Classes started today, so at the reference desk I got to experience the influx of students expecting that the library would have copies of their textbook available for someone to check out. Also I had someone wanting an official time estimate on their research project involving 40 things that they needed to look up on microfilm. Like number of minutes it would take per item to retrieve. And this is just the type of question that is sort of unanswerable because it depends on so many factors like, are you using microfiche or microfilm? How familiar are you with the microfilm readers? How fast can you scan things that you read? Does seeing a ton of text whiz by on a screen give you motion sickness? I was able to tell him that it would take more than a morning, and he wouldn’t be able to only spend 1-2 minutes per item to look it up and print it out.

Anyway one of the things I’ve been obsessing over at work is the creation of stable proxied links to individual articles for instructors who use our university’s course management system. So I taught a workshop on how to do this last week and it was fun because I was teaching a group of faculty who wanted to be there and had tons of questions. In contrast I do think that some freshmen composition students, when given the choice between library instruction and a sharp poke in the eye would pick getting poked in the eye.

I picked an article to demonstrate this proxied link building process that would be in line with the research interests of one of the less technically adept attendees, prompting a little mini-discussion in the back of the room:

“Oh, I’ve read his stuff!”
“Really?”
“Yes, his specialty is mumble mumble”
“Uh huh?”
“He’s a good historian!”

But it was nice teaching a more engaged class, it is something I have to try to replicate in the classes I usually teach.