Friday Questions

Two questions in my Friday session...

1. Where can I find info on library employment? A: It was easy to find a webpage on this topic, much like ours.
2. Can someone from another university come into my college library to study? A: I'm thinking right away that the answer is obvious, but if it's so obvious then why is someone asking the question? So I tried to find the answer written out on the website somewhere. Everything on their website looked really welcoming, so I first told the student that I thought it was really unlikely that they could not do this. Then I finally actually found a page about rules of conduct that said, basically, guests are welcome if they are over 14 and follow the rules.

Chris' chat on 8/31/09

I had two questions today:

Student needed the article Teaching tools. 10-minute assessment for patient safety. Wolf L; Fiscella E; Cunningham H; Nurse Educator, 2008 Nov-Dec; 33 (6): 237-40 but was not able to get her username/password to work. In the end I needed refer her to her IT help desk. I tried to send her the article as a short-term solution but we did not have access to it.

Student needed from Cancer Immunology, Immunotherapy 2004 May;53(5):422-30. Epub 2003 Nov 26. It took me a while to figure out their list of journals but unfortunately found they didn't have this year. They used ILL instead.

Chris' session 8/27/09

I worked with two questions today.

The first was someone (no email address or name) from Harrisburg Pa CC who was wanting to know where to get a good deal on a car. I asked a few questions about familiarity with the area and whether he/she was interested in new or used cars while I thought this question. I was going to recommend edmunds.com that lets you look for dealers by zip code and gives reviews but the person disconnected before I could.

The second question was a student who waned to know what book her professor had on reserve for her course. That was a simple search of their catalog's reserve module.

Chris' chat 8-21-09

There were a number of questions that came in today but many were taken before I could click on them. At one point 3 questions came in at once and I managed to get one of them from a person needing a transcript from 92/93. He/she was wondered if it would be available online or if he/she needed to request it. He/she decided to call instead of waiting for me to find out via web pages.

Chris' chat 8-14-09

I only had one question. A student forgot the resource he was given on how to assess whether an article is peer reviewed or not. I found it on his library's website and gave him the url. I offerred to look at some articles with him but he just wanted the resource so he could do it over the weekend. He obviously had better things to do with his Friday afternoon. Can't blame him.

Thinking outside the box

I had some routine questions today and a stumper, stumping me mostly because I couldn't think past how we do it at Penfield. Patron had a specific article that I determined was from Conference Proceedings -- wanted electronic access that she thought she should be able to get. I looked in their catalog by the conference proceedings title and got thousands!! of results. Took me way too long to think of searching by the article title, which is how they were cataloged. Then I got two results and, pretty quickly, was able to determine from their policies page that the problem was that she needed to log-on before accessing the catalog e-link.

Most of the questions I had today seemed very local in nature, which is why I created a script just now for librarians helping with our local information queries -- suggesting they call or email us directly. Have you run into things that you think I should address in our institution scripts?

Chat catch-up

I've had several sessions recently, so here's my catch-up post --

• last week was one really long (1 hr) question, and I think the problem was that maybe the answer didn't exist. The patron was looking for a specific report on a government program that had been referred to (vaguely) in a senate speech. I found the report, I found the senator's remarks -- not what she wanted. I found several other things -- not what she wanted. Perhaps the senator was speculating about the changed attitudes of the Tanzanians and did not actually have documentation of this? I finally referred her to her home library, which I noticed referred her to a subject specialist.


• next session -- a couple of pretty easy questions, that I used the college websites to answer. One that I actually asked them to call their reference desk, because it sounded like a complicated case that might involved exceptions to ILL policy, etc. The home library looked to be open and available.


• I have trouble remembering to sign-in on time. Does anyone know of a timer that can be set on the computer? I'm afraid Jaclyn is going to give me a scolding!


• Now I'm on my last chat for the week. It's a pretty slow Friday afternoon, but I just made someone happy with the NCES education statistics site. They were looking for illiteracy rates by state and county, which was surprisingly easy to find with google. Then there was the question about how to get to the next level on the video game... guess they didn't know I have no clue! I'm not sure I handled this well, since I sort of told them this wasn't the kind of questions we usually handle. This was one from MD AskUsNow. Is their service Academic & Public combined?
• And I discovered a really cool trick I didn't know -- you can sort the libraries on the librarians' list alphabetically. Just hit the title of the column. I figured this out so the next time I get a MD AskUsNow question I can sort quickly and see if someone from that cooperative is online. I also noticed that it sorts first by type of library, and academics are "B"... not A as one might expect.