Federated search: hats off to the U of Wisconsin!

I have great admiration for the University of Wisconsin Libraries, and their willingness to share information on their various projects (I should send them a fan letter sometime.) Their materials have helped me more than once. This time my hat (black fleece, since it's below zero) is off to their Metalib Assessment project. This year they've been assessing their federated search product, Metalib. And they're terrific enough to share their working bibliographies and other documents. We're thinking of assessing our federated search product (we have CentralSearch), and some of the conversations stray away from actual assessment of the product. The UW Libraries are providing a great example. Thanks to them!

End of term is in sight

I've been "away" at the Minnesota Library Association conference, and then the Thanksgiving holiday, so I haven't posted for awhile. When I got back to work after the holiday, I had several requests for student appointments. Aha! It's December now, so the semester is almost over, and the students need me (it's nice to be needed.) While it can be challenging to deal with this, juggling their schedules and yours (just coming in to find me may not be the best option), it IS great to be helpful to students. And it's nice in a way to have another marker in the turning of the year (so THAT assignment is here again.)

One way that I think I'm good as a reference librarian is that I can usually put myself in the place of the novice user (I've been confused by many web interfaces in my day, much less subject headings, etc.) While I've been through THAT assignment many times, I can understand what it must be like to a novice. I went to a very interesting presentation at MLA about what some of our high school students are and aren't learning about library research (I need to post on that in the near future), and I realize that for many first- and second-year college students, this whole idea of Subject Headings is a new thing. Knowing this helps me help them.