Friday, April 29, 2016

Current Cites for April 2016

 CurrentCites

Current Cites for April 2016 is out! You can find the issue here...

This month I recommended a rather enjoyable research article that looked at focus groups involving college students and their searching habits -- a situation rather familiar to those of us fortunate enough to work in public service. Included were lines like, "few students were aware of what a 'subject librarian' was".

Saturday, April 16, 2016

Job Description : Part-time Reference Librarian

Just got a request to describe my activities as a part-time reference librarian. Here's my response:

Basically the part time job is totally reference (i.e. public service) work. Questions run from 'where is the copier/bathroom/color-printer' to 'I'm writing a research paper on advances in chemistry in the 18th Century and need to find some research articles'.

Am I an expert on advances in chemistry in the 18th Century? No, but I know where to get the student started and I can also show the student how to find articles and, equally as important, how to evaluate search results so that they branch out into even better material. I also know, finally, what the limits are and who and when to refer them to other people.

That's pretty much what I do.

Saturday, April 02, 2016

Current Cites for March 2016

 CurrentCites

Current Cites for March 2016 is out! You can find the issue here...

This month I recommended an article that took text-based content analysis and applied it to tweets from the Twitter accounts of 10 different academic libraries. Interesting results.