Mama Leah's Chicken Soup

"When a man eats a chicken, one of them is sick," says Tevye in _Fiddler on the Roof_.

We recently had the need AND a stewing hen for soup, thanks to a cold and a stewing hen from Little Tree Farm.

Our favorite chicken soup recipe is from Mama Leah's Jewish Kitchen, by Leah Loeb Fischer and Maria Polushkin Robbins (c1990).

The best part of making the soup was that the stewing hen came with feet!

Chicken feet!	Chicken feet in the soup ...
The second best part was eating the soup! Tasty soup!

What They Learned in Class

I taught a "one-shot" session of The World of Mass Communication this semester. It's a 100-level class designed to introduce students to the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

I went in to talk about doing better Google searches AND to show them some of our spiffy news databases. I created a LibGuide for the class which got a lot of use that day in class an a wee bit of use following the class.

As usual, I asked the class to write a bit about what they learned in class. Because the class had over 300 students, we were not able to talk about what they learned. Instead, the professors asked students to write in Sakai (our course management system) a sentence or two about what they learned.

Professor Boynton sent me a copy of what they said. The comments themselves were helpful, but I also enjoyed looking at what they learned in a word cloud.


I was happy to see that several of the things they said they learned were topics I had taught in class: "I learned how to use quotes in google to get more exact search results" and "I really like the chat option that the library offers so that many of our questions can get answered!"

One of their assignments was to find a blog and analyze it over the course of the semester, so I taught them that they could do a fancy Google search with inurl:blog -- which is why that phrase shows up in the tag cloud.

The class was great fun to teach, and the word cloud helps me analyze what they learned in my session.

Ginger snaps!

As I do every year, I made a ginormous batch of ginger snaps. My work, spouse's work, our fridge ... so many reasons to have ginger snaps!

The cookies taste best after a day or two, and they freeze beautifully!

The wet stuff: eggs, butter, molasses, vanilla.	The dry stuff: flour and four tablespoons of ginger powder (and a few other things).
The dough is very sticky!
Lots of little dots on the baking pan turn into ...	Lots of ginger snaps!

Check out the recipe on Evernote.

Infographic: Research on Students' Research Habits

The good folks at the University of Washington's Project Information Literacy created a great infographic of their findings about 11,000 college students' research habits:

For the text-based learners among you:

• 70% use Wikipedia 
• 92% use search engines

Other resources students use for course research:

• 88% library databases
• 83% instructors
• 30% librarians (emphasis mine)

What's most difficult about doing research?

• 84% getting started

and check out the 12 adjectives students use to describe how they feel about research assignments!

For more, check out the Project Info. Literacy website, where you can read an article from College & Research Libraries about Alison Head's research, watch a video, and more!

Advertising & Libraries

I got some great ideas from the Next World Media Symposium held at UNC Chapel Hill on October 25, 2013. So many of the topics & takeaways were tweeted by students at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, so I created a Storify of the speakers' pronouncements -- and how they relate to libraries.

I went to the session hoping to get some ideas on how to better help my advertising students ... and I came away with ideas about how to better promote and advertise libraries.

Above all, keep it simple. Think about Daryl Evans' quarters -- let's throw only one or two quarters at at time rather than the 100 we think they might need someday.

Read on for more.

Thanks to UNC JOMC professors Gary Kayye, JoAnn Sciarrino, and John Sweeney for a wonderful session!

"Twitter for the Skeptical Professional" in MHC Alumnae Quarterly

Love the image of MHC Founder
Mary Lyon with the Twitter bird

I recently wrote a fun article called Twitter for the Skeptical Professional for the Mount Holyoke College Alumnae Quarterly.

The article's audience is alumnae "over a certain age" (as I am myself, having graduated in the mid 1980s) who have heard about Twitter but think it's silly or not relevant to them.

I talk about how I use Twitter at work (to promote the library) and for fun (to connect with science peeps). I hope it's helped persuade some of my skeptical sisters to give Twitter a try; if you or someone you know is similarly skeptical, feel free to share this article with them.

Suggestions and Outcomes of PR Writing Assessment

I'm delighted to share student suggestions and outcomes from Dr. Lois Boynton's PR Writing class.

The suggestions include (but are not limited to):

• Asking professors to give students extra credit if they talk to me as they are working on their assignment. I've mentioned this to two folks who are enthusiastic.
• Send a press release to faculty about our new website (when it goes live). This idea works particularly well in a school with a public relations department, but it's a good idea for any discipline.
• Emphasize the instant-ness of chat in classes. I think I'll ask a student volunteer to use the chat while in class - how much more instant can we get? 
• Bring in a student from an earlier semester with me to talk about how helpful it was talking to me about the class assignment.

The output includes (but is not limited to)

• A series of three short videos where I demonstrate what happens in a library interaction - and show that I don't bite. Check out the first one (the other two are on YouTube and embedded in some of my LibGuides):
• A flyer to be made available to students about what the Library has to offer. I originally balked at the idea of a flyer (print? really?) but this is the second group of PR students who recommended one, so I went ahead and made one.

• I printed 100 copies, which I've placed around the building and will share at the School's welcome reception.
• I will also post them in bathrooms to see if that increases awareness.

Now if I could just super-charge my Photoshop skills so I can create slides for the School's digital signage boards ...

As I implement more of the students' ideas, I'll blog them. 

PR Recommendations for the Park Library

My library recently served as the client for Dr. Lois Boynton's PR Writing class, where her students analyzed the Park Library from a public relations perspective. It was both a humbling and terrific experience, and I got several great bits of advice and some great videos out of the experience. Plus, I got to see some of the work our PR students do - which will help me help future PR students. It was win - win - win.

image from Microsoft

I'll start with the students' Strengths / Weaknesses / Opportunities / Threats analysis, interspersed with some comments of my own. I'll share the students' suggestions and outcomes in another post.

The strengths, as defined by the students, include:

• The library's chat feature (tho' one student had not used it, thinking it would be as slow as email; note to self: promote chat as "Instant Chat").
• The Library's website and all its resources.
• Return books from any library to the Park Library.
• Food & drink allowed in the library.
• Therapy dogs during finals.
• The Library's location within the building where most department classes are held.

The weaknesses & threats, as listed in the students' SWOT analysis, include:

• Not enough visuals on our website; library website is difficult to find on department website.
• Longer hours (mentioned by multiple students).
• We don't have a free campus printer (aka CCI printing).
• Funding.
• Students are afraid to ask questions or don't want to ask for help.
• Olivia H. wrote "Easy access to library materials on Park's website could mean fewer students actually using library facilities because of home access."
  Olivia adds: "Although Stephanie makes presentations to many classes, students may forget about the resources and information that she shares as the semester goes on."
• Too much information on our website and in our "extensive online collection." 
• Faculty don't encourage use of library in their classes.

Opportunities & recommendations

• More visuals! (on the website and on the School's digital signage boards).
• More promotion generally -- through flyers and bathroom signage.
• Extended hours.
• Update the website.
• Adding a free campus printer.
• More information about Stephanie (which seems strange to me, but this was mentioned several times, over two semesters).
• Social media contests such as hashtag promotions on Twitter or Instagram.

This statement highlights my aspirations quite nicely: "The goal is not just to get [students] in the door but to also to get them comfortable enough to ask questions while they are there." (emphasis mine)

So ... hearty thanks to Dr. Boynton and her PR Writing students. I hope to implement a few of their ideas this semester; and I will post about them as I do.

Working with Students, Non-traditionally

I've branched out into non-traditional librarian-student interaction, and it's been a great success.

This spring, I collaborated with JOMC professor Spencer Barnes and his Infographics students. Dr. Barnes asks the students to create (amazing) infographics over the course of the semester. In the past, I have worked with him and his students to find great statistics for their work; my favorite sources for them are the Statistical Abstract of the United States and Statista; see the full list of sources on this library course page I created for JOMC 182: Infographics.

That's the traditional part.

Here's the non-traditional part: I thought it would be fun to graphically display some library statistics for UNC's Library Snapshot Day, and I asked Dr. Barnes if his students would be able to design something for me. He graciously agreed to let "library statistics" be one of the three topics students could tackle for their final project.

I am so pleased with the results! Three students participated, and my favorite is this, by sophomore Marissa T. It's a striking representation of library service, collection, and "library as place" over the past year or so.

This summer, I'm working with professor Lois Boynton and students in her JOMC 232: Public Relations Writing class. The Park Library is their semester-long client, and they are working towards increasing students' awareness of library reference services. I'll blog about their efforts once their project has finished.

Non-traditional student interaction is as rewarding as traditional student interaction, AND it's helped me enhance the Park Library. Win, win, win.

Search: Fail

image from findicons

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox had a nice (if sobering) column in March: "Converting Search into Navigation."

Nielsen's conclusion: "Users are incredibly bad at finding and researching things on the web. A few years ago, I characterized users' research skills as 'incompetent,' and they’ve only gotten worse over time. 'Pathetic' and 'useless' are words that come to mind after this year's user testing."

His study focused on e-commerce websites, but I think the results would be even worse if we studied user search behavior for academic purposes. His first user had trouble finding a pink iPhone case on Amazon, largely because she was unable to translate her meaning into something that Amazon could understand, or as Nielsen put it, she did not "realize that Amazon uses a full-text search that doesn't understand the meaning of a query."

Nielsen suggests that websites should be designed for "mediocre searchers." I know that the UNC Library is trying hard to do this with its book catalog and Articles+ super search. Sadly, library database vendors aren't as good at this.

What's the solution? At a minimum, be aware that your students aren't as search savvy as you think they are — they are likely not as search savvy as you are.

In an email to faculty, I added: in an ideal world, I'd have you invite me to come talk to you students. An interim step is for you to tell your students to come talk to me (or another librarian) about improving their searches in Google and using better resources like America's News (for news articles) or Communication and Mass Media Complete (for scholarly articles in JOMC areas).

But again, remember that students aren't as savvy at using Google as you (or they) think they are!

found through Greg Notess'  | Search Engine Showdown April 2013 blog post "Searcher Behavior."