Educause 2008 – Day 1

So I’m at my third (or is it fourth… I forget) Educause conference. Last year we were in lovely, gorgeous Seattle. As you might imagine, the city itself competed with the conference for my attention. This year we’re in Orlando, so not so much on that problem. The only upside about being in Orlando is the possiblity of seeing friends who live here tomorrow night. Not even the weather is much better than Boston.

(ETA this whole paragraph which I cannot believe I forgot. Long day much?)

The opening session speaker today was V.S. Ramachandran (official bio), a neurologist who talked about phantom limb pain and synesthesia. He’s a brilliant man and amazingly funny. He gave a TED talk last year, which was somewhat similar to today’s lecture.

After that great start-off, I struggled with session selection. The first couple I went to were on learning management systems, and we are so not at a place where anything the speakers were saying made sense to me. So instead I went and talked extensively with a few vendors about some of their products. Color me impressed with the second person I talked to at the Zimbra booth – he knew his stuff. The Google fellow was okay, but not as edgy or as hungry as the Zimbra people. That’s the problem with being the big guy – you don’t always know when someone is coming up from behind you, trying to knock you off your pedastel. Not that I think Zimbra will knock Google off of the bulk of their pedastels, but they do have some really compelling things about their product that I think many schools will find very attractive (*cough*integration with voice messaging*cough*). Spent some time talking with the Sharepoint LMS fellows too. It might just be me, but Sharepoint just doesn’t make sense to me yet. Perhaps it’s not having seen it used in any sort of situation… seems that it might be the issue.

The one session I went to today that really resonated with me was a session on student email and different ways of approaching it. There were large, medium, and small schools there (yay small schools!) and they took several approaches, from keeping it in-house to pushing it to the cloud via Google/Microsoft to using an open-source front-end to using a hosted open-source solution for everyone. The best moment of that session, though, had to be when the woman sitting next to me was working on her computer, which started in with a (very loud) loon wail that morphed into a yodel. (Note: those links are both to .au files, so don’t be that person who plays them in a conference session now, y’all.) Now I’m all about loon calls, having grown up on a lake in northern Minnesota with maybe a dozen mating pairs of loons. But in the middle of a session at Educause on student email solutions? It was hilarious, and the speaker handled it really well. Poor woman was embarrassed, as she should have been, but it definitely lightened the mood in the room.

I ran into several folks today who I wasn’t sure were coming: Mark C. and Janet S. from Bryn Mawr, Anne M. and Veronica B. from Wellesley (well, I knew they were coming, but still), and then I even met someone who worked at the University of Northern Iowa! We didn’t know each other when I was there, but he seemed like a nice guy and like he enjoys working there, so props to him. Still waiting to run into Pattie; reports are that she’s around.

The final thing I did today was go to the NITLE reception. I knew one person walking in there, and ended up meeting several other. That, of course, was the point. I enjoyed talking with John from Drake, Bryan Alexander, and Pamela from Occidental. Made a bit of a fool of myself with someone else, doing the whole, “I know you but I don’t know quite why I know you” spiel. Later it occured to me that he’s a former president of a national library association and his face was all over stuff several years ago. D’oh!

Tomorrow morning starts early, so I’m headed to bed now. Go Phillies, World Series 2008 Champions!

Refgrunt: Post-Thanksgiving Blahs

Seems that most of the questions folks asked today were kind of blah. I’ll chalk it up to the post-Thanksgiving blahs.

• stapler is out of staples
• need paper in printers
• i’m making liner notes for a CD and need to know how to punctuate something that goes at the end. i’ve got the dedication on some lines and then need to put a quote by someone who appears on the CD (but the quote isn’t on the recording). how do i punctuate that? looked it up in chicago manual of style 15th ed and decided that should have its own lines, author has own line, usually preceded by a dash, no quotation marks around quote, may be italicized by not necessary. (section 11.40).
• web page from antioch college isn’t printing correctly. help! we couldn’t select the text in IE so switched to firefox. tried to select text and print – page came out blank. so we just print-previewed and it looked like the text was all there. printed and it worked.
• where can I find data on immigrants in new york, boston, etc? american factfinder has category that is “foreign-born”.
• web page is cutting off words on right side of page when i try to print. found a “printer-friendly” icon and were able to successfully print.

Sorry for the missed day yesterday. Our road trip was going swimmingly well until we hit the MassPike. They don’t call us “Massholes” for no reason, I’ll tell you that. Forty miles of near-parking lot almost blew my gasket, but eventually we made it home, had dinner, and collapsed into bed. So now we have four cars in the driveway: the 2005 CR-V, the (new to us!) 1999 Subaru Outback, the 1995 hatchback Civic, and the Volvo sedan of unknown vintage. The last belongs to Amy’s brother and will be departing on Wednesday. I think we’ve got someone who may be able to make good use of the Civic. That will leave us with 2 cars – a somewhat more reasonable number for a 2-person, 2-dog household.

Refgrunt: The “But I looked there in the first place!” Edition

Monday-morning clean-up.

Brought out 3 boxes of paper, did all the recycling in the reference room, filled the printers with paper, found 2 boxes of toner to put in the spare-toner cabinet, and picked up all the books in the reference room and brought them to Circulation.

Student doing research paper on Egyptian and Moroccan war recruits in World War I was looking for British foreign documents from 1914-1919.

After a wild goose chase which involved me sending her to the stacks to find a book which would likely have a nice bibliography, I found a reference book that discussed most HMSO publications. And wouldn’t you know? The one we were looking for? We’d actually touched later years of it in the documents stacks. Somehow we both missed the fact that it went back in time and covered the years we wanted.

Since I don’t want to take credit for the blunder, I blame Rick Santorum for our oversight. (Long story, but thanks to Sam for that lovely little blaming tidbit.)

Was Wellesley Week published this week?

No.

What production is Shakespeare Society doing in the spring?

No idea, and it’s not on their web page. Best bet is to call them.

Several requests for MLA Handbook.

One request for tape dispenser and a single paper clip.

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After the reference shift, I had lunch with the art librarian (who I don’t see nearly enough of during the semester), barreled through email, and began writing a letter of nomination for an award. That took me to the end of the day.

Two more workdays this week and then it’s Thanksgiving! I’m looking forward to seeing family and friends, and to enduring not JUST flying and not JUST driving during the Thanksgiving weekend, but BOTH. Look at you, all green with envy. You’re jealous and I know it!

Refgrunt: A Busier Monday at the Reference Desk

This Monday was a lot busier than last Monday. I attribute this to two things:

1. We have classes tomorrow. Last week there were no classes on Tuesday because of the on-campus Tanner Conference.
2. A writing instructor with 2 sections (i.e. 30 students total) has set today as the due date for papers about Supreme Court cases.

With that, here are my questions from today’s 10 am – 1 pm desk shift:

• Checking to make sure in-text citations with EndNote/MLA were correct. (They are.)
• Which reference type to use in EndNote for Supreme Court case? (“Case.”)
• How do I download EndNote onto Vista? (Gave her directions on how to get to shared network space, helped download and install, found updated MLA style on Endnote website and installed for her.)
• Lawrence v. Texas – How can I find 2 of the 4 previous cases; not Supreme Court, but Court of Appeals and Harris County Criminal Court? (Lexis/Nexis worked for Court of Appeals. Made sure to add in “Garner” to narrow down search results.)
• Printer jam. (Worked my mojo and fixed it.)
• Fill the stapler please? (Filled.)
• Writing research paper on American legacy of “Crypto-Jews” or “Marranos” – Jews who converted outwardly to Catholicism during Spanish Inquisition; needs lots of info. (In Academic Search Premier found several books via book reviews; in library catalog used subject heading “marranos” and found 6 likely-looking books; in Sociological Abstracts found several recent and older articles.)
• During that previous question:Printer jam – twice. (Worked mojo again. Apparently mojo doesn’t stick.)
  Computer’s not working. (Plugged it back in. Plugs get kicked out often because of location.)
• How do I cite a Supreme Court oral argument using MLA style? (Possible answer: Speaker’s name. “Title of oral argument.” Oral argument. Supreme Court of the United States. Date. – emailed professor to confirm that this is what she expects. She emails back and says to take out speaker’s name. What do I know about Supreme Court oral arguments? Apparently not enough!)
• Which reference type should I use in EndNote for Supreme Court case? (“Case.”)
• Printer jam. (Mojo is draining fast.)
• Printer jam in other printer. (I have no mojo left.)

This was a much more interesting and fun Monday at the reference desk than last week. I’m always surprised at how it varies depending on the phase of the moon, whether the sky is partly-cloudy or partly-sunny, and if the swan living on the lake decided to chase geese that morning or not…

RefGrunt #1

So I didn’t pick the best day of the week to show off my prowess at reference work, nor to highlight the fabulous questions students at MPOW ask.

Monday morning, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m. This Monday, the day before the Tanner Conference when 300+ students give presentations to the entire community on service learning work they’ve done. The day before classes don’t happen on a Tuesday. The day on which the fussy electric stapler generated the most reference questions…

At any rate, here we go – my 10-1 desk shift on 11/5/2007:

• to the ref desk now.
• recycling taken care of, printers filled with paper, electric stapler massaged back into working.
• endnote installation problems. read the directions, folks! when it says “drag this folder to your desktop” DO IT.
• ref room is filling up. there were only 2 students in here at 10, at 10:30 we’ve got 10 students. no questions yet.
• room’s getting busier. 9:40 classes finished a bit ago, 11:20 classes start soon.
• oooh. my first in-person request. for the stapler. sigh.
• stupid electric stapler. put out manual one. hopefully letting electric one sleep will make it happy.
• patrons print insane amounts of stuff at this library. we go through paper and toner like it’s nobody’s business.
• almost done with this reference shift and the only questions i’ve been asked have been about the electric stapler. mondays are hard @ ref.
• finished writing educause report and posted to IS and RIG conferences (message boards).
• to lunch then meeting about staffing then office hours. then finish some work and head home. 

I think maybe I’ll rethink doing RefGrunts on the other Mondays, in case they’re as sloooooooow as today was. Snooze-o-rama! We’ll see if my desk shift tomorrow is any more exciting. (It will be, trust me. Afternoon shifts always are.)