Hi! I'm still here. I had an awesome summer going to the East Coast for the Athens Popfest and meeting lots of people who work for the libraries out there, including the University of Georgia Library where I worked for a month in serials once upon a time.

I start school full time in a week and accepted a temporary cataloging job organizing thousands of cds for a friend to sell. I'm using the delicious library program and it's pretty nifty when the cds are found in Amazon. I had a lot of trouble getting my iSight camera to work as a scanner, but I found if I moved the screen back and forth it worked better than trying to move the barcode around.

Also, I've been teaching one-on-one computer classes on Saturday mornings before the library opens. It is super nice to have uninterrupted time to spend with a patron on the computer and they've written really nice things on my evaulation sheets, so I hope my manager lets me continue. I do have to be explicit about what we can cover, someone wanted to learn an interior design program she saw in a home improvement DVD at the library. So I tell people things like "this is for beginners" and "we can go over the software on the library computers (Microsoft Office)" or "we can use the internet together". I really wish I had cobrowsing capabilities since I read so much about it while doing my review of the literature on virtual reference services (and I will post that paper to this blog, eventually). I tried our library's virtual reference service and had some pages "pushed" to me which was kinda neat, but I didn't get the best help from the librarian on the other end in terms of finding something I wouldn't have found on my own.

So I leave you dear readers with my latest search strategy, which is how I found authorative information that neither I nor the virtual librarain found the first time around: go to wikipedia and look at the links at the bottom of the article. In this case I was looking for haiku, and the haiku article had several good sources to find haiku linked at the bottom. Of course I'm afraid to get patrons started on wikipedia because they're not always evaluating the information they read online, but I'm sad neither me nor the professional thought of that strategy during our 25 minute chat.