Reference Questions, 8/31/2011

It's my first night shift of the semester. I have moved from Tuesday to Wednesday nights. The new librarian took the Tuesday night shift. I've heard we've been busy all day. Let's see how my 4 hours go.

1. Needed help pasting a discussion post he'd composed in Word to his class' discussion board in Desire 2 Learn. D2L is such a pain. This is our first full semester using it and I expect to field lots of questions about it.
2. (Chat) Student needed help locating a specific article. Turns out it was actually a book chapter. We had the book int he library but the student wanted to look at it online. It was an older book (1972) so I was able to find it in Google Books for them.
3. Looking for 2 books for a class (The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy and The World is Flat). Surprising we had both and they were available. I told him he was very lucky.
4. Needed help printing off some PDFs. When he printed them off originally from IE the right side of the sheet was cut off. I had him open the PDF files in Adobe Reader and they printed off fine then.
5. Was looking for the study rooms. I pointed him to the 2nd floor.
6. Wanted to know where to check out books
7. Looking for her print out, said it printed to pay-for-print
8. Student's document didn't print; she didn't click accept in the print assist window
9. Student wanted to know if they had to pay for everything they printed.
10. Needed help printing from D2L
11. Wanted to know how they had to pay for printing
12. Wanted to know where her print out would be
13. Could not get a web page to print from Chrome. I had her switch browsers. That fixed it.
14. Looking for the Norton Anthology of Western Music
15. Wanted to know where all the Macs that used to be on the 3rd floor are
16. Looking for a textbook for one of his classes; we didn't have it
17. Printer was giving a paper jam error message; printer was fine, just low on paper
18. Wanted to know if there was a back exit to the library
19. Needed me to explain how to find a book in the library
20. Needed help commenting on a blog post for an online class; she didn't have a blog and thought she couldn't comment if she didn't. I showed her how to use her Google account to comment on the blog.

Reference Questions, 8/30/2011

The Fall semester rolls on...

1. Professor looking for the journal Holistic Nursing Practice.
2. Wanted to know how to add printing money
3. Needed help printing a PDF
4. Had questions about how much printing cost
5. Needed to borrow a pair of scissors

Reference Questions, 8/29/2011

Thus begins the Fall semester. Let's see what's up.

1. Student was not given her allotted $5 in printing money for the academic year. Told her to go to Walker to have that checked out and to go to Heth to the RU Express office to have her RU Express set up.
2. (Chat) Student was having trouble accessing an article from PsycINFO. I emailed it to her.
3. Student wanted to know how to print

Day 1 down, a lot more to go.

Reference Questions, 8/26/2011

I'm back after a vacation and a medical absence for an abscessed tooth/root canal. Classes start Monday. Here we go.

1. (Chat) Wanted the group code for RefWorks
2. Wanted a campus map
3. Wanted to know if the printers were working here
4. Wanted to borrow a pair of scissors
5. Coke man was looking for the ABP
6. Looking for a water fountain

Reference Questions, week of 8/8/2011

8/8/2011 (1 hour at the desk)
no questions

8/9/2011 (3 hours at the desk)

1. Looking for the ROTC offices on campus
2. Student needed me to witness her signature on a couple of documents she had to submit to the nursing school
3. Student needed help with the scanner
4. (Phone) Professor was having trouble accessing Web of Science. It's seems off-campus access might be having issues. I contacted the e-resources librarian
5. Looking for a book by Madalyn Murray about atheism.
6. Patron needed help finding a book in the stacks

Reference Questions, week of 8/1/2011

8/1/2011 (4 hours at the desk)

1. Needed help using the scanner
2. Looking for the bathroom
3. Wanted to know where to go to change her address in the system. She said she had emailed the registrar's office about it. I suggested that if that didn't work to try DoIT.
4. Wanted to borrow a post-it note
5. Wanted to know if he could still print even if he wasn't enrolled for summer classes. He is enrolled for Fall, so I told him he would be able to.
6. Looking for a reference book on demonology
7. Looking for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on DVD

8/2/2011 (2 hours at the desk)

1. Professor wanted to know how to save a picture that had been embedded into an email. The picture was only appearing as a blank box with a small red X in the upper corner. I told him he'd have to have the sender resend the picture, preferably as an attachment. The red X means that there is no file there to load.

8/3/2011 (2 hours at the desk)

1. Looking for books on the Army

8/4/2011 (2 hours at the desk)
no questions

8/5/2011 (2 hours at the desk)
no questions

cpd23: My Path to Librarianship

My path to librarianship has been an interesting one. I did not grow up wanting to be a librarian. I grew up wanting to be a dentist, an orthodontist to be exact. How did I go from orthodontist to librarian you might ask? To make a long story short, I had an extremely bad freshman year in college. This experience prompted me to go from being a chemistry major to an English major two months into my sophomore year. Goodbye dentistry career. Anyway, I had also been working for my grandfather's commercial plumbing company since graduating high school. I worked there part-time while I was in college. So after I graduated with a BA in English, I continued working for his company. I ran his office and pretty much handled whatever he wanted me to do. During the time I worked there, I thought about going and getting a masters degree in something. In 2006, pursued my MS in Accounting for a semester, but in the end I decided it was not something that I wanted to do. In November 2007, my grandfather announced he was retiring. I decided then that I was also finished with the plumbing business. I have several cousins who are also in the plumbing business and I could have easily continued with that, but I decided that I was done with construction (and working for family) for good.

I wanted to pursue a masters degree that would let me utilize my undergraduate degree. An MA in English was out of the question. That degree is basically worthless by itself. My husband has 2 masters degrees, and one of them is an MLIS. So, I was already familiar with our alma mater's library program, and they already knew me. So I took the GRE and enrolled at UNCG in March 2008. I started grad school in August 2008. During my time there I was a graduate assistant for the department, a member of the LIS department's curriculum committee, Representative for the department on the Graduate Student Association, a reference intern, and president of the ALA student chapter. When I started library school I wanted to be a cataloger. All of my research, along with my independent study and practicum, were focused on cataloging. However, when it was time to apply for jobs it became evident that I was not going to be a cataloger. There were no cataloging jobs out there. The ones that I did see wanted 3-5 years experience which is impossible to have straight out of library school. Thank God I was also a reference intern while I was in grad school. It is the only reason I got a job.