January – 2009 – Spurious Tuples

Monthly Archives: January 2009

Thinking about “scholarly” vs. “popular” serials

January 30, 2009 – 2:27 pm

We’ve all done the classic “how to tell a scholarly journal from a popular magazine” lesson, usually with a face-off between something like Newsweek and The Journal of Neurobiophysiology or Critical Discourses in Freudian Meta-Rhetorical Analysis. And we all tell our students that one of the classic hallmarks of a “popular” or trade magazine, as […]

By Catherine | Posted in Instruction, Reference | Comments Off

The things students don’t know…

January 27, 2009 – 2:21 pm

I just had a student come to the reference desk with a question about a business assignment about India for a class I taught last week. (Every student in the class has to write the same memo about India, so I’m not worried about her confidentiality: she could be any one of the 19 students […]

By Catherine | Posted in Reference, Students | Comments Off

In which I slap myself in the forehead

January 21, 2009 – 4:56 pm

WHY didn’t I think of this sooner? I’ve been struggling to explain EBSCO’s “My EBSCOhost” feature to students for a year now. Most times, when I explain that it’s a way to save citations and articles (and other stuff, but I generally don’t go into that) from one session to another, or a useful way […]

By Catherine | Posted in In the classroom, Instruction, Students, Those dang databases | Comments Off

Why I’m not on Facebook

January 18, 2009 – 4:40 pm

Okay, I’m admitting it: I’m not on Facebook. Not at all. Don’t have a profile there, and never have. Do I have to turn in my NextGen Librarian card now? It’s not that I’m social-media-challenged; I’ve got a blog (and not a hosted blog, either), don’t I? I’m on Twitter, del.icio.us, and Flickr; I use […]

By Catherine | Posted in Professional issues, Students | Comments (2)