Me and my Grandpa.I can now close the stacks part of the library while keeping the computer lab open so I can more easily go to lunch when I want. It's wonderful to have more control over my schedule again.
I've been doing catalog entry. I've done about 100+ books at his point and there are at least 300 to go. And then, once I get tape I can label them all! Yippee! I've been using the Populi library system that's connected to their college management software program since that's what the school already uses. Adding resources to the catalog is pretty simple. It lets you enter something by ISBN number and it pulls information from Amazon. This gives you a more or less full description of the contents for your resource page along with the authors and publisher. You have to enter all other data by hand. The resource page when created is not particularly streamlined but there are a lot of different field options. Except a series field for some reason. And you can't delete a resource or change it's status between available and unavailable. Apparently they're working on changing that. Sometimes it just refuses to enter things correctly at all and you just have to work around it.
You can, of course, assign multiple subjects of your own wording to each item and to be honest I only sometimes use LCSH or MeSH. I don't have thousands of books and I don't want there to be fifty different subject headings with only one item linked to them. These things are to help users find similar items or to let them browse for a useful topic. The wording needs to be something they'll think to look up. There's no way I'm putting the APA manual under the heading "Psychological Literature". Who's going to look for help with citations under that? Also, there's no reason to limit myself to three subjects when four will be better. I want things to be interconnected in such a way that when students browse the catalog they find things they hadn't thought to look at but find useful. I'll have to conduct a survey after they've been using it for awhile to make sure it works.
Yesterday I created an APA citation help sheet for the students and I've helped a couple that were sent by their teacher for instruction. I'm looking into how to make video tutorials for using online databases and to help teach reading comprehension and evaluative skills. I have no budget so I downloaded Windows Live Movie Maker and I'm thinking about getting CamStudio. I've also come to the realization that since the library is one of the only open doors on the hall I'm going to have to be ready to help not just students but anyone else who wanders in looking for information of whatever nature.
I'm almost done with Red Lights. It's just one long night for Steve the protagonist. He gets progressively drunker as he and his wife make the trip up to Maine to pick up the kids until eventually he decides his wife needs a lesson in understanding him when she objects to his stopping at bars along the way. He takes the keys with him into the bar to prevent her from driving off without him, which she threatened to do, and comes back out to find her gone. More drinking, one escaped convict, and lots of embarrassing drunken rambling about being men later and Steve wakes up in the car with a flat tire, missing luggage and wallet, a bad hangover, and no idea where his wife is. When he reaches a phone it turns out she never made it to where she was going. So he has to find her.
The narrative kind of feels like the passing of the highway under tires and also, unsurprisingly, like a drunken night out. It's a monotonous, nighttime journey, where roadside places are indistinct and very human emotions of hurt, annoyance, and confrontation come to the surface as the road wears on with nothing to do but watch traffic. Things start out very clear and get more and more blurry and less cohesive as Steve loses it, until he wakes up painfully alert with a squirrel watching him through the windshield. And then comes the shame, because he made a fool of himself, and the anxiety at being far from home with his wallet gone, and then the panic because he can't find his wife.
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