Comments on: Reference Question of the Week – 6/12/11

By: Brian Herzog

Brian Herzog — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 11:52:38 +0000

@Oleg: Thank you (and @Ruth). And regarding your #2, you’;re right, that is the perfect time – I’m sure they’ll refer back to the email more than once, and that is a great way to give them tips in writing they can digest at their own pace. Thanks for the suggestions.

By: Oleg K.

Oleg K. — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 21:54:35 +0000

I’m with Ruth, Reference Questions of the Week is one of my favorite ongoing things in library blogdom.

As for your answer this week, two comments:
1) I’ve never found it awkward to ask for patron’s email address since it’s clear that I’m getting it to help them with something they need. No patron has ever looked at me weird when I ask them for it (nor a phone number, if I need to get back to them about a question later).
2) I don’t know how busy it was at the info desk when you were typing your answer, but a suggestion for the future would be to throw in a sentence or two about your search process or at least something about limiting searches. I’ve shown many people “advanced” Google techniques (librarian secrets :O) ) and they’re always surprised and amazed that there’s ways to find things using Google that goes beyond basic keyword searching.

By: Ruth

Ruth — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 11:28:28 +0000

I love these Reference Questions of the Week, I do enjoy a good mystery!

By: Brian Herzog

Brian Herzog — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 01:38:00 +0000

@Mary Jo: Thank you – I thought there must be more recent data. The breakdowns if offers are interesting, and I’ll send it to the students.

By: Mary Jo

Mary Jo — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 19:45:24 +0000

I love the way you explain your thought process. Following along, I stumbled upon:

http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/state_report/sat_perf.aspx

This link shows by district or school up through 2008-2009. Can also be filtered by gender, ethnicity, etc. Might be helpful?

By: Brian Herzog

Brian Herzog — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 22:40:14 +0000

@Ben: we actually do have a “desk” flash drive that we use for moving patrons files around in a pinch. It probably would have been more efficient in this case, since it would have been one less trip to the study room – but then I guess the trade-off is the kids don’t have the easy-access later on in their email.

I’m not sure what would be easier – is just seemed like, since their computer was so close, and on our network, there should be an easy way to IM the urls to them or something – kind of like the Bump app for sharing contact information. Hmm, but maybe smacking laptops together isn’t a good idea.

By: Ben

Ben — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 22:31:37 +0000

This may seem a little counter-intuituve, but if you find that getting the personal e-mail address of a patron to send them links is slightly awkward, you may want to consider having a flash drive around to which you can drag-and-drop URL shortcuts (alternatively, a text file with the links as well as any short context you think might be necessary). That way a patron can borrow the flashdrive, double-click the shortcut, and launch the found link, and you don’t have to ask for personal information. The only downside — aside from the fact that it may seem inefficient — is the potential loss of flashdrives.