Monday morning, a foggy day in Eugene. We're starting week four of the term, and the reference area is pretty busy.

• How do you spell "dichotomy"?
• Do we have any copies of the actual diary of Anne Frank, as opposed to the play adapted from it? (This is actually sort of hard to tell from the catalog, because of the way titles are listed when they're not originally in English.)
• Where can I find a dictionary of Greco-Roman mythology?
• Where can I find an anthology of eighteenth-century French poetry?
• What is the connection between those red books and the subject headings on books in the catalog? (Asked by a student in LIB 101, whose assignment was to find subject headings in common among a set of books she'd found. A good little conversation about subject tracings ensued.)
• Thank you for helping me last year with those citations I couldn't get--once we figured out that the journal had changed names, I resubmitted my request to ILL and got them right away. (Yay! So nice to have good feedback!)
• How do you spell the airplane manufacturer "Northrop"?
• Where can I find a textbook on interpreting electrocardiograms, specifically for the abnormality of right bundle branches?
• Is there any way I can request an entire journal be sent to me via Interlibrary Loan? (It's a recent philosophy journal that we don't subscribe to, and I want to see it in the flesh.)
• Do we have a subscription to, or access in full text to, the Mexican newspaper La Jornada? (We don't appear to, although I'm told it's like a Mexican New York Times.)
• Where can I find information about Mongolia in the present day? I.e., what issues face the country, where is it going, what's up with Mongolia?
• Where can I find books about learning Japanese? What about Hebrew? What about audio cassettes or CDs to learn Japanese and Hebrew? What about videos of movies in Japanese or Hebrew?
• If something is published by the Cato Institute, is it from an academic source?
• Where do I plug my headphones into this computer?
• How do I get a book if it's listed as being in "SCI STORAGE"?
• Can someone fix the sink in the fourth floor men's room? It runs constantly.
• Where can I find circulation numbers for the magazine Natural Home? (This was a bit ridiculous, because first of all I assumed she meant she wanted a call number, which she didn't. Then I found that Natural Home [which my sweetie just brought home from the store the other day--great little magazine with an environmental slant] isn't listed in Ulrich's online, although it is in Ulrich's print, but there are no circ stats. It's in Magazines for Libraries, but no circ stats. It's not in the Gale directory. I ended up telling her to email the magazine off its website. Failure! ETA: Argh! It is in Ulrich's online! I missed it because the title's not exact, and the publisher info at the top of the page doesn't match the publisher info in the print edition. Argh! Argh! For the record: 150,000 paid.)
• Where is our ethnic studies faculty candidate? We sent him to the library for a tour and we've lost him.

Monday morning, a foggy day in Eugene. We're starting week four of the term, and the reference area is pretty busy.

• How do you spell "dichotomy"?
• Do we have any copies of the actual diary of Anne Frank, as opposed to the play adapted from it? (This is actually sort of hard to tell from the catalog, because of the way titles are listed when they're not originally in English.)
• Where can I find a dictionary of Greco-Roman mythology?
• Where can I find an anthology of eighteenth-century French poetry?
• What is the connection between those red books and the subject headings on books in the catalog? (Asked by a student in LIB 101, whose assignment was to find subject headings in common among a set of books she'd found. A good little conversation about subject tracings ensued.)
• Thank you for helping me last year with those citations I couldn't get--once we figured out that the journal had changed names, I resubmitted my request to ILL and got them right away. (Yay! So nice to have good feedback!)
• How do you spell the airplane manufacturer "Northrop"?
• Where can I find a textbook on interpreting electrocardiograms, specifically for the abnormality of right bundle branches?
• Is there any way I can request an entire journal be sent to me via Interlibrary Loan? (It's a recent philosophy journal that we don't subscribe to, and I want to see it in the flesh.)
• Do we have a subscription to, or access in full text to, the Mexican newspaper La Jornada? (We don't appear to, although I'm told it's like a Mexican New York Times.)
• Where can I find information about Mongolia in the present day? I.e., what issues face the country, where is it going, what's up with Mongolia?
• Where can I find books about learning Japanese? What about Hebrew? What about audio cassettes or CDs to learn Japanese and Hebrew? What about videos of movies in Japanese or Hebrew?
• If something is published by the Cato Institute, is it from an academic source?

Back from ALA, plunged into the cold-water dive tank of teaching 4 credits and ministering to neglected faculty. And a split shift on the desk today. Installment one yields:

• How can I find this article that Business Source Premier says should be available online? Morphed into: How can I find articles about Social Security privatization in Academic Search Premier? From a student I've helped already this term, who was very uncertain about using the computer a couple of weeks ago. She's better now; more able to navigate between browser windows, etc. Nice to see.
• How can I find popular magazines from the 1920s, 1950s, 1930s...? A millionfold. There must be multiple classes doing this kind of thing.
• Where can I find articles about teaching gay and lesbian issues in schools? There was so much coverage of this before the election, and now I can't find anything.

In a whirlwind of activity, pre-ALA. Teaching class, planning next week's classes, prepping for committee meetings, doing desk hours, indexing for ABELL (@#!! midwinter deadling), and generally keeping the good ship afloat. My feet hurt and I want to go home and watch Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid.* Except I did that last night. When all else fails, eat chocolate and watch a creature feature.

So far today:

• What's the difference between peer-reviewed and refereed journals?
• How can I get into Lexis-Nexis Academic to find newspaper articles?
• Where can I find books on photography in this library, as opposed to in the Architecture and Allied Arts library?
• Can I get a print copy of an article on food labeling that was in the NY Times in 2003?
• Where can I find coverage of an event that occurred in the 1950s--a kidnapping and beating of a black man in Houston by KKK members?
• Where is the wireless signal strongest in the library?
• What is the most recent edition of the Mental Measurement Yearbook?

I taught for an hour and a half on LC classification today, and nobody fell asleep. There was a suspiciously high rate of absence, though. It baffles me that the students who can't hand in assignments on time can still look ahead through the syllabus to see when they don't have to do a follow-up draft on a class. And then they disappear in droves. Mysterious.

*Terrible. But satisfying.

Just one hour on the desk today..

• Where can I find the complete poetical works of Thomas Traherne, 17th century poet?
• How can I figure out what citation style this list of references is in? It was left with me by a professor who doesn't know what style it is either; it's not any of the major styles. I need to add more references to the list, and I don't have enough examples in the list to follow.
• Where can I find articles about Edward Brooke, an African-American senator in the 1960s?

Things are getting a little more interesting in the ref dept now, in more ways than one. So far:

• Where can I find articles about Pisistratus, classical tyrant? And once I find those articles in L'Annee Philologique, how do I know whether they're in English?
• What do you call that musk you're wearing? (This from an intense, creepy older man who then regaled me with apocryphal/revisionist Genesis outtakes.)
• Where can I find an African-American periodical from the period between 1870 and 1900? (This was a fun one, because just this summer I wrote an article on the history of African-American literary periodicals for an encyclopedia from Greenwood. I gave the student a copy of my Excel spreadsheet and the draft article, including a bibliography of suggested readings. Direct to the end user! Sure, yes, we also covered catalog searching and APS.)
• Where can I find copies of the Register-Guard from 2000?
• Where are the books on reserve for my class? (Over and over and over...)
• Where can I find information about someone named Louis Sylvestre, who was French? (No more information, except that he may have been an artist. Turns out he was 17th century, actually named Louis de Silvestre. And pretty obscure. No offense to Silvestrians.)
• Why can't I get free access to this online article in the journal Constellations, even though I'm seeing all the citation details in ingenta?
• How can I locate a dictionary of anatomy in the reference collection?
• How do I get into the online OED from off campus?

High point: a student in my class dropped by to say hi, and that she was enjoying the readings we've been giving them. I said great! Good luck with those scintillating articles on LC classification for Thursday!

Ahhh, the sweet, still air of the reference department, week one. It's been a while.

I spent the holidays in Canada with my family. I miss Canada. I miss Canadian radio and Canadian politics on television. I miss Rick Mercer. I miss French packaging. I miss public officials who sound, at least superficially, as though they genuinely care about what's good and decent in the world, rather than just what's likeliest to get them re-elected. I miss coinage. I miss Vancouver. I don't miss taxes, but I'm willing to shoulder them if they buy me civilization. (And the right to get married.) I miss my friends' accents. I miss the ocean. And the mountains. And the clean, unbreathed air right off the Pacific, special delivery from Japan. There are wonderful things about Eugene--my neighborhood, my friends, my sweetheart, the size of life around here--but I sure do miss my homeland sometimes.

That said, I'm teaching a four-credit course with my friend and colleague Annie Zeidman-Karpinski, and so far it's exciting and fun. It's on environmental research methods, and we're team-teaching it as an interdisciplinary course from the perspective of a humanities reference librarian and a science reference librarian. (She's the scientist.) It's a lot of work, and there isn't enough relief from the rest of my job to really even things out, but it's worth it. Great experience, good group of students, and four hours a week with a good friend who's a big geeky librarian, just like me. Yay!

The reference desk, on the other hand, is feeling a bit like an intellectual gas station at the moment, because most students haven't started doing any research yet. So far this evening:

• How do I find print copies of Time magazine from the 1950s and 1960s? (Approximately a million students are asking this tonight, for a Journalism project due tomorrow.)
• Where can I get a French-English dictionary?
• Where can I find information about the separation of church and state, and how should I approach my essay on the separation of church and state, and is there more information available on the separation of church and state in education or in government, and are those the same things? (Beginning researcher.)
• Where can I find some materials to help me with my creative writing assignment, which is about the creation of the self? I need non-fiction items, and I'm not sure what that means.
• Where can I get my password for my UO email account?

I'm gearing up for ALA next week too...wishing I could tesseract there instead of spending 12 hours in airports each way. It's always 12 hours, no matter where you're going. The airlines like to be consistent about that.