- Speed-weed your ready reference collection.
- Work a real-life reference desk shift... blind-folded.
- Make a halfway decent pot of coffee... then catalog it.
- Play a game of Trivial Pursuit/Scrabble against your most cantankerous faculty member.
- Explain Ranganathan's laws of library science through interpretive dance.
- Wrestle a cataloger.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Interviews, Doing presentations at
When hiring a librarian, many academic libraries try to fill part of the obligatory eight-hour interview with a presentation by the candidate. More often than not, the candidate is asked to "demonstrate a database." Zzz. When inviting candidates to your library to interview, make things more challenging by asking them to...
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or ask them to get up onto a study table and beatbox while improv-ing a fly library rap
I once suggested we promote a new service through interpretive dance. Another librarian even offered to choreograph, but somehow the idea never made it out of committee.
I'd much rather do any of those things than demonstrate a database. Much more fun!
"Work a real-life reference desk shift... blind-folded." -LOL
BTW - Thanks for reminding us to laugh in library land! You make my day.
I'll take the Trivial Pursuit game
Great ideas!
Or they could order something from the campus coffee house, see how close they come to filling the order correctly, and then try to eat it.
Don't ever wrestle a cataloger. We may be frail-looking, but we're dangerous in a cage match.
Some years ago I did, in several venues, explain LC's early Collaborative Digital Reference Project to assembled reference librarians with a brief (not sure it was "interpretive") dance. Reference librarians seemed to get it. Now that CDRS has become QuiestionPoint, however, I don't think I'd dare try it. That dance would take a troup on the order of Cirque du Soleil, I think.
But what if you are interviewing for cataloging position. Must you still wrestle a cataloger?
Thanks for the creative ideas. You just add value to what I did at Amazon, in my Listmania
I have cited you in my post.
Please leave you comments to improve this blog and the other blog.
I was told that I lost out on a position because I refused to do a canned twenty minute instruction session. Instead I wanted to discuss why teaching subject and genre searching in MLA Bibliography would create confusion in the mind of the average undergrad and suggested alternate search techniques. Needless to say that I probably wouldn't have fit in to the culture anyway.
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