Saturday, August 12, 2006
August 12 (the first one), 2006
Back to Work
We only have about 10 days left in our voyage, and it’s crunch time. The students are working on their papers. Just as on land, many have waited until the last minute to do their research and write their papers. The library has been hopping for the past two days. Kinda nice to be doing more reference work, I must admit.
Mostly the UVA database access is going smoothly. Find@UVA doesn’t seem to work on the ship – something we should investigate. I’m not sure why it doesn’t work here. So, I’m back to figuring out where the full text of articles might appear if it’s not in the database in which the student was searching. Also, downloading PDFs is problematic. If they aren’t too long downloading is going pretty well, but longer ones definitely take too long depending on the time of day and how many people are on the internet.
The students, as most of us, all assume that they should begin (and end) their research online. I am working to convince them to consider using books for some of their research. This is a small library, but it is geared toward the areas they are researching to some extent. For basic background information it’s certainly their best option. The Winnebago online catalog has some searching quirks and the students aren’t used to it the way they are their own universities catalogs, so I end up doing much of the book searching for them. Many of them have found books in this collection which were perfect for their research.
Back to Work
We only have about 10 days left in our voyage, and it’s crunch time. The students are working on their papers. Just as on land, many have waited until the last minute to do their research and write their papers. The library has been hopping for the past two days. Kinda nice to be doing more reference work, I must admit.
Mostly the UVA database access is going smoothly. Find@UVA doesn’t seem to work on the ship – something we should investigate. I’m not sure why it doesn’t work here. So, I’m back to figuring out where the full text of articles might appear if it’s not in the database in which the student was searching. Also, downloading PDFs is problematic. If they aren’t too long downloading is going pretty well, but longer ones definitely take too long depending on the time of day and how many people are on the internet.
The students, as most of us, all assume that they should begin (and end) their research online. I am working to convince them to consider using books for some of their research. This is a small library, but it is geared toward the areas they are researching to some extent. For basic background information it’s certainly their best option. The Winnebago online catalog has some searching quirks and the students aren’t used to it the way they are their own universities catalogs, so I end up doing much of the book searching for them. Many of them have found books in this collection which were perfect for their research.
