The Muppet Musicians of Bremen

Puppet Design Contest

For one task, although it was another scanning project, it was one in which I ended up also doing a little bit of cataloging. Every year since the late 1950s, the Jim Henson Company has send out company Christmas cards, all of which are in the Henson Archives. Currently, there is a Jim Henson Exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago called “Jim Henson’s Fantastic World,” a Smithsonian Traveling Exhibition. (Check it out!) The Museum of Science and Industry asked if we could provide any sort of Christmas decor for the holidays, and so my task was to scan appropriate cards that they may use. By “appropriate” I mean cards that all provide content that is in the property of JHC, because the company sold the rights to the Classic Muppets to Disney several years ago. I scaned many cards from the late 50s/early 60s, mainly designs that Jim did himself. This was one of my favorite tasks so far– for one, it is because I know exactly what the art will be used for, and that is a pretty neat thing– the museum is going to blow up some of the cards to poster-sized. For another, there were several missing items from the catalog because a number of the earlier cards were framed, and never really fully cataloged. So I actually had to dig into the files and provide missing information. I really enjoyed seeing this task through.

Another task was a bit of PR work, finding press bits (short sentences or phrases) from positive reviews of a currently running JHC TV show. In an archive that is part of a production company, PR is part of the job, and I really enjoy learning about this use of the archives. Another sort of PR/History project currently running is a blog/twitter feed project from a journal of Jim’s, never released into the public. The Red Book uses small clips from his journal (really more of a goings-on listing of events in the company’s life, premieres, meetings, guest-star appearances, etc). This and other blogs often post documents from the archives to supplement the content, and it is fascinating to observe the JHC archivist at work curating the content and the items for this project.

1. The amount of organization set up to keep track of the contents in a special library is immense. Not only do you need sound systems or organization for the objects and files, but there are records of records themselves. The other day I added to a document and created folders for files of off-site request forms and photocopy forms, important files for Tamiment but files that outsiders never actually see. By keeping track of how often services are utilized you can then try to streamline those that get used most often, or just keep track of general patterns.

2. The Tamiment Library is kind of like the Constitution. It may have some old content, but it is still living, breathing, and adapting. I filed a large bunch of new serials in the serials section the other day, and all of the items were newly published materials. Just because it seems like an historic library doesn’t mean it does not acquire new content. Although this seemed obvious to me with monographs, seeing the very same “New York Teacher” newspaper that I receive every few weeks (having been a UFT member for 3 years) made me realize just how adaptable a library needs to be to keep up with all new current publications and content. As well, serial folders and boxes and shelves need to be constantly updated, moved, and sorted to keep a system in place in order to know what we have.

3. Organizing materials takes a long time. This may seem obvious but it doesn’t really hit you until you try to divide up files by name of the person that the item is related to (which, in some cases, may seem to be hard to figure out!). Several weeks ago I divided up documents this way, and then checked to see if we had pre-existing files on the people, or if we needed to create new files. This was before any more formal documentation was completed. It also takes a certain degree of focus to accomplish these tasks.

4. Sometimes things get lost. Or one person has put items in one place, and this may not be clear to everyone. Overall, this place runs very smoothly. But once in awhile things happen that you just can’t control in a place where staff rotates at the reference desk, or by the fact that people just have different ways of accomplishing tasks. One interesting example of this concerns a group of students in a course who were all told to go use a certain set of archives here at Tamiment. For one, their professor did not tell us that he was sending his students here. This would have helped us prepare for their arrival– namely, we could have ordered their requested archives ahead of time, because they were off-site. Instead, researchers arrived ad hoc and we had to try to order all of their desired boxes. As well, some of their content overlapped. To further confuse, sometimes we would order boxes, they would be here, and when another researcher requested those same boxes, they might accidentally be ordered again, while still being here. It seems like there must be a way to streamline this system in order to avoid this. Again, this is difficult when you have a rotating reference and page staff.

First: Google itself. I learned several search shortcuts here. The main one I already know was that if you “quote” something it will return searches using that exact phrase. However, I learned several more. One example: using site:nyu.edu will narrow searches to a specific site, in this example, the NYU site, or site:.gov without domain name.  Another shortcut: a hyphen in front of a term stands for NOT, in order to limit searches and search a phrase without certain results. Google is secretive in terms of their search algorithms.

Next, Google Books: This project started at Michigan, Go Blue! This is very useful to find something, but not necessarily to read the whole book. Library catalogs have descriptive metadata, but they are not text-searchable like Google books is. Alexa showed comparative searches using BobCat and Google Books– and BobCat links a preview to Google books if has that book. It is also searchable. Google Books has content that is copyrighted (with limits) and books in the public domain (full text, pdf downloadable). Google books has a “find in a library” link most of the time, if you didnt come from BobCat and wanted to know if a specific library has it. Google’s site even recognized the IP address and saw that we were here at Bobst, and provided a link directly.

Google Scholar: Google scholar is very useful for finding a specific article if you have an incomplete citation. You can also search patents and legal opinions and journal. When searching in Google Scholar, pdfs that are available will be shown, but otherwise you will find a piece of an abstract but not the entire article. Those abstracts links to cited citations.  Additionally, if we are on campus and we have access to a specific journal, we will be able to link to that access directly through Google Scholar. You can also use settings to show if any article searches is available at NYU, or any library that you use regularly. Google Scholar also gives you an option to import your results or citations into the NYU compatible/hosted citation organization sites, RefWorks and EndNote. I am amazed as how connected Google is to the academic research world.

Google.com/unclesam was also something I had never seen! This is a Google search specifically for government documents. This Uncle Sam site is really useful for getting additional information. For instance, Alexa found a bill in LexisNexis, and then put that name into google.com/unclesam and found supplementary information.

news.google.com/archivesearch is another engine within Google. Many news archives have given Google the ability to search their collections. ProQuest is the academic version but has a few gaps, and sometimes this archive search is a good way to fill in any missing information. There is a timeline at the top of your search results that gives you the results based on the year, to see how relevant the topic is to that time. Most of these link to the full text.

Google Reader: I have an account, but it makes total sense that you would use this for academic needs rather than just personal interest. You can create rss feeds through ProQuest of academic journals, and add those to your reader account! However, Alexa recommended using a feed from the publisher, rather than using reader. I thought this was a creative thing to tell students about. Google Labs is also a way to keep up with new Google products, an Google patents show you pdfs of many inventions, including the patent drawing!

I think that it would be difficult to teach these classes when you consider that students are probably at all different familiarity levels with the university library. Some people in the class asked very basic and seemingly obvious questions, but that’s only that way to me because I have spent a lot of time observing people searching and using BobCat. In a specific class like this one where there is not a lot of time for those generalities, it is hard to cover everything else. However, this was a useful connection between Google and BobCat.

This class was quite useful and interesting. I was interested in it from two perspectives– one, as a graduate student, and two, as an educator. Watching Scott made me know that were I to be an academic subject specialty librarian I would want to spend time teaching these classes because it combines my interest in library science and teaching. I was also surprised to realize that I was already aware of so many of the tools on which he focused, which was exciting to realize that I have in fact learned quite a bit about university library systems (or at the very least, NYU’s). However, I would here like to share the strategies that I did learn about that I had not known about beforehand.

1. The availability of subject area librarians: Having spent time at Bobst and with various librarians at the reference desk, they seemed available to me, but I didn’t realize how readily they are available for general student assistance. While I know they are not always available for one-on-one consultations, the fact that the students can access them or e-mail them for questions seems quite useful.

2. The Web of Science: This database is fascinating! Once in awhile I remember looking at bibliographies of some of my favorite textbooks to find more sources of information, but this is a database that will do that for you. You can find out bibliographies for books, and find out the books that use a particular book in their bibliography, likened to Google Scholar.

3. Nothing circulates at the NYPL Research Libraries: Talk about a fun afternoon to look at old maps and other documents! (For a nerd like me, anyway.) I should take advantage if I need to do extensive research on a related topic that I might find information about there.

4. Common research assistant responsibilities: Research assistants are about to have borrowing privileges for the professors they work for. This is extremely useful. As well, research assistants can place items on reserve for courses, and can post reserve lists on Blackboard for the professors. This seems useful as well, particularly for professors who might want computer network assistance.  Scott also gave an interesting piece of advice: when directing students to articles on databases, you should direct them to the NYU reference page to that article, not the article itself– NYU controls their own web pages, but the database may change the direct link from their website. Seems really useful from a long-term perspective of assigning the same article year after year.

Overall this was a useful course, and I look forward to my Google workshop on Thursday the 9th!