Great googly moogly, school starts next week! How'd that happen?
Upping the googly and amplifying the moogly, of course, is this week's coterie of workshops, activities, and meetings, on top of the usual workload. Fair warning: By Friday's vlog, I may somewhat resemble Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos.
What can I say? It runs in the family.
Drop by tomorrow for free lemonade and stuff! We'll be handing it out for Arrival Day, and the forecast is that it'll be hot. We're here to help you cool off!
Today, we get to the fun stuff! What changed between May and August?
A lot.
New computer stuff
Really, only one thing is new, and the other thing is new ... ish. I told you about the printing system change last week -- that's the new thing, along with our brand-spanking printers, the Brothers. That's what I call them, mostly because that's what brand they are. I am, probably, more excited about the fact that we've gotten new printers than anything else. We've been using a different brand for a while, and they seem to have a tendency to jam up, especially when a given printer receives a large (2 or more, that is) number of jobs. This leads to frustration for the people who just want their paper printed out so they can go to class and tore-up hands for the librarians who have to figure out how to liberate a stubborn piece of standard letter-size. The Brothers come with a long list of positive reviews, especially handling large volumes of printing, and that, coupled with the more orderly job-release system we've implemented, should lead to a lot of easier lives and lower blood pressure all around. This is a Good Thing.
The second new thing -- ish -- is Windows 7. At long last, our public computers have been updated to Microsoft's newest operating system, just in time for the Fall semester! Granted, this probably sounds pretty cosmetic, but you'll appreciate it more if you've ever used one of our computers and had to wait five minutes or more for it to be ready to use. Windows XP appears to have been the wrench in the works in that case; when a student logs on with their username and password, the system automatically creates a profile on that computer. This profile doesn't actually hold any information, but it still exists in its own block of memory, and when profiles accumulate, the computer's memory becomes occupied, and things slow right down. We've had to have ITS technicians come in every few months and delete the accumulated profiles off of each computer, which is a significant inconvenience for the Library, ITS, and our users. Windows 7 should fix that and speed things up a little, so we're looking forward to it!
New Web site design
We redesigned our Web site -- library.gallaudet.edu -- this summer. Finding important information on the old site wasn't too easy because the layout was fairly spread out, leading to lots of scrolling and hunting. This time, everything that belongs together is now together, and it's all been compressed, so there should be less effort to find what you need. Also, we placed greater emphasis on searching our catalog so people who are just looking for a book or film can get right to it. We also gave news greater priority -- it now occupies the entire middle column, starting with short announcements at the top, recent blog posts in the middle, and longer news at the bottom, which will be updated less frequently. In general, we're just trying to make it easier for folks to find out what's changed or been added since the last time they were here.
More space
We've given our DVDs more breathing room, for a start. The Deaf DVDs are growing very quickly, partly because our terrific Deaf Collection Librarian, Diana Gates, is doing a good job sniffing out hard-to-find films that incorporate deaf characters, deaf themes, or education about deaf-related topics. The other part is, of course, the conversion of our VHS collection to DVD -- many older deaf films that have either passed out of copyright or were produced at Gallaudet are being transferred to DVD for purposes of preservation and clarity. In addition to that, VHS tape degrades shockingly quickly, especially considering how much use they get here, so where possible, damaged copies are being replaced with DVD versions. DVDs also take up less space than VHS, so that's one major consideration.
Our General DVD collection is also growing, albeit more slowly (we are an academic library, after all, so the main growth is occurring in documentaries closely tied to the curriculum), so that, coupled with the Deaf DVD collection, means we decided to split them up. They used to share a single shelf unit, Deaf on one side and General on the other. Now they each occupy their own, which gives us room to grow!
Also, Jane Rutherford's been slaving over our periodical collection all summer. She took on a herculean task, sorting through a few hundred subscriptions, figuring out which records needed to be updated, which had ancient issues that needed to be discarded, which subscriptions needed to be canceled, and coming to each of the other librarians in turn to get our decisions on titles in our fields. Poor Jane -- I think most of us started dreading the sight of her coming our way! In general, she chose to devote her time to accelerating a project that's always going on, but which she decided she'd like to see finished before her retirement. This leads us to ...
Jane Rutherford's retirement
We did a whole blog post about that one. I'm still sad. We've got Elizabeth Henry now, so we're doing fine, but as wonderful as Elizabeth is, Jane isn't replaceable. Her last day at work will be this Friday; time's running out to drop by, shake her hand, and wish her well!
LibGuides tutorial
We also made a video tutorial on the basics of using and navigating a LibGuide; it's available on libguides.gallaudet.edu. Granted, the quality isn't great -- that's partly because the only way we could get it onto the page was through YouTube, which compresses it considerably. Still, you will be able to see the basic information (especially if you view it in fullscreen mode), and the captions are pretty clear! We're working on a better solution, though, so hang in there.
The blog
Well ... you've seen it. It's all part of our drive toward better communication with the community we serve, which involves making blog posts more focused and readable, adding vlogs so you get to see the people here (but mostly me, because it turns out I secretly dig being in front of a camera -- who knew?), and making announcements easier to get to.
New catalog ... which is actually pending
Sort of. The Consortium has been looking for new solutions for our patrons, which have thus far tended to involve combining books and articles into a single search. This means you'll be able to find both in our catalog, so if you're looking for something that would appear in Ebsco or ProQuest or other databases, but are not sure where to look, you might be able to use our catalog to get there. It'll make everyone's lives much easier. In the meantime, we're still looking and figuring out how to put the pieces together. You'll get more information on that in a couple months.
That wraps up our What You Need to Know series for this year. We'll end the week on Friday with another book review vlog, and next week will see a few announcements. In the meantime, orientation week is happening all around us, and classes begin next week! If you're starting out at Gallaudet, welcome! If you're returning after last year, welcome back!
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
What you need to know: Part 2
Before we start, an announcement (I know this breaks the rule of only one big thing per post, but hey, I'm flexible): The Library has changed its printing system.
For various reasons, we decided to adopt the printing policy in effect at other computer labs on campus both to save paper and reduce printing jams that can occur when a large number of people try to use the same printer at once, saving everyone time and money! This means that if you use our public computers to print something, you'll have to abide by the same rules that you do elsewhere: 5,000 pages for printing per semester. Anything you print out at another lab using this policy -- like the Harkin Digital Lab in the Student Academic Center -- will count toward this total. Here's what you do if you want to print something out:
The default is still duplex -- two-sided -- printing, both to save you money and to Save The Trees. You can change this if you need to; if you find yourself struggling to find that setting, ask at the Service Desk and the person working there will gladly help you!
Now, on with the main thing: This past year's Questions of the Week. Without further ado, here are all the questions that have been asked since last September, organized by category.
Collection
What do we do with donations?
How to use an e-book
What's the Deaf Copy 1 room for?
What happens to damaged films?
When do we get new books?
Equipment
What happened to the stapler?
What's up with the printers?
Does the library have videophones?
What do I do if the printer jams?
Catalog
In the catalog, what does 'electronic resource' mean?
What is ALADIN Mobile?
Policy and Services
Why would I be asked for my ID if I were just using a computer?
Faculty member wants to know about testing in the Library
Can I use the Gallaudet University Library if I'm not affiliated?
Why is there a time limit on reserves?
What do I do if I lose a DVD case but not the disc?
Can the library help me show films in public without violating copyright?
Why would my loan period only be 1 week?
What are my summer program borrowing privileges?
Building
Thanksgiving holiday hours
Is the Library open during the holiday break and why did my account expire?
How do I get a job at the Library?
Can you install better lighting?
Why are you open over Spring Break?
Are you open during the summer?
Because I'm weird
Why do you capitalize book titles the way you do?
How long does it take to change a book display?
As a great American luminary once said, Th-th-th-that's all, folks!
For various reasons, we decided to adopt the printing policy in effect at other computer labs on campus both to save paper and reduce printing jams that can occur when a large number of people try to use the same printer at once, saving everyone time and money! This means that if you use our public computers to print something, you'll have to abide by the same rules that you do elsewhere: 5,000 pages for printing per semester. Anything you print out at another lab using this policy -- like the Harkin Digital Lab in the Student Academic Center -- will count toward this total. Here's what you do if you want to print something out:
- Do everything as you would normally:
- Click "Print."
- Select Printer 1 or Printer 2.
- Click "OK."
- Then go to our printer workstation. It's on the counter by the copiers.
- Log in.
- Find your job on the list.
- Click "Print." This will release the job to whichever printer you picked.
- Then click "Done."
- Pick up the product.
The default is still duplex -- two-sided -- printing, both to save you money and to Save The Trees. You can change this if you need to; if you find yourself struggling to find that setting, ask at the Service Desk and the person working there will gladly help you!
Now, on with the main thing: This past year's Questions of the Week. Without further ado, here are all the questions that have been asked since last September, organized by category.
Collection
What do we do with donations?
How to use an e-book
What's the Deaf Copy 1 room for?
What happens to damaged films?
When do we get new books?
Equipment
What happened to the stapler?
What's up with the printers?
Does the library have videophones?
What do I do if the printer jams?
Catalog
In the catalog, what does 'electronic resource' mean?
What is ALADIN Mobile?
Policy and Services
Why would I be asked for my ID if I were just using a computer?
Faculty member wants to know about testing in the Library
Can I use the Gallaudet University Library if I'm not affiliated?
Why is there a time limit on reserves?
What do I do if I lose a DVD case but not the disc?
Can the library help me show films in public without violating copyright?
Why would my loan period only be 1 week?
What are my summer program borrowing privileges?
Building
Thanksgiving holiday hours
Is the Library open during the holiday break and why did my account expire?
How do I get a job at the Library?
Can you install better lighting?
Why are you open over Spring Break?
Are you open during the summer?
Because I'm weird
Why do you capitalize book titles the way you do?
How long does it take to change a book display?
As a great American luminary once said, Th-th-th-that's all, folks!
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Review: The Genius of America
Book review time!
No, I don't plan to do every book review as a vlog. A little vlog goes a long way in my opinion, exactly as gasoline doesn't.
Anyway, I read The Genius of America: How the Constitution Saved America -- and Why it Can Again by Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes.
The uber-long title kind of explains it all. The first half of the book goes into the first 11 years of the United States, the period between 1776 and 1787 when we were governed by the Articles of Confederation, the struggles of the Constitution drafters, and how the Constitution has worked, been amended, and undermined over the last couple of centuries.
The U.S. had declared independence from Britain in 1776 and was humming its way through the war until it ended in 1783 with the Treaty of Paris. Everyone thought things were peachy. Unfortunately, they weren't. It didn't take long until the Articles of Confederation -- based on the idea of each state as a sovereign power, loosely federated with the others under an incredibly weak national government -- began to show some serious problems. The problem, as the framers saw it, was that the Articles were written based on an assumption of "public virtue." This was the idea that people would, on their own, look out for the good of society as a whole over their own self-interest.
The states, being human constructs made up of human beings -- which are self-interested creatures on general principle -- immediately fell to squabbling and jockeying for power, wealth and territory among themselves. The federal government, limited as it was by the Articles of Confederation, couldn't do much, and so it began to look as though the new United States was about to fall apart only a decade after its founding. A Constitutional Convention was called, and the writers of the Declaration of Independence and delegates from the states attended, one hot summer in Philadelphia.
Long story short, it took the entire summer for the Convention attendees to agree on the basic points of federal governance in relation to the states. James Madison, commonly considered the father of the Constitution, proposed what became known as the Virginia Plan (he was a Virginia delegate) -- a three-part government, with a very powerful executive who would have actually been a monarch. It sounds funny today, but some of those delegates were seriously considering the possibility that the best thing to do would be to return to governance by royalty. With some obvious adjustments to weaken the executive and turn the legislative branch into a two-house Congress defined by differing metrics, that plan became the Constitution and is the government we know today.
The interesting thing is that the system those attendees set up and enshrined in our founding document is completely different from the Articles of Confederation. The Articles assumed that people would do what was good for society; the Constitution assumed the exact opposite and created a whole new governmental system based on people's self-interest. In this system, nobody would get their way; they'd be forced to go through a strenuous legislation process in order to buy time to deliberate, argue, and compromise. In fact, compromise -- what often seems to be the "C" word these days in our polarized politics -- is the foundation of the system. Even if both houses of Congress pass a piece of legislation, it still has to avoid a presidential veto. If it manages to squeak through that, it could still be challenged -- and struck down -- by the Supreme Court.
In other words, the system created ample opportunity to tweak. And that's why the system's survived so well for so long. It survived the Civil War, which is the closest our country has ever come to fracturing completely and permanently; it survived the Great Depression, which could have killed the country altogether, regardless of any unifying sensibility, if it hadn't been for an executive who was willing to do what it took to get the country back on its feet; it survived Richard Nixon, who claimed the Supreme Court couldn't subpoena his documents because it had no authority over the President, but eventually capitulated and resigned.
It's flexible because of that exact thing everyone hates: Congress. Passing things through Congress and forcing consensus through compromise is what makes the government work.
Unfortunately, our Congresscritters refuse to compromise these days, so things are locked up, the deficit and debt are ballooning, important programs are being cut, and people are beginning to say that maybe it's time to throw the Constitution out with the bathwater.
One manifestation of this inclination in recent years is the initiative-and-referendum process, which was discussed in a part of the book I reached the day Proposition 8 was declared unconstitutional -- a miracle of good timing, as it turned out. The process was introduced into the California Constitution in the 1920s, then forgotten until the 1970s when, angered by the fact that they had to pay taxes, the Californian people revived it. Essentially, what this process does is allow initiatives to be introduced on the state ballot if those initiatives gather enough signatures in support. Then, on Election Day, the initiative is subjected to a referendum, and if the majority of people who vote that day vote "Yes" on it, it becomes law. The state constitution can be amended this way -- by the direct voice of the people. It's called direct democracy, and it's something the founding fathers wanted to avoid.
This is how Proposition 8, a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, was passed in 2008. This is a classic illustration of why the founding fathers built the system the way they did: they wanted to avoid tyranny, whether by the majority or a vocal minority. The system is designed to prevent a group's rights from being taken away by another group. If same-sex marriage must be banned, it should be done through the usual legislative process so that a consensus can be achieved through compromise. At this point, as far as Proposition 8 is concerned, it's now up to the courts.
In general, the authors are saying that people are growing frustrated with the government pretty much because they've started expecting way too much from it. Every time something bad happens, they expect the government to intervene, regardless of whether or not it actually has a Constitutional mandate to do so. Part of this stems from the social programs that were established in the New Deal, like Social Security; people just sort of got used to the idea that the government should take care of them. The rest stems from the fact that the part of the system that can meet specific needs is nearly unable to do so because of the lack of compromise in Congress.
In general, according to the authors, the government has never been, and never will be, able to meet every single demand. As I've said elsewhere, it was in fact designed to do the opposite: to frustrate those demands and force people to give up some of them in exchange for the rest. The authors state a few times that the two branches of government elected by the people -- the executive and legislative branches -- tend to reflect society as a whole. When a refusal to compromise occurs on all sides, things stop working, and it takes some willingness to sacrifice to get things going again.
I think it's a fantastic book and should be required reading for everyone, especially if you didn't pay attention in your Civics or American Government classes in high school. It lends a new perspective on our political system regardless of your actual party affiliation, and you start to see the hallmarks of the Constitution everywhere, in a gridlocked Congress and in court decisions, in federal silence and presidential statements on controversial mosques. You learn to be amazed by our system, and that's as it should be. Highly, highly recommended.
No, I don't plan to do every book review as a vlog. A little vlog goes a long way in my opinion, exactly as gasoline doesn't.
Anyway, I read The Genius of America: How the Constitution Saved America -- and Why it Can Again by Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes.
The uber-long title kind of explains it all. The first half of the book goes into the first 11 years of the United States, the period between 1776 and 1787 when we were governed by the Articles of Confederation, the struggles of the Constitution drafters, and how the Constitution has worked, been amended, and undermined over the last couple of centuries.
The U.S. had declared independence from Britain in 1776 and was humming its way through the war until it ended in 1783 with the Treaty of Paris. Everyone thought things were peachy. Unfortunately, they weren't. It didn't take long until the Articles of Confederation -- based on the idea of each state as a sovereign power, loosely federated with the others under an incredibly weak national government -- began to show some serious problems. The problem, as the framers saw it, was that the Articles were written based on an assumption of "public virtue." This was the idea that people would, on their own, look out for the good of society as a whole over their own self-interest.
The states, being human constructs made up of human beings -- which are self-interested creatures on general principle -- immediately fell to squabbling and jockeying for power, wealth and territory among themselves. The federal government, limited as it was by the Articles of Confederation, couldn't do much, and so it began to look as though the new United States was about to fall apart only a decade after its founding. A Constitutional Convention was called, and the writers of the Declaration of Independence and delegates from the states attended, one hot summer in Philadelphia.
Long story short, it took the entire summer for the Convention attendees to agree on the basic points of federal governance in relation to the states. James Madison, commonly considered the father of the Constitution, proposed what became known as the Virginia Plan (he was a Virginia delegate) -- a three-part government, with a very powerful executive who would have actually been a monarch. It sounds funny today, but some of those delegates were seriously considering the possibility that the best thing to do would be to return to governance by royalty. With some obvious adjustments to weaken the executive and turn the legislative branch into a two-house Congress defined by differing metrics, that plan became the Constitution and is the government we know today.
The interesting thing is that the system those attendees set up and enshrined in our founding document is completely different from the Articles of Confederation. The Articles assumed that people would do what was good for society; the Constitution assumed the exact opposite and created a whole new governmental system based on people's self-interest. In this system, nobody would get their way; they'd be forced to go through a strenuous legislation process in order to buy time to deliberate, argue, and compromise. In fact, compromise -- what often seems to be the "C" word these days in our polarized politics -- is the foundation of the system. Even if both houses of Congress pass a piece of legislation, it still has to avoid a presidential veto. If it manages to squeak through that, it could still be challenged -- and struck down -- by the Supreme Court.
In other words, the system created ample opportunity to tweak. And that's why the system's survived so well for so long. It survived the Civil War, which is the closest our country has ever come to fracturing completely and permanently; it survived the Great Depression, which could have killed the country altogether, regardless of any unifying sensibility, if it hadn't been for an executive who was willing to do what it took to get the country back on its feet; it survived Richard Nixon, who claimed the Supreme Court couldn't subpoena his documents because it had no authority over the President, but eventually capitulated and resigned.
It's flexible because of that exact thing everyone hates: Congress. Passing things through Congress and forcing consensus through compromise is what makes the government work.
Unfortunately, our Congresscritters refuse to compromise these days, so things are locked up, the deficit and debt are ballooning, important programs are being cut, and people are beginning to say that maybe it's time to throw the Constitution out with the bathwater.
One manifestation of this inclination in recent years is the initiative-and-referendum process, which was discussed in a part of the book I reached the day Proposition 8 was declared unconstitutional -- a miracle of good timing, as it turned out. The process was introduced into the California Constitution in the 1920s, then forgotten until the 1970s when, angered by the fact that they had to pay taxes, the Californian people revived it. Essentially, what this process does is allow initiatives to be introduced on the state ballot if those initiatives gather enough signatures in support. Then, on Election Day, the initiative is subjected to a referendum, and if the majority of people who vote that day vote "Yes" on it, it becomes law. The state constitution can be amended this way -- by the direct voice of the people. It's called direct democracy, and it's something the founding fathers wanted to avoid.
This is how Proposition 8, a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, was passed in 2008. This is a classic illustration of why the founding fathers built the system the way they did: they wanted to avoid tyranny, whether by the majority or a vocal minority. The system is designed to prevent a group's rights from being taken away by another group. If same-sex marriage must be banned, it should be done through the usual legislative process so that a consensus can be achieved through compromise. At this point, as far as Proposition 8 is concerned, it's now up to the courts.
In general, the authors are saying that people are growing frustrated with the government pretty much because they've started expecting way too much from it. Every time something bad happens, they expect the government to intervene, regardless of whether or not it actually has a Constitutional mandate to do so. Part of this stems from the social programs that were established in the New Deal, like Social Security; people just sort of got used to the idea that the government should take care of them. The rest stems from the fact that the part of the system that can meet specific needs is nearly unable to do so because of the lack of compromise in Congress.
In general, according to the authors, the government has never been, and never will be, able to meet every single demand. As I've said elsewhere, it was in fact designed to do the opposite: to frustrate those demands and force people to give up some of them in exchange for the rest. The authors state a few times that the two branches of government elected by the people -- the executive and legislative branches -- tend to reflect society as a whole. When a refusal to compromise occurs on all sides, things stop working, and it takes some willingness to sacrifice to get things going again.
I think it's a fantastic book and should be required reading for everyone, especially if you didn't pay attention in your Civics or American Government classes in high school. It lends a new perspective on our political system regardless of your actual party affiliation, and you start to see the hallmarks of the Constitution everywhere, in a gridlocked Congress and in court decisions, in federal silence and presidential statements on controversial mosques. You learn to be amazed by our system, and that's as it should be. Highly, highly recommended.
Friday, August 13, 2010
What you need to know: Part 1 (Fall 2010)
See, I told you. There'll still be text posts. Welcome to the first of this year's posts about important information about the Library you'll need to know!
First, I want to refer you to last year's posts, some of which are outdated, and some of which are very outdated. However, there's still plenty of useful information in them that will serve as an introduction to our Library. Here they are:
General Research
Research Paper Award, Dutch painters, baseball, and free stuff
If nothing else, this particular post explains why we're using a new format. Anyway, down at the bottom, I discuss some resources you can use freely for your research without having to pay for access. It's great as a supplement to what we have for you here, as well as a main source if you're not affiliated with Gallaudet and can't get into our databases.
Why does research take time?
What essentially passes for a "philosophical" meditation from me. It's really just me explaining to a proverbial Student that research isn't always as easy as it may seem sometimes and some of the reasons why.
Using databases for personal research
We really do encourage students, staff, and faculty to take advantage of our resources to the fullest; that includes not just schoolwork, but also important information that may affect other areas of your life. Our Library is an informational gold mine in comparison to the average schmo's experience; why use it so narrowly?
It's all about RefWorks
RefWorks is one of the most useful resources we have. It doesn't offer any information in and of itself, but it does offer a great way to manage all the information you dig up while you're researching. In this Q&A post, I go over the basics of RefWorks and explain why it's so good.
A word about searching
Basically, I sit you, Dear Reader, down, and outline the steps you need to take in order to research more efficiently and effectively. You'd be surprised how many people take a scattershot approach and just put in whatever search term sounds good, then say that there's no information available on the subject!
Specific aspects of our collection
Some words on the Little Paper Family
A recent uptick in research on the Little Paper Family (LPF) resulted in this post; what is it? Why does it exist? And how can you look at it? It's all explained in this post.
E-books: How do they work?
Any resemblance to recent works by the Insane Clown Posse are completely coincidental. However, I do explain our e-book collection and how you can use them. This is increasingly becoming a must; although our print collections are holding steady, we are expanding our electronic holdings.
Introduction to our e-books
As in: Dear Reader, meet e-book. E-book, meet Dear Reader. I sift through the catalog and dig up a few real gems in a variety of topics.
Exploring our e-journals
It can be easy to fall into the habit of thinking that our e-journals are mostly dry piles of academia in your field, but when you wander outside of the discipline you're focusing on, you can find much that's weird and wonderful!
What's hiding in our collection?
I wander the stacks and dig up a few fascinating and unusual books as an example of the sheer serendipity you can encounter while you're among the shelves.
Meet Credo, your new best friend
IN WHICH introductions are made between readers and Credo Reference. All joking aside, Credo really is a fantastic resource and should be relied upon for important historical context and a terrific method of sussing out interrelationships between people, ideas, and events. It's a database of hundreds of reference books in dozens of specialties and links them all together in a very useful way. I also offer some examples of when Credo is the perfect database to use and when it isn't.
A good way to make searching our catalog easier
In the adjustment period we underwent after switching to ALADIN Discovery, I wrote this post in order to help people use the built-in search-narrowing features. This is really one of Discovery's biggest advantages over our old catalog; it lets you limit your search to, for example, only items published in the last 10 years, or just films, or books written on specific topics by specific authors. Among other things.
That about covers it all for now. Next week, you can expect a couple of book-review vlogs (to make up for the lack) and a guide to the questions of the week that have been posted since last August. Since those are usually questions that come up at the Service Desk, keep a close eye; you might satisfy your burning curiosity about the Library!
First, I want to refer you to last year's posts, some of which are outdated, and some of which are very outdated. However, there's still plenty of useful information in them that will serve as an introduction to our Library. Here they are:
- What you need to know: Part 1
- Includes a FAQ post link, links to individual librarian profiles (although Jane Rutherford will be retiring right at the beginning of the Fall semester, she's still worth learning more about!), and a few sample review posts of various books and films we have here. As I said, outdated, but it should give you an idea of the kinds of items we do have. In addition, there's a link to a comprehensive overview of the equipment we have available for you, which is worth checking out.
- What you need to know: Part 2
- This post includes links to a comprehensive discussion about the nuts and bolts of (a) finding journal articles; and (b) what our electronic article databases are all about. After that is a long, comprehensive listing of the previous year's Questions of the Week (which we'll do next week).
- What you need to know: Part 3
- Essentially a more focused update on exactly what changed from May to September 2009. The 2010 version will be the week after next.
- What you need to know: Part 4
- This was a long discussion of our new ALADIN Discovery catalog. We're not changing that this year -- not much, anyway -- so if you're new and need to know how to use our catalog, read this.
General Research
Research Paper Award, Dutch painters, baseball, and free stuff
If nothing else, this particular post explains why we're using a new format. Anyway, down at the bottom, I discuss some resources you can use freely for your research without having to pay for access. It's great as a supplement to what we have for you here, as well as a main source if you're not affiliated with Gallaudet and can't get into our databases.
Why does research take time?
What essentially passes for a "philosophical" meditation from me. It's really just me explaining to a proverbial Student that research isn't always as easy as it may seem sometimes and some of the reasons why.
Using databases for personal research
We really do encourage students, staff, and faculty to take advantage of our resources to the fullest; that includes not just schoolwork, but also important information that may affect other areas of your life. Our Library is an informational gold mine in comparison to the average schmo's experience; why use it so narrowly?
It's all about RefWorks
RefWorks is one of the most useful resources we have. It doesn't offer any information in and of itself, but it does offer a great way to manage all the information you dig up while you're researching. In this Q&A post, I go over the basics of RefWorks and explain why it's so good.
A word about searching
Basically, I sit you, Dear Reader, down, and outline the steps you need to take in order to research more efficiently and effectively. You'd be surprised how many people take a scattershot approach and just put in whatever search term sounds good, then say that there's no information available on the subject!
Specific aspects of our collection
Some words on the Little Paper Family
A recent uptick in research on the Little Paper Family (LPF) resulted in this post; what is it? Why does it exist? And how can you look at it? It's all explained in this post.
E-books: How do they work?
Any resemblance to recent works by the Insane Clown Posse are completely coincidental. However, I do explain our e-book collection and how you can use them. This is increasingly becoming a must; although our print collections are holding steady, we are expanding our electronic holdings.
Introduction to our e-books
As in: Dear Reader, meet e-book. E-book, meet Dear Reader. I sift through the catalog and dig up a few real gems in a variety of topics.
Exploring our e-journals
It can be easy to fall into the habit of thinking that our e-journals are mostly dry piles of academia in your field, but when you wander outside of the discipline you're focusing on, you can find much that's weird and wonderful!
What's hiding in our collection?
I wander the stacks and dig up a few fascinating and unusual books as an example of the sheer serendipity you can encounter while you're among the shelves.
Meet Credo, your new best friend
IN WHICH introductions are made between readers and Credo Reference. All joking aside, Credo really is a fantastic resource and should be relied upon for important historical context and a terrific method of sussing out interrelationships between people, ideas, and events. It's a database of hundreds of reference books in dozens of specialties and links them all together in a very useful way. I also offer some examples of when Credo is the perfect database to use and when it isn't.
A good way to make searching our catalog easier
In the adjustment period we underwent after switching to ALADIN Discovery, I wrote this post in order to help people use the built-in search-narrowing features. This is really one of Discovery's biggest advantages over our old catalog; it lets you limit your search to, for example, only items published in the last 10 years, or just films, or books written on specific topics by specific authors. Among other things.
That about covers it all for now. Next week, you can expect a couple of book-review vlogs (to make up for the lack) and a guide to the questions of the week that have been posted since last August. Since those are usually questions that come up at the Service Desk, keep a close eye; you might satisfy your burning curiosity about the Library!
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Vlog interview with our newest librarian!
One thing I neglected to mention in my post last week was that while posts from here on out would be shorter, they'd also be more frequent. We're not sticking to a schedule, though -- some weeks will have more than others!
Here goes ...
Here goes ...
Friday, August 6, 2010
Friday, July 30, 2010
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Today's post will be relatively short, because we're combining the review, the main body of the post, and the question of the week into a single monstrous Frankensteinian hybrid post this week!
Before we begin: This blog will be undergoing a few changes over the next few weeks, so keep a close eye on library.gallaudet.edu for any updates that will clear things up. I can't say much more about it right now, but when you hit a weird post, that's why.
Today, it's all about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.
It was selected as the Common Reading for campus this year, so I read the book a couple of months ago. It sticks out in my mind mostly because of the story, which is fairly unbelievable.
For the past sixty years or so, there's been a single cell culture underpinning virtually every major advance in medical technology, from the improvement of lab equipment to the polio vaccine. This cell culture is known as HeLa, and it is immortal. Given enough nutrients, it will double its population of cells every 24 hours, forever.
Or at least it has for the past sixty years, with no signs of stopping any time soon. It's been estimated that close to 50 million metric tons of HeLa cells have grown over the past six decades, enough for 100 Empire State Buildings. This cell line is descended from a single sample of cervical cancer cells taken from an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks at Johns Hopkins University in 1951.
Unfortunately, almost nobody knew her name. Nobody knew who she was. Nobody knew she had a family, complete with a set of five children, some with hearing losses or outright deafness. The doctor who originally sampled her cells discovered their unique properties not long after she died, and gave them away. Some people took those cells, used them to learn how to mass-manufacture cell cultures, and sold more of those cells and made millions. Industries ranging from pharmaceuticals to cosmetic surgery grew from those cells, and they made first millions, then billions, for the people who started out by using those cells. Jonas Salk grew the polio vaccine in his own copies of those cells and saved millions of lives because of Henrietta Lacks, but nobody knew her name, and her family saw none of this money.
Her family didn't even know what their mother -- though long-dead -- was doing to the world until 20 years after she'd been buried, and even then, the truth only came out because they were unknowingly being used for medical research, a common theme in African-American history during the 20th Century.
Skloot weaves together a few strands in her exploration of the story of Henrietta Lacks, propelled in some ways by Henrietta's daughter, Deborah. She digs deep into the history of Henrietta's family, both ancestors and descendants; follows the path of the cells from Henrietta's womb to its first laboratory to its distribution around the country to the world we live in today; traces, in some ways, the history of the African-American community in the early part of the 20th Century; and explores many questions of medical ethics.
For example, Henrietta's cells were taken from her without her permission. They were distributed, used, manufactured, and sold without her family's knowledge or consent. Her name -- and thereby that of her family -- was revealed, again without any agreement on their part. Her descendants were sampled and experimented upon while being told a different story. The list of sins is lengthy.
In the face of all this, the reader has to ask the question: is all of this morally-questionable behavior justifiable in the light of all the good things that have resulted from Henrietta and her cells? As we move deeper into the 21st Century, the question of privacy becomes important, not just electronic but genetic. For example, if your appendix goes bad and you have it taken out, what happens to the appendix? Does it get thrown out, or is it kept because it's useful biological material? Is your name attached to it? Does that mean the DNA in your former appendix can be analyzed, your entire genome decoded, laid bare, and stored in a database so that complete strangers can know everything about you and your body?
The list of ethics questions that arise after you read this book is also lengthy, and it's chilling. Do you have the right to your own body parts after they've been detached from you?
In general, the book addresses a huge variety of issues, from race to God and back again. This is why the book was selected as the Common Reading; that Henrietta's descendants are also deaf brings a new dimension to our discussion and makes the book especially relevant for us here at Gallaudet University.
As the Common Reading this year, all First Year Experience students will be reading it, but several other departments are leaping into the fray as well, because The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks transgresses a large number of disciplinary boundaries in its quest for the truth. Because of the involvement of so many departments, it'll be a big fall semester!
A number of events are being planned, both for the Gallaudet campus community and for the outside community as well. I'll keep you posted on those as the schedules appear, but I hear there are fascinating activities on the docket, so keep an eye out. The Library will also make a LibGuide available about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and the various topics it touches upon; when it's completed, I'll let you all know!
Also, please bear in mind that this book is popular; the Library has two copies right now -- which is unusual for a non-deaf-related book -- and they've quite literally been checked out nonstop since the spring. Hopefully, we'll be able to catch one of our copies as it comes back in and place it on reserve so it's available for everyone to look at. If you're not familiar with where to find the reserve materials, ask at the Service Desk -- they're on the shelves behind it! Just remember: an item on reserve can only be checked out for 2 hours at a time, maximum, although it can be renewed if nobody else is asking for it. You also must stay in the Library while using it; we can't allow it to leave the building. This is how we guarantee it's available for everyone.
Truthfully, I'm excited; it's been a while since a book that wasn't Twilight was this popular, and this fall sounds awesome. I'm teaching an FYE class, and am looking forward to exploring all of its implications with my students and with other courses.
In the meantime, come back next week for another round of posts about what students and faculty -- both new and returning -- need to know!
Before we begin: This blog will be undergoing a few changes over the next few weeks, so keep a close eye on library.gallaudet.edu for any updates that will clear things up. I can't say much more about it right now, but when you hit a weird post, that's why.
Today, it's all about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.
It was selected as the Common Reading for campus this year, so I read the book a couple of months ago. It sticks out in my mind mostly because of the story, which is fairly unbelievable.
For the past sixty years or so, there's been a single cell culture underpinning virtually every major advance in medical technology, from the improvement of lab equipment to the polio vaccine. This cell culture is known as HeLa, and it is immortal. Given enough nutrients, it will double its population of cells every 24 hours, forever.
Or at least it has for the past sixty years, with no signs of stopping any time soon. It's been estimated that close to 50 million metric tons of HeLa cells have grown over the past six decades, enough for 100 Empire State Buildings. This cell line is descended from a single sample of cervical cancer cells taken from an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks at Johns Hopkins University in 1951.
Unfortunately, almost nobody knew her name. Nobody knew who she was. Nobody knew she had a family, complete with a set of five children, some with hearing losses or outright deafness. The doctor who originally sampled her cells discovered their unique properties not long after she died, and gave them away. Some people took those cells, used them to learn how to mass-manufacture cell cultures, and sold more of those cells and made millions. Industries ranging from pharmaceuticals to cosmetic surgery grew from those cells, and they made first millions, then billions, for the people who started out by using those cells. Jonas Salk grew the polio vaccine in his own copies of those cells and saved millions of lives because of Henrietta Lacks, but nobody knew her name, and her family saw none of this money.
Her family didn't even know what their mother -- though long-dead -- was doing to the world until 20 years after she'd been buried, and even then, the truth only came out because they were unknowingly being used for medical research, a common theme in African-American history during the 20th Century.
Skloot weaves together a few strands in her exploration of the story of Henrietta Lacks, propelled in some ways by Henrietta's daughter, Deborah. She digs deep into the history of Henrietta's family, both ancestors and descendants; follows the path of the cells from Henrietta's womb to its first laboratory to its distribution around the country to the world we live in today; traces, in some ways, the history of the African-American community in the early part of the 20th Century; and explores many questions of medical ethics.
For example, Henrietta's cells were taken from her without her permission. They were distributed, used, manufactured, and sold without her family's knowledge or consent. Her name -- and thereby that of her family -- was revealed, again without any agreement on their part. Her descendants were sampled and experimented upon while being told a different story. The list of sins is lengthy.
In the face of all this, the reader has to ask the question: is all of this morally-questionable behavior justifiable in the light of all the good things that have resulted from Henrietta and her cells? As we move deeper into the 21st Century, the question of privacy becomes important, not just electronic but genetic. For example, if your appendix goes bad and you have it taken out, what happens to the appendix? Does it get thrown out, or is it kept because it's useful biological material? Is your name attached to it? Does that mean the DNA in your former appendix can be analyzed, your entire genome decoded, laid bare, and stored in a database so that complete strangers can know everything about you and your body?
The list of ethics questions that arise after you read this book is also lengthy, and it's chilling. Do you have the right to your own body parts after they've been detached from you?
In general, the book addresses a huge variety of issues, from race to God and back again. This is why the book was selected as the Common Reading; that Henrietta's descendants are also deaf brings a new dimension to our discussion and makes the book especially relevant for us here at Gallaudet University.
As the Common Reading this year, all First Year Experience students will be reading it, but several other departments are leaping into the fray as well, because The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks transgresses a large number of disciplinary boundaries in its quest for the truth. Because of the involvement of so many departments, it'll be a big fall semester!
A number of events are being planned, both for the Gallaudet campus community and for the outside community as well. I'll keep you posted on those as the schedules appear, but I hear there are fascinating activities on the docket, so keep an eye out. The Library will also make a LibGuide available about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and the various topics it touches upon; when it's completed, I'll let you all know!
Also, please bear in mind that this book is popular; the Library has two copies right now -- which is unusual for a non-deaf-related book -- and they've quite literally been checked out nonstop since the spring. Hopefully, we'll be able to catch one of our copies as it comes back in and place it on reserve so it's available for everyone to look at. If you're not familiar with where to find the reserve materials, ask at the Service Desk -- they're on the shelves behind it! Just remember: an item on reserve can only be checked out for 2 hours at a time, maximum, although it can be renewed if nobody else is asking for it. You also must stay in the Library while using it; we can't allow it to leave the building. This is how we guarantee it's available for everyone.
Truthfully, I'm excited; it's been a while since a book that wasn't Twilight was this popular, and this fall sounds awesome. I'm teaching an FYE class, and am looking forward to exploring all of its implications with my students and with other courses.
In the meantime, come back next week for another round of posts about what students and faculty -- both new and returning -- need to know!
Thursday, July 22, 2010
New site and Jane Rutherford's retirement
Thursday post! Yay, jury duty.
Well, I made it back from vacation, and the building's still standing, the collection hasn't been pillaged, and the campus is still here! That's a good thing.
First, one (relatively) minor announcement: With the exception of a page or two, the redesign of library.gallaudet.edu has been completed! I'm feeling pretty good about it at the moment, but -- and this is a big but -- please do feel free to contact me with any feedback, whether through the comments here (which will be moderated, so watch your language if the new design really ticks you off) or through e-mail at james.mccarthy@gallaudet.edu or library.help@gallaudet.edu. The whole idea here is to make things a little more compact and easier to navigate, so it's really important that I hear from anyone who uses the site.
Now, for the books. I read a lot while I was gone, but you're only getting two books out of me -- one for each week. I need to have some stocked up, after all.
First, I read The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak. Hmm. I sort of have mixed feelings about this one. A friend recommended it and I was curious about the story, which involves a young woman who's born illegitimately to a Turkish woman in Istanbul in the 1980s. It sounds fairly simple, but there's a lot wrapped up in it. When it was published, for instance, it led to a pretty serious controversy in Turkey because the author -- who is herself a Turk -- makes the Turkish genocide of Armenians in the early 20th Century a significant factor in the plot. At its heart, it's a family story, revolving around two siblings, a brother and sister, and the children they raise in the U.S. and in Turkey, respectively, who meet for the first time in their twenties in Istanbul. It's a story of reconciliation -- the American cousin is half-Armenian -- and of closure, when a big family secret is discovered and resolved in fairly short order.
I have mixed feelings about it mostly because it wasn't really my kind of book. I really enjoyed the fantastically engrossing depictions of life in Turkey, especially when contrasted with life in America, but the plot itself, especially the big secret around which it revolves, left me a little cold. That's not to say it's not a good book -- it is, very well-written and enjoyable -- but it's just not my type.
Why write about it in this blog, then? Because I think of my weekly book reviews as just those: reviews. They aren't necessarily intended to be taken as recommendations; they're just a quick peek into what's available through the Gallaudet University Library. If I'm effusive in my praise, though, that's probably a good sign that you should consider picking it up!
The second book I read was The Infinities by John Banville. The story centers on Adam Godley, a brilliant astrophysicist who's discovered a set of equations that have completely changed science and the world's understanding of time. He's dying. His family has installed him in an upper room of the homestead and called everyone back to wait for the end with him. His son, also named Adam, is visiting with his beautiful-but-hollow actress wife Helen, and Petra, sister to the younger Adam and daughter to the elder, who suffers from a severe -- but unnamed -- psychological disorder. Petra in turn brings in Roddy, a young man who claims to be interested in her, but is actually after her father, trying to write his biography. They all stay in the house along with Ursula, the elder Adam's wife, who drinks her way through her grief.
Overseeing all of this -- and this is what makes this novel so much more interesting -- are the Greek gods. The book is narrated by Hermes, the messenger, as he watches over the family and muses about their various idiosyncrasies, while being dragooned into helping his father, Zeus, get into bed with Helen, with whom he has fallen in love. There's even one fascinating episode early in the book when Zeus visits Helen and orders Hermes to hold back the dawn for an hour, which he does, of course, choking roosters and smashing the goddess of the dawn in the face.
Hermes's perspective adds a lot of humor and wry irony to the proceedings, especially when another god shows up in mortal form: Pan, the god of the woods, wildness, and alcohol. Together, the three gods create plenty of mischief over the course of the last day of Adam Godley's life.
In general, it's beautifully-written and very absorbing.
Now, on with the show. Jane Rutherford, one of our Instruction & Reference Librarians, is retiring at the end of August. I feel like I should put a little sad-face emoticon right about here: :( We're all very curious about what she plans to do and what's going through her head at this point, so I talked with her a little bit about her new adventure.
1) Every time I ask someone who's retiring what they plan to do with their time, they tend to say things like, "Well, I'm going to get up at the same time every day and make my coffee just like I always do, except instead of going off to work, I'm going off to get the newspaper, and then I'm going to sit on the back porch. That's my retirement." But you're Jane! I bet you've got a plan. Is that so? Do you mind sharing what it is?
Well, my plan isn't set yet. I've been too busy working to think about it much. BUT ... a big part of my plan is to not have a big plan for a while. I'm going to give myself 4-6 months to do just what I want, when I want. I also want to get my house in order, literally (cleaning, painting, organizing). During that time, I want to research some of the things I am interested in doing, such as volunteering, traveling, etc. I'm actually afraid I may over-commit myself so when I DO have a plan, it will have to include some downtime to really relax.
2) Will you be sticking around the Washington area, or do you plan to move somewhere exotic, like Raleigh or Macon?
Or Wisconsin? Actually, I plan to stay exactly where I am. I live in Alexandria, just south of Old Town. I have a nice condo that is very accessible, both in location and in the amenities it has for people with limited mobility (which I don't need ... yet) and quite beautiful. Plus, I just don't want to move ever again! I hate moving (well, really I hate packing).
3) Lots of retirees have told me that when they left their jobs, they had one big, outlandish thing in mind that they'd always wanted to do, but never had the time for, totally separate from their general post-retirement plans. I've heard all sorts of things -- skydiving, shark-baiting, building their own house by hand, arranging their bookcases by color, going on a European tour -- so I'm curious: Do you have something like that on your to-do list?
I don't think all of these are "big" or "outlandish," and I don't have just one, but here are a few things I am considering and will research in the next few months:
4) Now we're going to shift to more Library-like things. You've been pretty busy this summer, getting a lot of things out of the way before you take off. Would you share some details about what you've been doing?
Well, one thing I just started recently was taking personal things home. My goodness, one accumulates a lot of stuff after 29+ years! I'm also getting things together to pass on to my library colleagues -- you know, work stuff.
I've been the library selector for education for many years now and I decided I wanted to clean out those books. I've withdrawn a very large number of books, a decent amount of which were well over 30 years old. That means that those left will be more useful, if only because they will be easier to find on the tidy shelves!
Finally (or maybe not if someone comes up with other projects), I've done a thorough inventory of the general periodical (journals, magazines, and newspapers) collection. With the expansion and popularity of electronic periodical access, the librarians have been steadily increasing our holdings of those products for quite a few years now. That means some of the paper and microfilm products have to go so we can reallocate more of our money to electronic. I've determined exactly what we have on the shelves (titles and years/volumes), collected data about those titles (how much they are used, if they are available electronically, past decisions made, which librarian should monitor them, etc.), and put all this in a spreadsheet so it will be easier to make decisions about periodicals in the future.
5) You've had a long, rich career at Gallaudet, spanning almost thirty years. Looking back, what's the one thing that sticks out in your mind the most?
Change.
6) What's something you might miss the most about working at the Gallaudet University Library?
There are a couple of things. First, the interaction with people, students and staff both. I tend to be an introvert, but when I start working with students, individually or in a classroom, my energy soars. Next, I will miss learning things. That is the best thing about being a librarian. New topics come up all the time, and I get to research them and learn things I would never have thought about. It's not that I won't learn new things, but it won't be as serendipitous as it is here at work.
7) And finally, you knew this question was inevitable: What brand of sensible shoes do you recommend?
I believe we all need to be stylish, so I vote for Jimmy Choo! Just kidding ... those might kill or maim me. Really though, I've yet to find shoes that are always sensible (for me that means comfortable), but as my body approaches middle- to late-middle age (this is not a typo), flats are always better and thick soles help cushion these bony feet! Not Birkenstocks!
All joking aside, we're all sad to see Jane go. She's done a lot for the Library and for Gallaudet in general, and it'll be very tough to replace her. By the same token, though, she's certainly earned her time off!
If you've worked with Jane before, please feel free to stop by the Library any time over the next month or so to wish her well!
No question of the week this week; I think this post is quite long enough -- don't you?
Well, I made it back from vacation, and the building's still standing, the collection hasn't been pillaged, and the campus is still here! That's a good thing.
First, one (relatively) minor announcement: With the exception of a page or two, the redesign of library.gallaudet.edu has been completed! I'm feeling pretty good about it at the moment, but -- and this is a big but -- please do feel free to contact me with any feedback, whether through the comments here (which will be moderated, so watch your language if the new design really ticks you off) or through e-mail at james.mccarthy@gallaudet.edu or library.help@gallaudet.edu. The whole idea here is to make things a little more compact and easier to navigate, so it's really important that I hear from anyone who uses the site.
Now, for the books. I read a lot while I was gone, but you're only getting two books out of me -- one for each week. I need to have some stocked up, after all.
First, I read The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak. Hmm. I sort of have mixed feelings about this one. A friend recommended it and I was curious about the story, which involves a young woman who's born illegitimately to a Turkish woman in Istanbul in the 1980s. It sounds fairly simple, but there's a lot wrapped up in it. When it was published, for instance, it led to a pretty serious controversy in Turkey because the author -- who is herself a Turk -- makes the Turkish genocide of Armenians in the early 20th Century a significant factor in the plot. At its heart, it's a family story, revolving around two siblings, a brother and sister, and the children they raise in the U.S. and in Turkey, respectively, who meet for the first time in their twenties in Istanbul. It's a story of reconciliation -- the American cousin is half-Armenian -- and of closure, when a big family secret is discovered and resolved in fairly short order.
I have mixed feelings about it mostly because it wasn't really my kind of book. I really enjoyed the fantastically engrossing depictions of life in Turkey, especially when contrasted with life in America, but the plot itself, especially the big secret around which it revolves, left me a little cold. That's not to say it's not a good book -- it is, very well-written and enjoyable -- but it's just not my type.
Why write about it in this blog, then? Because I think of my weekly book reviews as just those: reviews. They aren't necessarily intended to be taken as recommendations; they're just a quick peek into what's available through the Gallaudet University Library. If I'm effusive in my praise, though, that's probably a good sign that you should consider picking it up!
The second book I read was The Infinities by John Banville. The story centers on Adam Godley, a brilliant astrophysicist who's discovered a set of equations that have completely changed science and the world's understanding of time. He's dying. His family has installed him in an upper room of the homestead and called everyone back to wait for the end with him. His son, also named Adam, is visiting with his beautiful-but-hollow actress wife Helen, and Petra, sister to the younger Adam and daughter to the elder, who suffers from a severe -- but unnamed -- psychological disorder. Petra in turn brings in Roddy, a young man who claims to be interested in her, but is actually after her father, trying to write his biography. They all stay in the house along with Ursula, the elder Adam's wife, who drinks her way through her grief.
Overseeing all of this -- and this is what makes this novel so much more interesting -- are the Greek gods. The book is narrated by Hermes, the messenger, as he watches over the family and muses about their various idiosyncrasies, while being dragooned into helping his father, Zeus, get into bed with Helen, with whom he has fallen in love. There's even one fascinating episode early in the book when Zeus visits Helen and orders Hermes to hold back the dawn for an hour, which he does, of course, choking roosters and smashing the goddess of the dawn in the face.
Hermes's perspective adds a lot of humor and wry irony to the proceedings, especially when another god shows up in mortal form: Pan, the god of the woods, wildness, and alcohol. Together, the three gods create plenty of mischief over the course of the last day of Adam Godley's life.
In general, it's beautifully-written and very absorbing.
Now, on with the show. Jane Rutherford, one of our Instruction & Reference Librarians, is retiring at the end of August. I feel like I should put a little sad-face emoticon right about here: :( We're all very curious about what she plans to do and what's going through her head at this point, so I talked with her a little bit about her new adventure.
1) Every time I ask someone who's retiring what they plan to do with their time, they tend to say things like, "Well, I'm going to get up at the same time every day and make my coffee just like I always do, except instead of going off to work, I'm going off to get the newspaper, and then I'm going to sit on the back porch. That's my retirement." But you're Jane! I bet you've got a plan. Is that so? Do you mind sharing what it is?
Well, my plan isn't set yet. I've been too busy working to think about it much. BUT ... a big part of my plan is to not have a big plan for a while. I'm going to give myself 4-6 months to do just what I want, when I want. I also want to get my house in order, literally (cleaning, painting, organizing). During that time, I want to research some of the things I am interested in doing, such as volunteering, traveling, etc. I'm actually afraid I may over-commit myself so when I DO have a plan, it will have to include some downtime to really relax.
2) Will you be sticking around the Washington area, or do you plan to move somewhere exotic, like Raleigh or Macon?
Or Wisconsin? Actually, I plan to stay exactly where I am. I live in Alexandria, just south of Old Town. I have a nice condo that is very accessible, both in location and in the amenities it has for people with limited mobility (which I don't need ... yet) and quite beautiful. Plus, I just don't want to move ever again! I hate moving (well, really I hate packing).
3) Lots of retirees have told me that when they left their jobs, they had one big, outlandish thing in mind that they'd always wanted to do, but never had the time for, totally separate from their general post-retirement plans. I've heard all sorts of things -- skydiving, shark-baiting, building their own house by hand, arranging their bookcases by color, going on a European tour -- so I'm curious: Do you have something like that on your to-do list?
I don't think all of these are "big" or "outlandish," and I don't have just one, but here are a few things I am considering and will research in the next few months:
- taking tap dance and/or drum lessons (I love the thought of all the noise these two activities make!)
- holding babies. I did not have children of my own and just love cuddling babies. I am going to look around for opportunities to do that, locally and maybe even internationally!
- going to Africa. I'd like to try working with the orphanage in Zambia which my church supports and where a friend might be going for a year or so. Even though my time there would be limited, probably no more than a month, I admit this still makes me a little nervous -- so far, so exotic, so hard -- but I am truly considering it, maybe as soon as next summer.
4) Now we're going to shift to more Library-like things. You've been pretty busy this summer, getting a lot of things out of the way before you take off. Would you share some details about what you've been doing?
Well, one thing I just started recently was taking personal things home. My goodness, one accumulates a lot of stuff after 29+ years! I'm also getting things together to pass on to my library colleagues -- you know, work stuff.
I've been the library selector for education for many years now and I decided I wanted to clean out those books. I've withdrawn a very large number of books, a decent amount of which were well over 30 years old. That means that those left will be more useful, if only because they will be easier to find on the tidy shelves!
Finally (or maybe not if someone comes up with other projects), I've done a thorough inventory of the general periodical (journals, magazines, and newspapers) collection. With the expansion and popularity of electronic periodical access, the librarians have been steadily increasing our holdings of those products for quite a few years now. That means some of the paper and microfilm products have to go so we can reallocate more of our money to electronic. I've determined exactly what we have on the shelves (titles and years/volumes), collected data about those titles (how much they are used, if they are available electronically, past decisions made, which librarian should monitor them, etc.), and put all this in a spreadsheet so it will be easier to make decisions about periodicals in the future.
5) You've had a long, rich career at Gallaudet, spanning almost thirty years. Looking back, what's the one thing that sticks out in your mind the most?
Change.
- How the University has changed -- Deaf President Now, communication methods, FYS/GSR, the buildings (new ones, long-gone old ones), etc.
- How the Library has changed, not the building but the things we do here and the way we do them.
- How I have changed: When I started I was the Library Systems Analyst and I worked with mainframe computers, then minicomputers, then PCs. About 15 years ago, I switched from computers to people and became a reference and instruction librarian. That change recharged my energy and made it easier to work here happily for almost 30 years.
6) What's something you might miss the most about working at the Gallaudet University Library?
There are a couple of things. First, the interaction with people, students and staff both. I tend to be an introvert, but when I start working with students, individually or in a classroom, my energy soars. Next, I will miss learning things. That is the best thing about being a librarian. New topics come up all the time, and I get to research them and learn things I would never have thought about. It's not that I won't learn new things, but it won't be as serendipitous as it is here at work.
7) And finally, you knew this question was inevitable: What brand of sensible shoes do you recommend?
I believe we all need to be stylish, so I vote for Jimmy Choo! Just kidding ... those might kill or maim me. Really though, I've yet to find shoes that are always sensible (for me that means comfortable), but as my body approaches middle- to late-middle age (this is not a typo), flats are always better and thick soles help cushion these bony feet! Not Birkenstocks!
All joking aside, we're all sad to see Jane go. She's done a lot for the Library and for Gallaudet in general, and it'll be very tough to replace her. By the same token, though, she's certainly earned her time off!
If you've worked with Jane before, please feel free to stop by the Library any time over the next month or so to wish her well!
No question of the week this week; I think this post is quite long enough -- don't you?
Friday, July 9, 2010
What have I been up to?
"I'm a Florida boy."
I have to keep repeating that to myself. "I'm a Florida boy." Sometimes we all need reminders that things could be worse, although after the sweltering weather of this past week, I'm not sure how. We broke triple digits a few times in the last few days, and just when I start to think it's not so bad, the humidity hits. Climate change or good old-fashioned heat wave? Who can say?
In an effort to clear this question -- among many others related to the weather (chief among which is "WHY?") -- from my mind, I read Generation A by Douglas Coupland.
I've heard a lot of stuff about Coupland. Most of the hoity-toity literary blogs I follow have mentioned him from time to time and it's usually in a very positive light, so I figured he must be pretty close to unreadable.
Except it turns out that Coupland is actually really readable. Generation A is the story of five individuals distributed across the world -- New Zealand, India, France, the U.S., and Canada -- who get stung by bees.
Given that the novel is set in a near-future where bees have been extinct for several years, rendering almonds, apples, and other fruits of assisted pollination (pun intended), very, very expensive, this is a global event. Coupland does a terrific job sketching in a future that looks eerily consistent with our present; the first person to get stung is an Iowan corn farmer who has a live Web stream of himself in his combine as he destroys a cornfield full of an "undesirable gene variant." The second is an Indian call-center operator for Abercrombie & Fitch, the third a New Zealander who's using her cell phone to make an "Earth sandwich" with a woman in Madrid, and so on.
So these five people are stung by bees, and this quite literally throws the entire planet into a tizzy. They become instant celebrities, their lives dissected by millions of people who are curious about what it is that attracted the bees to these people. The stung people disappear into quarantine for a few months while -- cue sinister music -- tests are run on them, and then reunite after being set free. However, they discover that there's a lot more to the story, involving a mysterious pharmaceutical called Solon, a native village on a remote Canadian island, and Belgium.
Truthfully, if the world the novel was set in were less realistic, the plot would probably exist on an astral plane with the works of people like Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins, and Dan Brown. But it's weirdly believable, very funny, and completely worth your time.
Also worth my time: The things I've finished so far this summer.
First on the list: Weeding. I've mentioned this a few times over the last couple of months. It's time-consuming and less than wildly enjoyable, but it's necessary and healthy. I set my goal as a specific percentage of the books under my control, and I'm pleased to report that I met -- and exceeded -- that goal. I've focused mostly on older books in the linguistics area of the General Stacks downstairs (call numbers 420-428). Truthfully, a sizable proportion of those books were histories of the English language -- published before 1938! This was before World War II, the 1950s, Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, Nixon, NASA, greed being good, the Internet, and the entirety of the George W. Bush administration, which gave our language a good workout on a daily basis. Those older books were only good for historical curiosity, but served no real academic purpose, which is our main focus.
Actually, they're perfect examples of books that have fallen through the cracks over the years. We're a busy nest of librarians, and weeding is an activity that we tend to perceive as something that goes on in the background all the time. It happens while we're doing other things, incrementally, and -- in my case, especially -- in one big whoop per year. That doesn't mean it isn't important to us, though. I've gone into detail before about why we weed, so, just as a refresher, let me sum it up: sometimes books are moldering on the shelf, dangerously outdated, never used, and are taking up space for books that have more to offer our students these days, so we get rid of them. It's easy to get into the habit of thinking that books are sacrosanct, especially where librarians are concerned (apparently we worship them; ridiculous! Ignore that altar in my bedroom closet, though); however, we have a specific mission to serve the students, faculty, and staff of Gallaudet University, and it is poorly-served by the neglect of our collection. So we prune the collection in order to encourage healthy growth.
Then the Deaf Research Help pages on our Web site. Those have needed to be updated for some time; we refreshed a few of them last year, but were barely able to make a dent. This year, we're making a big push to transfer all of that information to LibGuides. I worked on the FAQs about deaf statistics and ASL, which were pretty heavy by themselves. They're both information-heavy. The deaf statistics pages focus mainly on offering starting points for estimates of deafness within a population; the United States in general, then each state, then each country. It took me nearly a week to hunt down and tabulate the statistics for the U.S. alone; the Census Bureau and other data-collecting entities don't do things in as clear-cut a manner as they used to, so some figuring was necessary. The rest of the world took another couple of weeks -- it's not easy trying to find official statistics on the prevalence of deafness in Ethiopia, for instance, or the number of sign-language users in Brazil. Although I managed to put together a decent update, this will have to be an ongoing product as more information becomes available.
Sign language, on the other hand, was a little easier; some quick run-throughs of our catalog and major vendors, along with the advent of YouTube and Vimeo, among others, made life much simpler. All told, maybe a month's worth of work was spent on those two LibGuides, and I'm partly glad it's over and partly glad I was able to learn so much. For example, did you know that 95% of the Japanese deaf population is at age-level literacy? That's something the U.S. can't accomplish even with hearing people. Fascinating!
We've also set up a new chat system for our Meebo widget on library.gallaudet.edu. You'd be bored with the details, but it'll make our lives much easier; the main thing I'm excited about is that now, when we get a question over IM about something specific to someone's subject area, we don't have to run to their office and call them in to the Service Desk so they can answer it -- we can just transfer the IM directly to their office! The new system should also reduce the delays that sometimes occur when the person answering IMs at the Service Desk is busy helping other people and can't respond to an IM right away; someone else, in their office, will also get the same IM and answer it themselves if necessary. Overall, this should help ensure faster and more accurate responses.
I've also been working on a new program we bought earlier this year that'll let us create video tutorials (with captioning, of course) for various aspects of our online resources. I'm starting out with LibGuides, explaining how they work, what each important element is, and how to use them to your advantage. It should be appearing somewhere on the Web site within the next few weeks; I'm just about done, but what with one thing or another, it may take a little while to get up and running.
The ALA Conference was another big thing on my to-do list. It sounds funny, but a few days away from work was definitely included on my list of important things to work on this summer. You saw my post last week; most of those events were selected specifically for key aspects of my work here at the Gallaudet University Library, and I came away super-enriched with more information and ideas!
And then, last but definitely not least, I'm redesigning our home page. Yes, again -- I can hear the groans from the peanut gallery. Although our current design is much nicer-looking than the one we had before, one of the most common questions we've been getting for the past year is, "How do I search the catalog?" It only beats "How do I find e-Journals or databases?" by a very, very slim margin. The answers to both questions are right on the home page, but people are having a hard time finding it. So I'm shuffling things around a little bit, reducing the current number of boxes by a third and reorganizing information so things are a little more unified, grouping like with like. Above it all, I'm sticking a honkin' big search box for our catalog, so you can guess what our emphasis is. The result of all this is that the layout is more compact, logically compartmentalized, and much easier to take in within one or two spins of the scroll wheel on your mouse. Here's a tiny, not-at-all-clear preview of what's to come:
All of the above is what I've been working on for the past month and a half or so, ever since we finished ordering new items and put a nice little bow on the Spring semester. The sad thing is that although I've gotten a large amount of stuff out of the way, I'm still not done. The projects you've been reading about are the ones explicitly related to the Library. Now that they're just about over with, I'm going on vacation next week, and then when I return, it's time to focus on projects that don't involve changing out anything in the Library itself: preparation for the First Year Experience course I'll be teaching in the Fall (if you're an incoming freshman and you're reading this, I may be teaching you starting this August!), gearing up for the Common Reading, which will be The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, by preparing LibGuides and planning campus-wide events, and getting started on writing questions for the 2011 Academic Bowl competition. It'll be a busy late July and August!
I'm sure you didn't miss the bit where I said I'm going on vacation next week. There won't be a blog post then. But when I come back, there'll be a Thursday post on the 22nd (unless I don't get called in to jury duty) about Jane Rutherford in anticipation of her retirement, then Friday, July 30, will see more about the Common Reading and what we're doing for it. Following that, the month of August, as it was last year, will be devoted to the incoming class!
Enjoy your weekend!
Question of the Week
I'm here at Gallaudet for a summer program, and I have Library borrowing privileges. But I read the sign you have up on the Service Desk, and it doesn't say anything about me or how long I'm allowed to borrow Library things for. I just checked out a book, and the librarian told me I can only have it for a week. What's up with that?
That sign only addresses regular borrowers: students, staff, faculty, alumni, and members of other Consortium universities. When you're on campus for a summer program and have obtained an ID that allows you to use the Library, your borrowing period is determined by your expiration date if it's less than four weeks away. The main program going on right now wraps up on July 17, which is a week from tomorrow, so that's when your ID -- and, by extension, your ability to borrow Library items -- expires. It makes sense: when your program is done, you're likely not sticking around; why risk incurring fines if you'll be in another state long before The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is due?
I have to keep repeating that to myself. "I'm a Florida boy." Sometimes we all need reminders that things could be worse, although after the sweltering weather of this past week, I'm not sure how. We broke triple digits a few times in the last few days, and just when I start to think it's not so bad, the humidity hits. Climate change or good old-fashioned heat wave? Who can say?
In an effort to clear this question -- among many others related to the weather (chief among which is "WHY?") -- from my mind, I read Generation A by Douglas Coupland.
I've heard a lot of stuff about Coupland. Most of the hoity-toity literary blogs I follow have mentioned him from time to time and it's usually in a very positive light, so I figured he must be pretty close to unreadable.
Except it turns out that Coupland is actually really readable. Generation A is the story of five individuals distributed across the world -- New Zealand, India, France, the U.S., and Canada -- who get stung by bees.
Given that the novel is set in a near-future where bees have been extinct for several years, rendering almonds, apples, and other fruits of assisted pollination (pun intended), very, very expensive, this is a global event. Coupland does a terrific job sketching in a future that looks eerily consistent with our present; the first person to get stung is an Iowan corn farmer who has a live Web stream of himself in his combine as he destroys a cornfield full of an "undesirable gene variant." The second is an Indian call-center operator for Abercrombie & Fitch, the third a New Zealander who's using her cell phone to make an "Earth sandwich" with a woman in Madrid, and so on.
So these five people are stung by bees, and this quite literally throws the entire planet into a tizzy. They become instant celebrities, their lives dissected by millions of people who are curious about what it is that attracted the bees to these people. The stung people disappear into quarantine for a few months while -- cue sinister music -- tests are run on them, and then reunite after being set free. However, they discover that there's a lot more to the story, involving a mysterious pharmaceutical called Solon, a native village on a remote Canadian island, and Belgium.
Truthfully, if the world the novel was set in were less realistic, the plot would probably exist on an astral plane with the works of people like Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins, and Dan Brown. But it's weirdly believable, very funny, and completely worth your time.
Also worth my time: The things I've finished so far this summer.
First on the list: Weeding. I've mentioned this a few times over the last couple of months. It's time-consuming and less than wildly enjoyable, but it's necessary and healthy. I set my goal as a specific percentage of the books under my control, and I'm pleased to report that I met -- and exceeded -- that goal. I've focused mostly on older books in the linguistics area of the General Stacks downstairs (call numbers 420-428). Truthfully, a sizable proportion of those books were histories of the English language -- published before 1938! This was before World War II, the 1950s, Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, Nixon, NASA, greed being good, the Internet, and the entirety of the George W. Bush administration, which gave our language a good workout on a daily basis. Those older books were only good for historical curiosity, but served no real academic purpose, which is our main focus.
Actually, they're perfect examples of books that have fallen through the cracks over the years. We're a busy nest of librarians, and weeding is an activity that we tend to perceive as something that goes on in the background all the time. It happens while we're doing other things, incrementally, and -- in my case, especially -- in one big whoop per year. That doesn't mean it isn't important to us, though. I've gone into detail before about why we weed, so, just as a refresher, let me sum it up: sometimes books are moldering on the shelf, dangerously outdated, never used, and are taking up space for books that have more to offer our students these days, so we get rid of them. It's easy to get into the habit of thinking that books are sacrosanct, especially where librarians are concerned (apparently we worship them; ridiculous! Ignore that altar in my bedroom closet, though); however, we have a specific mission to serve the students, faculty, and staff of Gallaudet University, and it is poorly-served by the neglect of our collection. So we prune the collection in order to encourage healthy growth.
Then the Deaf Research Help pages on our Web site. Those have needed to be updated for some time; we refreshed a few of them last year, but were barely able to make a dent. This year, we're making a big push to transfer all of that information to LibGuides. I worked on the FAQs about deaf statistics and ASL, which were pretty heavy by themselves. They're both information-heavy. The deaf statistics pages focus mainly on offering starting points for estimates of deafness within a population; the United States in general, then each state, then each country. It took me nearly a week to hunt down and tabulate the statistics for the U.S. alone; the Census Bureau and other data-collecting entities don't do things in as clear-cut a manner as they used to, so some figuring was necessary. The rest of the world took another couple of weeks -- it's not easy trying to find official statistics on the prevalence of deafness in Ethiopia, for instance, or the number of sign-language users in Brazil. Although I managed to put together a decent update, this will have to be an ongoing product as more information becomes available.
Sign language, on the other hand, was a little easier; some quick run-throughs of our catalog and major vendors, along with the advent of YouTube and Vimeo, among others, made life much simpler. All told, maybe a month's worth of work was spent on those two LibGuides, and I'm partly glad it's over and partly glad I was able to learn so much. For example, did you know that 95% of the Japanese deaf population is at age-level literacy? That's something the U.S. can't accomplish even with hearing people. Fascinating!
We've also set up a new chat system for our Meebo widget on library.gallaudet.edu. You'd be bored with the details, but it'll make our lives much easier; the main thing I'm excited about is that now, when we get a question over IM about something specific to someone's subject area, we don't have to run to their office and call them in to the Service Desk so they can answer it -- we can just transfer the IM directly to their office! The new system should also reduce the delays that sometimes occur when the person answering IMs at the Service Desk is busy helping other people and can't respond to an IM right away; someone else, in their office, will also get the same IM and answer it themselves if necessary. Overall, this should help ensure faster and more accurate responses.
I've also been working on a new program we bought earlier this year that'll let us create video tutorials (with captioning, of course) for various aspects of our online resources. I'm starting out with LibGuides, explaining how they work, what each important element is, and how to use them to your advantage. It should be appearing somewhere on the Web site within the next few weeks; I'm just about done, but what with one thing or another, it may take a little while to get up and running.
The ALA Conference was another big thing on my to-do list. It sounds funny, but a few days away from work was definitely included on my list of important things to work on this summer. You saw my post last week; most of those events were selected specifically for key aspects of my work here at the Gallaudet University Library, and I came away super-enriched with more information and ideas!
And then, last but definitely not least, I'm redesigning our home page. Yes, again -- I can hear the groans from the peanut gallery. Although our current design is much nicer-looking than the one we had before, one of the most common questions we've been getting for the past year is, "How do I search the catalog?" It only beats "How do I find e-Journals or databases?" by a very, very slim margin. The answers to both questions are right on the home page, but people are having a hard time finding it. So I'm shuffling things around a little bit, reducing the current number of boxes by a third and reorganizing information so things are a little more unified, grouping like with like. Above it all, I'm sticking a honkin' big search box for our catalog, so you can guess what our emphasis is. The result of all this is that the layout is more compact, logically compartmentalized, and much easier to take in within one or two spins of the scroll wheel on your mouse. Here's a tiny, not-at-all-clear preview of what's to come:
All of the above is what I've been working on for the past month and a half or so, ever since we finished ordering new items and put a nice little bow on the Spring semester. The sad thing is that although I've gotten a large amount of stuff out of the way, I'm still not done. The projects you've been reading about are the ones explicitly related to the Library. Now that they're just about over with, I'm going on vacation next week, and then when I return, it's time to focus on projects that don't involve changing out anything in the Library itself: preparation for the First Year Experience course I'll be teaching in the Fall (if you're an incoming freshman and you're reading this, I may be teaching you starting this August!), gearing up for the Common Reading, which will be The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, by preparing LibGuides and planning campus-wide events, and getting started on writing questions for the 2011 Academic Bowl competition. It'll be a busy late July and August!
I'm sure you didn't miss the bit where I said I'm going on vacation next week. There won't be a blog post then. But when I come back, there'll be a Thursday post on the 22nd (unless I don't get called in to jury duty) about Jane Rutherford in anticipation of her retirement, then Friday, July 30, will see more about the Common Reading and what we're doing for it. Following that, the month of August, as it was last year, will be devoted to the incoming class!
Enjoy your weekend!
Question of the Week
I'm here at Gallaudet for a summer program, and I have Library borrowing privileges. But I read the sign you have up on the Service Desk, and it doesn't say anything about me or how long I'm allowed to borrow Library things for. I just checked out a book, and the librarian told me I can only have it for a week. What's up with that?
That sign only addresses regular borrowers: students, staff, faculty, alumni, and members of other Consortium universities. When you're on campus for a summer program and have obtained an ID that allows you to use the Library, your borrowing period is determined by your expiration date if it's less than four weeks away. The main program going on right now wraps up on July 17, which is a week from tomorrow, so that's when your ID -- and, by extension, your ability to borrow Library items -- expires. It makes sense: when your program is done, you're likely not sticking around; why risk incurring fines if you'll be in another state long before The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is due?
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