shinylib

Chat reference: live and pornographic

Wow. I am beyond excited. I just logged in to the admin account and reviewed our first day of chat transcripts.

We had 5 interactions, of which 3 were actual attempts to chat with us. One was someone testing and the last was a porn spam. Given that it’s the first day of summer term I am actually surprised there were 3 actual attempts to chat with us. We weren’t able to connect with everyone and that’s fine—sometimes yer gonna miss us. I’m just so excited that we’re actually doing this, pushing forward.

I am sorry for one of my librarians, who reported following the link and inadvertently viewing a few pics. I guess we’ll have to do some work on suggested practices with regard to receiving links via chat. I was highly amused at her response to the offending robot: “That’s not an appropriate question for our chat service.” She is made of win, that one!

It’s a pretty awesome feeling to log in to admin and see records that aren’t just you chatting with yourself in 3 different browsers.

Movement

There has been some movement on the chat front. We’re working toward a compromise on staffing models that allows everyone to feel comfortable…and still allows me to do an assessment after the first two quarters and adjust staffing as needed based on transaction data.

The key to compromise turned out to be the phone. I just got to a point where I couldn’t understand the intention behind all of the email I was receiving—so I just started calling folks and hashing things out.

I don’t think things will be perfect, they never are, but at least we can start making forward-going movements again.

Stress!

Lemme preface this post by saying I dig and respect my colleagues. I’m about to go on a major rant, but please don’t think I don’t value my coworkers. I am frustrated and emotional and they’re just feeling a bit more like co-irkers than coworkers at the moment. It will pass. If any of my colleagues are reading…well it’s a free world. Go right ahead, just don’t get passive aggressive with me in the workplace. We’re all adults.

As you know from my long-ass-list-of-junk-I’m-working-on-right-now post, we’re trying to get our chat reference program off the ground at PCC Library. This means we’re knee-deep in conversation about how to staff this thing.

I spent months trying to get folks to have a conversation about these things only to be told “yeah yeah sounds good” about my proposed ideas. Sure we can staff chat from the reference desk, it’s just like another phone line, right?

Now that some “practice” (I use the term loosely, very loosely) has actually happened, the librarians are deciding that maybe staffing chat from reference is too hard for them. I don’t think that’s true at all; they’re just scared. I’m really struggling with my boundaries as the web specialist. There’s a real temptation to say, “You know what? That lady who signs the paychecks seems to think I have some expertise in this area. That’s why she made me the web dork librarian. Just do it my way.” Yeah, that will totally make me friends in my library. Only not.

I sent an email to the librarians asking them to have a little faith in me, in the proposed pilot service, in themselves, and to give it the ole college try for Summer and Fall. I made promises to review transaction data and anecdotal responses at the end of Fall and reevaluate the staffing situation then. Data, data, data I kept saying. Why? Because it’s wicked easier to get the boss to sign-off on proposed staffing changes (or, eee, possibly dig up a few more hours for us from somewhere) with numbers in hand. We served X students, Y per cent of whom waited more than 60 seconds for a response. Based on on X and Y we should really try Z for Winter and Spring.

I even had some comments from various managers who saw my email and said that it was a very well-written email that made a lot of sense. So why did I get back what boils down to a “hellz no” from one of our librarians?

I get that things felt scary during practice (when you didn’t even have real patrons yet) but I also know that some of the librarians didn’t actually practice. Of their own admission, whenever a triage situation arose, they just dumped their pretend chat patron. “Oh, someone’s here, gotta go.” Well, that’s not stretching your skills and abilities at all, now is it? You can’t get better at typing “just a minute please, I have someone on the phone. If you need to go make sure to leave your email and I will follow up with you there,” if you’re not actually doing that.

So I’m super frustrated. The counter-proposal from the librarians is to staff reference from shifts in their offices. Remember this is a community college, not some fancy-pants university library. We don’t have the luxury of office hours and pretty much all of our time not spent teaching and manning the desk is spent in meetings or prepping for eleventy-nine other things. So this alleged time in the office doesn’t even exist. To propose that non-existent office time should be used to staff chat is not especially feasible.

There’s also the issue of inequity between campuses. Everyone is stretched thin and doing more with less. For some reason (dates back to before I was here) our librarians really get off on finger-pointing and insisting that things were better before one campus stole the other campus’ part-time librarian hours. At the campus I work for, we’re generally pretty sure that we’re getting the shaft in this battle, but we’re over it. There’s a perception that we have more hours of librarian allotted to us, so we must have it easier. We also see more students, open reference an hour earlier, and often teach WAY more classes…but hey, whatevs.

So I have a lot of fears that this magical librarian-in-an-office solution will really turn into “why don’t you guys do it, you have more librarians”. Which will then boil down to, “Hey Allie can do it all the time. She types more quickly and is better at that stuff.” And I am willing to sell my time. Hour for hour, desk time for chat time—but I don’t think that’s what they had in mind.

I have a lot more I could say on this, but I’m just getting myself irate while at reference. Egad, I can answer questions, the phone, chat, AND write blog posts at the same time. Maybe I am a freaking genius.

</vitriol>

Conversations

I had an interesting conversation with a student tonight. She mentioned that she had just transitioned from English language learner classes to “regular” college classes.

The writing class she ended up in focuses on political themes and she said she felt completely unprepared for political language. I hadn’t really thought about that. Sure the classes prepare you for basic college English, but then you end up in a Writing 121 that focuses on the 60s and you’re trying to decipher peacenik-speak anti-hippie rhetoric.  Or you end up in the writing class focused on popular culture references that are completely out of your framework. Most of the time students have no idea what kind of writing class it will turn out to be. As far as I know it’s completely at the discretion of the instructor. Sure the student could drop the class and try to take a different section, but that’s a total crapshoot when you’re competing with thousands of other students for the right spot in the right class at the right time on the right campus. Ugh, I don’t envy them.

What she didn’t say, but would have been completely justified in doing so, was that on top of this there’s the added layer of research language for which no one had prepared her either. As we looked at a few results in a fairly basic database search I could see her almost physically shrinking away from the screen. I backed up a few steps and tried to give her a basic rundown of what a database is and does (she’d already identified a need for articles, not books) and I think that was working for her.

I think on a more fundamental level she was struggling to understand why I was being so helpful. Maybe she was trying to figure out why someone had sent her to me in the first place (I got the distinct impression she didn’t wander in on her own). I finally realized she just hadn’t ever worked with a librarian. Once I figured that out I could assert the it’s my job factor in a convincing manner. I think we’re in good shape for a future visit.

I just wish her paper wasn’t due Monday. Or that she’d come in sooner. Something. It’s hard to go from zero to research in a short period of time.

Citation Woes

Hm. I am bummed. I just got word that a nursing student has threatened to file a grievance against one of the nursing faculty. The student received a poor grade on a paper due to the ridiculously non-APA citations she submitted.

The student alleges that a librarian told her that the citations were fine. She also claims that “some program” made the citations for her. I’m looking at the student’s works cited list and I can confidently say that she may have used various citation helps that came from within different databases, but no single tool generated these cockamamie citations.

Having said that, I don’t believe the student was intentionally doing anything untoward (despite the fact that her first citation comes from Homer & Simpson, 2007). When I check in Academic Search Premier, sure enough the database is generating incorrect APA citations. Each citation the student gave has the exact same flaw in the date section.  This tells me that she decided that Ebsco should do a better job than she would of providing citations and she went back and edited each of hers to match the date formatting given by the database.

Sigh. Add to this that only some of the Ebsco suite of databases provide DOIs for APA citations and others stilll use a Database name and retrieval date and we’ve got an intensely sticky situation. Others of our databases just don’t provide citation assistance–in the past that really vexed me but now I’m kind of wishing that none of them did if this is how it’s going to go.

One of our library faculty has suggested that we propose to all subject faculty who assign APA that they just accept incorrect APA citations until such time as the databases have caught up but I find that idea deplorable. You’ll be hard-pressed to convince me to teach students to do things incorrectly just because it saves a headache in the long run.

I have a lot more to think and say about citation styles, but first I need to finish prepping my talk for tomorrow. You can find me at the 2009 Oregon Virtual Reference Summit, where I’ll be speaking about creating buy-in for new reference mediums.

And I thought our questions were difficult…

We’ve been having a tough time supporting biology assignments. This isn’t really new but it comes with increasing frustration. Sometimes I feel like the biggest idiot, sometimes I feel like the Biology faculty need to get two clues and rub them together. We’re not at all sure what they are looking for, so we sure as heck are having a hard time instructing their students on how to find it.

Having said that, this email I saw recently on STS-l makes me feel a lot better about my shortcomings. At least I’m not being asked to answer questions of this caliber:

I cannot find *which* heme is formed from ferrous protoporphyrin IX. I think it’s Heme B, but cannot find out definitively. 2.) I need to know how and where best to search for DSC (differential scanning calorimetry) results for HSA (human serum albumin), A.) alone, B.) bound with three different drugs, and C.) simultaneously bound with the three different drugs AND that (or any) heme. The drugs are i.) ibuprofen, ii.) warfarin, and iii.) diazepam. All would most likely be buffered for control (buffer) comparison, and the heme may be bound to CO (or something else, like O2 or CO2). Any papers I have yet found only show one data curve and don’t address reproducibility, so I’m specifically looking for that aspect of the data. I have some ability with the Boolean terms, but the more complex strings get tangled. Any help will be much appreciated. Thank you!