teaching focus almost always mean that there will be new needs and desires for information resources. If this were recognized and funded at the university level, it would make for happier researchers and librarians.

I don't have much influence at the university level just now, however, so I'm thinking of ways that we could get more funding for the kinds of tools that may be much more useful to select groups of researchers than to our larger student body, or the bulk of our teaching faculty and staff.

Aside from continuing pushing for support of Open Access so that some day we may have a sustainable and viable system for database subscriptions, I wonder if libraries could partner with researchers as they apply for grants, building access to tools and databases into the grant funding so that the researchers, the larger institution, and the libraries all benefit. Has anyone done this before? I'd love to see examples.

In the meantime, we work with what we have, hoping we can turn it to new uses.

Poor Blog

2010-06-30T12:30:00.000-07:00

Dear Blog, I've been neglecting you of late and I apologize. I haven't posted here for some time for a number of reasons.

Reason 1: I've been posting new book lists on my library subject guides pages. Here are the links: New books in Communication, New Books in Anthropology and Archaeology, and New books in Women's Studies.

Reason 2: I am sometimes disorganized. Please don't tell anyone. This is a terrible sin if you're a librarian.

Reason 3: The WSU Libraries have implemented LibGuides for subject pages, have changed the way we take our reference statistics (we used to fill out a spreadsheet & now we use a SurveyMonkey form), and the Research Services parts of the Libraries here at Pullman are undergoing reorganization. We've been having a busy year!

Reason 4: In spite of the activities listed in Reason 3, my life is often boring. Truly. It's part and par of the whole uncool vibe.

Reason 5: After a month of bed rest in January (ugh) and an early, but not scary-early delivery on the first of February, I'm now spending a lot of time worrying over how to protect the world's ducks from my cute baby monster.

Being responsible for the fate of all ducks weighs heavy on a person.

But I'll try to write more faithfully here. The WSU Libraries are going to be doing some great things this year, and I'm looking forward to being a part of them and to posting about them.

Almost there

2009-05-21T12:12:00.000-07:00

Latest (and close to final) iteration of new noise signage:

I need to crisp up the tag cloud image and give the text another good hard look.

PSA Widget

2009-04-27T11:36:00.000-07:00

From The White House Blog:

I know that flu epidemics can be serious and scary things, but I'm tickled that our administration is using blogs and widgets to communicate.

The "Things You Can Do" list is full of good common-sense type advice, and I recommend looking at it. Sometimes we really do need to be encouraged to stay home when we're sick.

Sign mock-up #1

2009-04-22T15:53:00.001-07:00

Here's the text:

While in the Libraries, remember that others are

chatting collaborating copying cramming emailing focusing learning meeting napping panicking printing researching snacking studying talking texting tutoring working writing

created at TagCrowd.com

Please show consideration to those around you by keeping your conversations reasonably quiet.

Thanks!

Seems full of words to me, still, but I like the tag cloud image.

Signage ideas and examples?

2009-04-21T12:30:00.000-07:00

Last year, after quite a bit of conversation, we decided to take down our "No Cell Phones in the Libraries" signs. Huzzah!

However, with no signs up about noise levels, there's been some confusion over whether or not phones are allowed and about noise in general. Now that Holland & Terrell Libraries are cell phone friendly, we need some signage to let people know that all conversations (IRL or on phones) need to be conducted with respect for surrounding students. I'd like to avoid going into specific noise levels in a way that might imply we're policing for noise, and I'd especially like something that promoted the idea that our library space is our patrons' space and that we trust them to make good choices.

I've been scanning the web and have found a few jumping off points (Many thanks to Aaron at Walking Paper for collecting so many great images of signs!), but any suggestions or examples would be greatly appreciated.

Ideally, the language should be clear and brief. Bonus points for humor and helpful images!

Belated Valentine's Day post

2009-02-25T16:27:00.000-08:00

So, Valentine's Day has come and gone, but today I saw that John Green, who has written some darned good YA novels (An Abundance of Katherines, Looking for Alaska, and Paper Towns, among others) has some fine answers the age-old question, "How do I get boys to like me?" And it seemed like the sort of thing that I would have liked to hear on Valentine's Day when I was fifteen.

So here it is, all funny and sweet and stuff.

Good customer service

2009-02-02T14:53:00.001-08:00

My trip to the ALA Midwinter conference wasn't exactly fraught with peril, but winter travel is always time consuming and never predictable. After arriving in your hotel lobby an hour before midnight, after spending 15+ hours in airports and on planes, the last thing you want to hear is that the hotel is overbooked and you have to go somewhere else.

I was very cranky with the Hyatt Regency, and with traveling, and with the conference, which I wouldn't have attended this year if my life had worked out in happier ways, more than five months ago. I was tired, self-pitying, and disappointed (but hopefully polite) as I took myself off to the room at the Comfort Inn that the Hyatt arranged for me that Friday night.

The next morning, as I returned to the Hyatt, it became clear to me that this place does customer service right. First, their manager admitted to making a mistake, then he apologized for it, sincerely and thoughtfully, letting me know that they new it wasn't pleasant for a customer arriving late in the day to encounter an overbooked hotel. They gave me access to the Regency Lounge (free breakfasts!), sent another note of apology with fruit later Saturday evening, and didn't charge me anything for Friday night's reservation. All nice things, but what still sticks with me is the sincerity of the apology I received. No one at the Hyatt knew how ambivalent I was about attending Midwinter this year, or that I haven't been the happiest of campers lately. But they recognized me as a human being and valuable customer; they took responsibility and made amends. They not only did the right thing, they made me feel better.

How often, in Libraries, do we make mistakes, admit to them, and make things right for our patrons? How often do we do this graciously and thoughtfully? It takes a lot of bravery to do this. To do this right, I think it takes a sincere desire to serve people well. I am now looking to serve my patrons better and more thoughtfully.

Thank you, Hyatt. I'll be back.

What bloggers can learn from journalists

2008-12-16T12:29:00.000-08:00

I listened to the commencement speech given at WSU on Saturday by Frank Blethen, publisher and CEO of the Seattle Times. I admire Blethen's defense of journalism, but I think that, by attributing so much of the blame for the newspaper industry's current dilemmas on the internet, (Google and Craigslist, particularly) he missed a chance to talk about how newspapers, online news sites, blogs, and search engines can work together.

Also, it seems clear to me that newspapers, while they have provided and do provide invaluable services to the public, need to think innovatively and creatively if they're going to survive. We're trying to ask our auto industry to do this, the faculty and administration at my university and universities around the country are being asked to do this, and it seems reasonable to expect new ideas and business plans in other industries as well. Blaming Google seems like a real avoidance of the kind of creative thinking that could lead to survival.

Blethen was very dismissive about blogging, and this is understandable. There are plenty of tensions between professional journalism and blogging, and how these tensions play out in the next several years is going to be fascinating. But bloggers, many of whom are interested in driving traffic to their blogs and in cultivating audiences, and some of whom consider themselves citizen journalists, can learn a lot from journalists. Anita Bruzzese, writing a guest post on Chris Brogan's Community and Social Media blog, has a brief and sensible post about this: What Bloggers Can Learn from Journalists.

Journalists may already be learning from bloggers as well - that would make an interesting post, too.

And, if you want to watch the commencement and hear Blethen's speech for yourself, you can take a look at the streaming video.

Edited to add: Stephen Abram lists some good additions to ways bloggers can learn from journalists: Bloggers as Journalists.

Current economics, and many reasons why Libraries are especially important now

2008-12-11T12:33:00.001-08:00

Just a nice clip showing how valuable libraries are to their communities when things get tough economically:

Meryl Streep

2008-11-19T14:57:00.000-08:00

is going to play a librarian:

http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/currentnews/newsarchive/2008/November2008/streepheartsdewey.cfm

New Summit catalog for WSU

2008-11-14T13:01:00.001-08:00

From our Library News feed (http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/general/News-Events.htm), here's some information on the upcoming new iteration of the Summit catalog used by WSU Libraries and by cooperating Washington and Oregon Libraries. We keep trying to make interlibrary loan easier and better, and hopefully this new version of Summit will help us in doing that.

New Summit Catalog Coming Dec 1
Post Time: 11/12/2008 1:02:11 PM
Posted By: coreyj@wsu.edu (Corey Johnson)
Category: News

Summary
WSU Libraries, in cooperation with the 35 other WA/OR academic libraries of the Orbis Cascade Alliance, will be launching a new version of the Summit Catalog on December 1. We will be offering enhancements to the catalog while supporting Summit borrowing without interruption. New features include:

The addition of the 110 million book/media records from OCLCs WorldCat to those discoverable through Summit.

Access to about 50 million articles from OCLC databases such as ArticleFirst, British Library Serials, PubMed, and ERIC, through Summit.

An improved user interface with spelling assistance; book covers; post-search filters such as author, format, date, audience, language and topic; improved relevance ranking, syndication/tagging with online services like Google, Amazon and Facebook; citation creation tools and book reviews.

You can learn more about the new version of Summit at: http://orbiscascade.org/index/communication-kit

You can test a beta version of the new catalog at:
http://www.summit.worldcat.org/
(You cannot order materials through this test instance of the new catalog.)

When librarians build a search engine...

2008-11-10T16:23:00.000-08:00

I'm very curious to see what will come of Reference Extract, a web search engine "built for maximum credibility" that will weight results toward sites used heavily by libraries.

According to the article on Reference Extract in the Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus, "The idea is to cull and promote recommendations from tens of thousands of librarians around the world."

I think this could be phenomenally cool, or a complete disaster. It would be nice to see a good marriage of search engine algorithms and librarian knowledge, something that would leverage the abilities librarians have developed as we evaluate information and attempt to teach others to do the same. It would be nice to have access to a search engine that was not so easily leveraged to bring up results corporations want us to see.

On the other hand, it often seems to me that librarians are really excellent at gathering and organizing information but not always so good at making it easily accessible to non-librarians.

Good luck, Research Exchange. I hope you do very, very well.

I'd like to think this is true

2008-10-28T14:01:00.000-07:00

News about Google's $125 million settlement over Google Book Search can be found here:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10076948-2.html

The money information is interesting, but what I really loved was the last paragraph of the article:

"All public libraries in the United States will be offered a free online portal to Google's digitized collection, said Aiken, and patrons will be able to print an unlimited number of pages for a per page fee. Google will also be offering institutional subscriptions to colleges and universities. Google Book Search services available outside the United States will remain the same, Drummond said."

I hope it's true.

And I wonder if land grant institutions like mine couldn't get in there with the public libraries somehow...

CFP for graduate students

2008-10-24T10:37:00.000-07:00

This call for papers was sent to one of my many library listservs today, and I thought it might be of interest to graduate students in Anthropology.

October 16, 2008

CALL FOR PAPERS

Public Writing: A Cultural Studies Journal for Undergraduate Writers provides a lively and provocative online forum for undergraduate writers who are engaged in critique of contemporary, historical, public ideas.

Student writers from across the humanities and social sciences and around the world are invited to submit to Public Writing. A Public Writing submission may combine any of the following fields in an interdisciplinary manner: cultural theory, social theory, literary theory, cultural anthropology, linguistics, rhetoric studies, historical analysis, sociology, queer studies, disability studies, gender studies, philosophy or any other applicable field.

Public Writing’s open-access format allows writers to be exposed to a larger readership. The open-access movement in scholarly publishing provides a model whose essence is unlimited availability and use. As such, authors themselves—not publishers—retain copyright. Work published in Public Writing will be freely available on the Internet.

Submissions to this journal should be approximately 15-25 double-spaced pages in length. Please use MLA format only.

Please submit an electronic copy at http://scholarlyexchange.org/ojs/index.php/PW/index, or e-mail to public.writing@gmail.com. E-mailed submissions should also contain a separate document containing:

Author’s name
Title of manuscript
Mailing address
Affiliated institution
E-mail address
Phone number

All manuscripts that wish to be considered for Volume 1 must be submitted no later than January 1, 2009. Any manuscript received after this date will be considered for later volumes.

Public Writing is being published with the support of both the George Washington University and Gelman Library. The editorial group consists of students, faculty, and librarians from a number of universities and colleges. It is lead by Andrew Noel, junior major in American Studies from GWU, and Rachel Riedner, Assistant Professor of University Writing at GWU with the assistance of Cathy Eisenhower and Dolsy Smith from GW’s Gelman Library.

If Peeps can do it, so can we.

2008-10-16T10:42:00.001-07:00

You've seen them use the library, now see them vote!

Go look at Real Peeps Vote. You have to scroll down a bit to get to the images, but it's brilliant.

I am thinking of setting up tiny little Peeps polling places on my kitchen table this November and wondering about issues important to Peeps (anti-torture laws that include the prohibition of microwaving?). Also, who handles Peep voter registration...

And if Peeps can vote, you can, too.

A bit of Colbert for you

2008-10-12T18:01:00.000-07:00

Blatantly stolen from The Shifted Librarian because it is very funny.

Spin doctors

2008-10-08T08:46:00.000-07:00

As we approach November, politics are everywhere. I try not to use this site to espouse my own political views, but I believe strongly that voting is important, and informed voting is very important. So here is a brief post on some sites and resources that I use to keep informed during this season of spin.

LexisNexis Congressional: available to WSU students, staff, and faculty. This is a fantastically useful database for finding information on government information of all kinds. It will let you look up the history of bills and check voting records of individual members of congress.

FactCheck.org: A nonpartisan group that keeps an eye on what the major political figures are saying. They point out when candidates (Democrats and Republicans) provide inaccurate or misleading information. A handy resource if you are trying to process and understand candidate debates or if you're wondering about the truthfulness of a campaign ad.

Project Vote Smart: A group devoted to providing impartial information to voters. They provide a plethora of information on issues and candidates including voting records, interest group ratings, campaign finance information, and "political courage tests" where candidates share (or decide not to share) their positions on important issues. Also available is information by state.

Smart Voter: Provided by the League of Women Voters, this site offers nonpartisan information on federal, state, and local elections and contests. The site allows you to find information relevant to you by zip code or state, can help you find your polling place and provides information on how to register to vote. And it's not just for women, though more women should vote. Seriously.