Depaul

Talk about potpourri, this week's DePaulia, the student newspaper of DePaul contains the following highlights:

Wow, I don't recall this ever happening: The phone rings at the reference desk. I pick it up. And the recorded message begins, "This is a message from Credit Card Services".

"Credit Card Services"? At the University? I have to admit that it took me a moment to think about this. Then I hanged up.

Actually the school year started on Tuesday but it's the first day back for me!

On a side note, DePaul Library now has a new Twitter account: http://twitter.com/dpulibrarian

Here's something interesting. Andrew Sullivan, on his blog, The Daily Dish, has been featuring a series of user-submitted photos called, 'The View From Your Window'. And wouldn't you know, Saturday, he ran a picture from DePaul!

We had a wonderful turnout of close to 20 librarians from all parts of the Chicagoland area. Knowledge and skill-level ran from seasoned veterans to people being introduced to Drupal for the first time.

[read more after the jump...]

Project Demos & Participation

Made it over to the early voting station at the Lincoln Park Branch of CPL during a break. It's for the Primary to replace Congressman Rahm Emanuel. The last time I had been there was in October for the General Election. Needless to say, the one or two people waiting to vote this time round in no way matched the scores of people all packed in and waiting just a couple of months ago. Instead of close to an hour, it took maybe 5 minutes.

I'm pleased to announce a Chicagoland Drupal4Lib BoF on Friday, 3/20 (1:30p-4p) at DePaul's Loop Campus, 1 E. Jackson (10th fl., Rm# 10028), Chicago.

GOALS OF THE CHICAGOLAND DRUPAL4LIB BoF

The Chicagoland Drupal4Lib BoF will be an opportunity for librarians to get together and discuss how they use (or would like to use) Drupal in a library context. We'll ask people to present projects they're working on and we'll field questions on problems and approaches to implementing Drupal. All levels of knowledge from expert to n00b are welcome.

Doing my Current Cites at the Reference Desk in between patron requests.

UPDATE: And hot off the presses, here's the latest issue of CurrentCites for November...

So I came up with the brilliant idea of ducking out from work to go to the Early Voting location at the Public Library just across the street.

Bad move. After filling out the form and giving them my ID, I was led into a waiting room with more than 60 people! This is going to take a hundred years. My colleagues at work probably think I skipped out of town.

[Note: the above was written while I was marooned in the waiting room. And yes, I finally got out and was able to resume normal reference services.]

Today was my first day doing reference at DePaul University Library. I grabbed a couple of volumes of the DLB and a volume of the NUC (Pre 1956) and I was in 7th Heaven. It's only a couple hours a week but I love it!