On Thursday, June 11, I was able to leave my “regular job” for a few hours join librarians at the King Library for training on GOBI, a Web-based application the King Library uses for Web management.
On Monday, June 15, I came to the library again and Diana and I went over a project I will be doing using GOBI: finding possible titles for the business collection searching with special “fund” codes to find materials in the categories of marketing and decision science. Diana told me of other potential sources for finding materials, including Melvyl (the catalog of University of California libraries), Amazon.com, and recommended titles in the Wall Street Journal. We also went over what kind of criteria is sometimes used is selecting materials for the collection: e.g., if the library has multiple copies, if any of them have been checked out, indicating the titles are in demand, etc.
After lunch, I observed another librarian, Shannon, for a half hour of her time on Qwidget virtual reference duty. As in the previous case, there were no questions, but she did give me some helpful insight on her past experiences. Afterwards, Shannon showed Diana and me a Digital Learning Objective survey she had built to gage what students gain from information literacy classes. Diana explained this kind of data is useful for showing people such faculty and accreditors the value librarians’ presence has on campus.
At home this week, I logged on to questionpoint.org to familiarize myself with the questions people are asking in virtual reference. I tried to login to GOBI but I did not have the correct password, so my work with that program will now occur in the following week. Since there was a delay with that, I spent my extra time at home studying Captivate and the GMID (Global Market Information Database), as I will be creating a 3 – 5 minute tutorial introducing it to users.
