Practicum Hours 33.5-37.5

Veronica had stuff to do (meetings) for the first part of the day, so I spent that time searching for reviews for the education books that she's considering purchasing. There was one series in particular -- the "Classmates" series, from the UK, I think -- that she particularly wanted to a review of, but I was only able to find a couple reviews of the individual books, which wasn't what she needed. And searching for the reviews in Google was -- surprise! -- very time consuming. Ultimately I did find one review of a mathematics book that was from an Education Book Review site sponsored by Michigan State. But that was it. ERIC was no help, since most of these books date from 2004.

After Veronica got out of her meeting, I went with her to man the reference desk. There were a lot of questions. One woman came up asking for the article, "The Rise and Fall of the American High School" from Education Week. She had no other citation information; the prof had pointed to it as a model to be emulated for the assignment, and the student insisted that this was the correct information. But it did not come up in ERIC, nor was there an article with the title in ProQuest, and nothing about it at the Education Week website. The student got rather surly when this was explained to her; eventually she told us to forget it, and that she had another question for us, about how to search for a subject for a paper. Veronica explained that the student would need to choose which topic she wanted the paper to be on before much could be done in the way of developing search strategies. The woman was directed to peruse the ERIC subject headings book, but she eventually disappeared without any further help from us.

Another man came up to the desk asking for biographical information on the holder of a medical patent filed in 1946. We were unable to find anything for him, and he started to list off people's names that he wanted to search for, only upon further query, the people turned out to be the guy's neighbors when he was growing up. It seems that this guy tends to ask questions like this rather frequently.

A large number of the questions were simply interested in using ERIC. Or really basic things like printing on the library computers.

The system went down twice over the course of the afternoon.