The first few months of each semester are chaos. Complete and utter chaos. A colleague saw me walking out of the library one day and asked “Are they actually letting you leave the building?” The irony is that I was walking to the water fountain in the next building before starting my reference desk shift … in the library. “No,” I said, “They are not.” Because of the requirements for teaching and committee deadlines, we must work overtime. But, in working over 40 hours a week I build up comp time that we are supposed to claim within the week. At this rate, I think I can claim my comp time in June … maybe July.
Archive for February, 2009
An LIS student rocks it Guitar Hero style
I know Game Nights are virtually ubiquitous in libraries nowadays, especially with the hip libraries, but I really must brag about our Game Night.
Game Night Lives, the sixth biannual UNCG Game Night, was on January 30, 2009 in the Reading Room of Jackson Library. It was probably the biggest and easily the most stress-free. We are getting to be experts at planning this event after having five under our belts, but this one was a blow-out. We haven’t got the stats yet, but there were over 150 students. We also had a larger variety of games–from the usual vids to board games to card games.
Although we do a bit of organizing, most of the planning comes together in a very anarchic, slightly disorganized fashion. We depend heavily on the students to show up and bring the noise. We also never, ever dictate what they can play or how the event is to run. I LOVE that. Controlled anarchy in the library … just for a night.
I started playing around with Jing after two NCSU DE librarians gave it a rave review. It works great for short tutorials, but is absolutely not meant for anything long as there isn’t any editing capability. Nevertheless, the visual presentation is pretty powerful and I can imagine these tutorials (even the shortest of them) being great for the harder databases (Hello, LexisNexis!) Check out my first attempt: a tutorial on using World Development Indicators
