The Ubiquitous Librarian

End of the Spring Semester - riding the M Train

Today is our last day of finals. Campus is clearing out quickly. Time to prep for a new batch of incoming freshmen.

My manuscript is due to ALA in Sept and the book will be out in Feb-- so that's where I'm at right now. It's been an interestingly fun and frustrating experience and the last few chapters are shaping up nicely.

Something a little light for today. Here is a great promotional video that some students produced for the College of Management. Don’t waste your time on science and engineering, ride the M-train.

Librarian as Recruiter

I’ve written about my efforts to reach students before they arrive on campus, but what about pushing it even further? What about convincing them to attend your school?

I was invited to an open-house weekend for prospective engineering graduate students, but could not attend due to a scheduling conflict. I was later included on an email to faculty urging us to contact candidates who had been accepted but were still considering their options.

This was an interesting insight because you often read about the drama of athletic recruiting, and it appears that the same thing happens (on a much smaller and less sexier scale) for academics as well.

I could see that we had top prospects in mechatronics, manufacturing, and thermal sciences. Just like a running back’s sprint time, I could see their undergraduate GPA and GRE scores. As well as the University they attended and whether or not we were offering them a Teaching Assistantship, as well as several other attributes.

I decided to contact some of the candidates and sent 20 of them a very casual email introducing myself as the librarian dedicated to their discipline and briefly mentioned a few of the resources and services that we offer to Georgia Tech students, customizing it a little for their field.

Surely they care more about the funding and research opportunities available to them – but it was an experiment and a chance for me to dabble in the recruiting effort. I figured it couldn’t hurt, I mean, are librarians from MIT, Stanford, or Michigan talking with these top prospects? It gave me the chance to humanize the library and offered them a direct communication channel to learn about research and resources for their area. It also showed that our librarians are thoroughly engaged and hopefully planted a few ideas and expectations of what we offer.

Long story short – it totally bombed. Three weeks later and no one wrote back. Although it only took about 15 minutes to send each candidate a separate email, it would have been nice get at least a “thank you” reply.

Perhaps I over estimated the value of the library or perhaps they decided to sign with someone else? I was operating on the principle that everyone likes to be wooed – whether they are choosing a college or being recruiting for a new job, people like to feel important. I figured that if I can give up a few minutes of my time to try and convince the next great nanotech scholar to attend then I’ve done my part. Imagine several professors calling to express their interest in you as well as a librarian emailing to say that the journals and conference papers you’ll need are all available in full text… it all works together to position our Institute as a more desirable option. 

Student Reviews of LibGuides & SubjectsPlus

We are in the pre-planning process of transitioning over to a new subject guide system. Two of the products that we are seriously considering are LibGuides and SubjectsPlus. (A big thanks to the taskforce for all their work.)

I asked a few students to provide some quick feedback looking at another school’s guide for their discipline—here’s what I got back.

LibGuides

Student #1
hard to scan text, too wordy, not enough differentiation between title
and description of databases. not enough focus on the main content -
it is battling for the reader's attention with 2 sidebars. the site
design is repulsive, rounded corners make it look like they're trying
to go web 2.0 but failing miserably and it doesn't work well with the
homepage which is more grid/linear oriented than rounded corners
and modules.

Student #2
- there's too much red
- it's hard to read
- the search bar was hard to find
- the "meebo" feature looks pretty cool... is there a way to guarantee
that my questions would be answered? is there a program where i would
get the answer if i went offline?
- there should be an outline or description about the tabs because the
name of the tabs were really unclear...

Student #3
Libguides doesn't seem very helpful at all.  I just look for a list of the
journals/databases that GT has access to & I check those out.   

SubjectsPlus

Student #1
good, accessible navigation. headings in blue blocks clearly separate
different portions of the site that serve different tasks. interesting
use of icons to depict extra metadata about the databases visually.
descriptions have good line-height and are not too verbose to be
unhelpful. wouldn't hurt to wrap text in the main content area
earlier.. 15+ words per line is on the edge of being annoying to read.
main content is a bit too long, perhaps use domtab to load different
areas of text via JS. sidebar is helpful and spaced out well, albeit
the lower elements are too wordy for the area.

Student #2
- i like the "try these first" box that pops up
- the red/green padlocks that appear to show what i can/cannot use is
really helpful
- the Research by Subject: Business--Industry Information section at the
top should stand out more. it doesn't really look important when actually
it saves a lot of time scrolling...
- the main horizontal bar is amazing! drop down lists that bring you to
specific pages is a great feature
- the option to hide or show the key is GREAT!
- a picture of the librarian is also helpful

Student #3
really dislike the popup that you would have to X out of every time.
It's useful to have the most common journals on top, but the popup makes
me feel like I'm being assaulted by advertisements. But I like how the layout
takes up the entire browser window. I don't really understand the 'lock' symbols
next to the journal titles. 

Personally I prefer LibGuides—it feels more modern and the features offer a lot of possibilities… but that’s librarian thinking. Students, at least these three, seemed to prefer the simpler of the two. I hope to get a few more responses back—if so I’ll post them here, but we’re on the verge of finals and they have better things to do than review subject guides.

Summary: It’s easy to get caught up with the flashy new toy, but I guess we just need to keep asking ourselves— who are these guides for: us or them?

The anatomy of an all-nighter

The transparent technologies of flickr and twitter offer tremendous assessment possibilities. We hear about students pulling all-nighters, but this is documented evidence.

4:56 PM
paper + pres due in 22 hours. tick tock. group members unite

6:51 PM
if I have to pull an allnighter to finish this proj I'll likely have to skip the gatech awards banquet luncheon thing and get my award later

7:55 PM
I just talked about epistemological connections in this CS paper. Do I get my cookie now or later?

09:23 PM
trying to explain color wars in this paper as a way of community-driven convention for subgroups. prof is going to think twitter is crazy.

10:17 PM
GT Parking is heartless.. giving parking tickets to students parked at the library this late. @flashmob needs to do something about it

11:15 PM
cramped between @jarryd and @hd_phones in the library near the collaborative computing section.

12:24 AM
@vending_machine: let me start a tab! you know I'm good for it. i need this caffeine. don't make @jarryd and i tilt you. you know we can.

2:10 AM
paper update: 7,400 words and probably 5 pages or so left. then lots of proof reading, bibliography, and then making a presentation. x_x

3:28 AM
just got a call from my connect. coffee is on the way. @ 8,100 words

5:30 AM
now at 8,700 words. just me and @jarryd in the library.

6:11 AM
~9,100 words and we haven't started on the presentation yet =/

3:04 PM
just got done presenting my twitter research paper. relaxing would be nice but alas i have more projects to do.

5:12 PM
back from rocky mtn pizza with @jarryd and @gomeler. now to regain the sleep I didn't get from crashing on the library floor this morning

Donuts for Design

Our administration distributed donuts to each department/unit as an anniversary of our ACRL Award.  So the User Experience Group—consisting of myself and a multimedia designer—took our dozen and gave them out to students… with the catch that they had to give us feedback on a renovation that is currently in the pre-planning stages.

This pre-planning stage has consumed me the past few months. (I’ll post about that in a few weeks once everything is done and we move to the next phase.) So after hours of observation, focus groups, interviews, and U of Rochester type techniques—we’ve developed four layout prototypes—all based on user feedback. In fact, two of the designs were drawn by students themselves. We’ve been testing these concepts over the last two weeks and our little donut excursion re-enforced everything that we’ve been hearing. You know that you’ve got the right design when everyone shares the same vision.