virtual ref 2

i shadowed meg for a bit while she did virtual ref this afternoon. she signed into meebo this time and things looked a lot different. she also signed into questionpoint (where we get the ask-a-librarian emails). most of those were about renewing books and have been assigned to the access dept. lucky for me today had to be the day that bobcat and aleph is revived. the system went live this morning and before anyone could update transactions from the past two weeks, the system decided to blast everyone with overdue notices.

anyway, we got a few questions over IM. one was about citing images in chicago manual style. after a while, he/she stopped responding to us. we got a text message too and there was a slight mixup because someone else does text.

she also showed me where on the wiki i can find resources on doing virtual reference. she's not sure how dated they are, but they're nice guides...

meg also showed me how to use the libguides program. she started one for physics. it looks really easy and the hardest part is finding the content for it. i want to write one for math, but i dont have access to the libguides program. so i'm just going to dig up information to include (it involves researching other people's research guides to see what they came up with). i'm looking forward to spending the next 10 hours on this. knowing me, it'll pass quickly...

on the side, she had a meeting to go to after our session. i asked her how often she's in them. she said it's like 1/3 of her time. that's a lot of time! when do you have time for anything else??

virtual reference

meg set up an hour to meet with me and do virtual reference. there's a program that basically links all the different applications (gchat, aim, yahoo, etc) into one. we got two questions, both of them involving the functionality of bobcat. the servers had a meltdown over thanksgiving and some data files also became corrupted so we're kind of at a standstill with everything. she did her best to answer their questions. like face-to-face reference, you always want to check in with the patron and ask them if you're answering their question because what you answered might not be what the person was looking for. and at the end, you tell them to come back if they need further assistance.

she also signed into questionpoint, which handles the ask-a-librarian emails, and we started working on one. the student is writing a paper on the american dream and we were doing keyword and subject searching and discussing how to go about answering her question. meg wrote like 5 paragraphs and then ended up cutting half of them and rewriting a lot of what she already wrote. it turns out another librarian thought she was on duty and answered the question while we were still composing an answer. so meg just saved the email for future reference.

it's interesting to see the differences between virtual and face-to-face reference. i didn't get a chance to see any text references, but i imagine it would be a cross between email and chat. in email ref, you can't simply ask the person to clarify; you need to write more to get the person started. whereas in chat, you can easily ask the person to clarify and if you're adequately answering the question.

cool, so i'm looking forward to another hour next thursday. meg's gonna show me a guide to virtual reference that they use for new trainees. oh, i forgot to ask her to set up something for libguides. i'm interested in writing one of math (moreso to help myself with my research, hehe).

win

dominique linked me this one. it's full of win. it makes me *almost* want to watch the original series -- almost. nonetheless, some people posted additional ones in their comments. also win.

i almost forgot to mention that christmas came early this year! i already got my present from my awesome best friend danielle. and it is an awesome present indeed. you'll never guess what it is...

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last night, i got obsessed with my wiki page for the mentorship program and i figured out what it was missing: interactions with my mentor outside the set modules. so i created a new "child" page. (i think it's hilarious that they use the term "child" page for subpages of pages and "parent" page for pages -- it reminds me of cataloging, ie child records and parent records). so now i have a log of that in addition to scribbling my thoughts on this blog.

and my apologies to jerry heverly for misspelling his name all over everything i've written. i have changed everything to the correct spelling. (hope i caught everything!)

mellow monday

pauline left me a long long list of things to do over the next week. she's going to mexico and then LA and coming back on dec 7. in the meanwhile, i've got tons of work ahead of me. tons.

met with meg for a quick chat this afternoon. we went to starbucks and i ordered a peppermint mocha to see if it's supposed to taste different, but nope. it really does require two packets of sugar. lol. some things we covered included thanksgiving plans, virtual reference shadowing, tenure, internships, and the SLA name change. i think it's old school to use "assistant curator" and "curator" as the position titles for a tenure track position. i suggested she find an internship with google cuz that would be so cool.

allan.

on a side note, john showed me this video. enjoy!

catching up on the last 20 hours

yesterday was my first time using the restrooms in LL1 in Bobst. we send people there all the time from the reference desk. WOW. it's like a fancy upscale restroom that belongs in a hotel or fancy restaurant. there are like 10 stalls in a row and those crazy dyson airblade hand dryers, where you stick your hands into this machine and the air blowing at you moves the skin on your hands. no papertowels anywhere. luckily, they still believe in foam soap to wash your hands with, unlike at smith where they only gave us antibacterial hand sanitizer.

helped rae install miktex/texmaker/texniccenter on her computer. she's got a choice of like 3 editors now. lol...
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then i met up with meg for coffee and catching up. we went to the think cafe that's right across from courant. i got a mocha and it was the strangest mocha i have ever had. but i think i like it. it wasn't sweet at all, but i added a packet of sugar and it was good (could've used another one actually). $$ tho so i can't buy that often... we talked about random stuff that mainly had to do with reference, internships, difficult questions, difficult patrons, the class i observed earlier, what i learned from that, what i found interesting, etc. we're gonna meet again on monday or tuesday...
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came back to courant; on my way up, i bumped into alex and we talked about the grateful dead archivist position that everyone's talking about. so i end up chatting with him and jen for the next hour before i actually get to obtaining all the stuff i need to do hw.

met up with allan and we walked/talked to chinatown. he wanted to see elizabeth center. i was fairly certain it was closed, but we went anyway (window shopping after hours lol). then we went to big wong for dinner. i was raving about how good the roast pork is and he wanted roast duck. so he ordered two dishes, one of each meat. i wanted a roast pork wonton soup with noodles (really good). unfortunately, it was late by the time we went and they had already sold out of both kinds of meat. haha... so we ended up switching in bbq spare ribs, which were pretty good (not as good as roast pork).
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supposedly, NYC has issued a gridlock for manhattan today and as soon as we got onto the belt parkway, traffic hit us like a brick wall. dad got off at the next exit and dropped me off at the D train and i took that to work this morning. i was afraid the traffic was going to be as bad as that day with the yankee parade. made it to work 20min late so it's coming out of my lunch time, which is fine. i dont really need an hour lunch.

first thing that mike had me do was replace the maintenance kit in the printer. it was surprisingly fun. at first i couldnt figure out how to get the back piece to open, but it turned out to be really easy and i felt really stupid for wasting almost 10min trying to lift it instead of just yanking it out. i really thought it was on a hinge! anyway, once i got that part out, the rest was cake. there was one part i was replacing that left my hands smeared in ink. i had to wash my hands twice before continuing with replacing some of the other parts. i had to get a stool cuz i was too short to reach some of the parts on top. i felt like such a mechanic lol. all in all, it took me about 40min.

after i shelved what little books we had, i rearranged the circ desk cuz we're using a different computer to check items in/out and the materials just weren't strategically located...

and finished the crossword puzzle with a little help from the internet. i found this awesome crossword dictionary!