Monthly Archives: December 2008

Friday Toddler-Blogging

It’s my last day of work before two weeks off for the holidays (HALLELUJAH, and thank you, Saint Mary’s College, for your generous number of days off near the winter holidays), so I leave you with this:

LOEX and the “small conference” problem

If you’re an instruction librarian, you know about LOEX, the organization that holds the leading annual library instruction/information literacy conference in North America, also known as LOEX. And if you’re an instruction librarian who’s ever thought of going to LOEX, you probably know about the insanity that is LOEX registration. If you don’t, here’s the […]

in which I date myself, and also crack myself up

I just got asked a question about citing multiple authors in APA style, and to illustrate the point, I used Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, and Howe as an example.  I’m virtually certain it went right over the student’s head.

Reference traffic vs. reference questions

It’s hard to compare the experience of working the reference desk at my current job with the experience at MFPOW, the NCSU Libraries. Just trying to explain one to the other is hard, as I’ve discovered in talking with my co-workers here. At Saint Mary’s, we have one person on the desk at a time, […]

Spam conundrum

Why is it that this blog, which has been online for, what, less than a month? has already had its first piece of spam caught by Akismet, while my other blog,* which has been up for three years and was on WordPress 1.5 until just two months ago, hasn’t gotten any? *Sorry, no link – […]

Dangers of being too helpful

I’d like to think that, if we worked hard at it, us reference and instruction librarians could almost work ourselves out of a job.  We’d teach students to be so good at not only finding information for themselves and evaluating it, but also learning new systems and new tools for themselves, so that they didn’t […]

Ethical dilemma

Someone has requested a couple of truly gorgeous books on quilting via Inter-Library Loan. I can see them sitting on the “Received” pile every time I walk through the tech services area. If you know me personally, you might know that I’m a quilter. I would love to know who requested these books and go […]

What do faculty know about what students know?

There’s a lot of discussion going on about what students, especially first-year students, know about library research and information literacy. This makes sense: we need to know what students know, and what they don’t know, so that we can avoid boring them with stuff they’re already familiar with, and so that we can fill in […]