Report from Ocala

I know I should be grading papers right now, but I wanted to take a break to say hello. I don't want to clog up e-mail with something that is basically irrelevant to your work, but I wanted to catch you up on what's going on down here. I also want to apologize for not calling and for not notifying (some and/or all of) you that I was unable to call.

I arrived in Ocala late Monday night. My first workshop was at 8:30 am for a group of Nursing students. Several of the students had never been in the library before (the allied health building is separate, but I don't think this is an excuse). I completed a total of 5 workshops that day for approximately 100 students. In three of the workshops, I completed a presentation on the start-to-finish process of writing a paper (I call it anatomy of a paper). In the other courses, I completed kind of an APA-mash. Most of the instructors wanted me to talk about APA and writing and databases for the entire period (2 hours). I know that's too much information for students, and at times I know a few of them were bored with just what I covered.

This is the first week that I've tried to be entirely PowerPoint free and I think that I've been pretty successful. I used the white board to list various points and information (in either theme-workshop). In the "anatomy" class, we pretended like we were writing a paper on the topic assigned by the instructor, and worked together to brainstorm, research, etc. I was very impressed by the number of students who interacted with me and provided informed opinions and ideas. I also had many good questions during the APA workshop.

The most unsuccessful workshops by far have been the times that I've done database demonstrations. The demonstrations have been brief - no more than 15 or 20 minutes - but I could tell the students just weren't interested in watching me search. The highlight was when I compared searches in Google to searches in the database. I also related the importance of narrowing a topic to searching in Google - how narrowing can take your results from 800,000 to 800.

I have collected worksheets and surveys in all workshops, if for no other reason than to prove that it most certainly can be done. After collecting the handouts, I immediately stapled them to the worksheet so that I knew how to enter them when I fill out the Excel sheet (which will be on the plane ride home). Most of the feedback has been positive, although I have not examined any of it thoroughly.

Aside from workshops, I've done quite a bit of work cleaning up the library. I begged Hilary to come to Ocala today (and she was a huge help, Thank You Hilary!!!). Together, we weeded about 500 very outdated materials (folks, we just scratched the surface) and purchased about 150 books from Barnes and Noble.

I am trying a new method of cataloging, and we will see how it works. I've entered all of the books into OCLC and given each book a spine label and a barcode. I then entered the ISBN and barcode number into an Excel chart so that I can do the ALEPH portion later even if I'm not in front of the books. This may be a good exercise if you have multiple books to catalog or if you know you're not going to be at the desk for several hours, but will still have access to a computer.

In all, this has been a good but exhausting experience. I've put in 12 hour days (at minimum) all three working days this week, and I haven't touched any of my System responsibilities. I am looking forward to working with a new librarian (we have a great candidate right now) to get that campus back to the place it should be in terms of both resources and services.

10 workshops in 4 days.... 150 books in OCLC in 3 hours.. who knew?

-E