I show them ways to find what they are hunting. Sometimes I show them the library databases and the library catalog. I show them how to search to find “on topic” information. I show them subject searching in the library catalog. For example, if someone needs a book about William Shakespeare, they need to use the name as a subject, otherwise they will get all the books that contain his writings. If we use his name as a subject, then they get what other people had to say about his writing.

How is this related to digital resources? Some of the methods that I use to teach people lead them to digital resources. Databases contain digital resources. Library catalogs do, too.

I think we over-estimate people’s abilities to locate what they need. Most of the time, they do a quick look at Google and then think that is all there is. Google works for its purpose, but not to find specific information for a topic.

Oh yes, Wikipedia! It is a great starting point for many topics. Besides the encyclopedic materials, there are citations that can get people started toward the “right stuff.”

Reference is not dead, but those who want to kill it don’t appreciate what reference is all about! They do not understand or want to understand the “information needs” of the people who come into the library.

The book is arranged into 3 books, or sections. The first section is devoted to his travels around the Great Wall. He talks to people every where he goes and finds out a lot of the history of the Great Wall. The only historians for the wall are self-educated peasants who value the history of the Wall(s).

In the second section, he lives part-time in a village and gets to know the people there. Some valuable insights evolve about Chinese people as he tells us about his friends (and some who are not friends) in the village. He becomes observes and becomes involved in the village life. I learned a lot about education, culture, etc. in this section.

The third section is about the factories and the people in the Development Zone. He befriends some of the workers in the factory and the factory owners. While I didn’t think this section would be as good as the other 2, it held some surprises for me. The Chinese attitudes toward work and business were interesting.

I found some of my conceptions about China to be confirmed, but yet my impressions changed as I became acquainted with the characters in this book.

It is a fascinating read. I highly recommend it.

In our department, we tried several methods to upload them. Student workers checked to see if they were already cataloged and adding 856 fields with URLs. We tried dumping in the entire batch filtered for our library. We tried variations on the same idea. We still weren’t satisfied.

When I got to be in charge of the department, I experimented some more and now have a different variation. I filter the records at Dataminer by our depository number and then download the batch. Since some of the links include records to the GPO catalog, but not to the digital item, I don’t want to include those records. I use MarcEdit to make batch changes to the entire bunch and then upload them into our OPAC. It is not quite that simple, but it is not that difficult either. It takes some tweeking of the records and of the holdings codes, and I am done.

I used a similar process to batch load e-journals and ERIC records. I may write about them another day. Hope this jogs someone into thinking about a better way than I am now using and that they let me know. Until then, it is the best that I have come up with.

So back to the other issue, having the resources to get to my projects. I came back after Memorial Day and my week vacation to discover that I had virtually no workers at all. One worker who had agreed to work found the opportunity to more hours in her home department. That left me with one worker who wanted to work one hour a day! So I dug through the very few applications. Most of the applicants had another campus job and only wanted another hour or so, here or there. No real help for me there! I did see one promising applicant, who informed me that she had just decided to take a job at a summer camp. Lucky me, I now had one worker could give me one hour per day. Since my assistant is out having major surgery, not enough workers!

Fortunately, things have a way of turning out OK. The original worker didn’t get the expected hours, after all, so I now have some excellent help. Wish I could steal her, but that’s not likely.

As I said, things have a way of righting themselves, today one of my academic school year workers walked in wanting to have some hours to work! YEA!! A trained worker!! So now we can, at least, climb out from under the never ending mail! I actually started thinking about emptying those 2 file cabinets again!

If you have never worked in Serials, you will not realize the differences from other departments in processing, shelving, etc. in this ongoing, continuing environment. Part of the reason I love it! Serials never stop coming as long as we subscribe. It is not like a book that you order and boom, it’s here. That’s about it. Well not really, but my point being that if you get a weekly serial, you get it every week, whether you are there or not! If the publisher forgets to send, if the mail doesn’t deliver, if it gets sent to the wrong department, we try to figure out how come! We claim issues that don’t show up on schedule. We place them on the shelves and then go pick them up when people use them. It is an ongoing cycle.

The fun of serials is that they do change from time to time. That weekly periodical may decide to save money and only publish every other week. It may decide to change size, by that I mean taller, shorter, etc. It may change to a new name or simply add something to its name. For example, Businessweek, a long time standard added the words Bloomberg to the beginning of their masthead and title. Fun times in the serials world. Do we reshelve? Does it need new records? How do we explain it to our novice workers.

Seems I went off in another direction from whence I started. I think I am working in the right area, Serials. Once you think everything is going one direction, off we go! Yes, there is a lot more to talk about.

I have been on vacation and tomorrow is back to work again. The Spring semester is over and Graduation is finished. My assistant is off due to surgery and I am not sure if I will have a student helper when I get back. (It was up in the air last week–student was trying for a better paying job! Can’t say that I blame her, but we do have some unofficial perks that the “private sector” does not, like understanding when there are exams to be taken or that a visit home is past due.)
Why am I writing about all this? Because it is a good time to review procedures and to identify what needs to be done and how it should be done. One of those steps we forget about as we slog along every day and don’t consider there might be better, or more efficient ways to accomplish our tasks. Also, maybe some of the tasks we are doing, don’t need to be done. Hmmmm….

I think more of the work flow can be accomplished by student workers and I intend to point more of the work their direction. We have bright students and they are capable of doing more than we sometimes expect them to do. So, tomorrow, I intend to begin rewriting the procedures!

It’s funny how each SLIS class has impacted me. It truly was a growth experience. I don’t intend to stop growing! Right now, I am experimenting with Twitter for library promotion. This summer, I worked on our library web page. I made some progress. It is good to have access again to the materials that are posted. I wish that I could upload the finished pages to the website, instead of having to edit them through the CMS (Content Management System). It is tedious to recreate html links and to have to explain to non-librarians where changes need to be made, and why. If your library allows more access to the finished product, you are lucky indeed. Unfortunately, those who are in control, do not realize that libraries have changed and “are not their father’s libraries.” Digital management is so important to library success!

I am back playing with Facebook, but it is more a personal project, much like my genealogy work. Yet nothing is a stand alone product. We are all products of all our efforts and insights. We don’t always realize it, but it is better when we do.