Another semester is done! Just got back from my last Reference class, where Jean, Linda, Stephanie and I presented on Geographical Sources and had a tremendous amount of fun doing it.
We decided we needed to do everything we could to wake the class up (especially since we were 4th to present so it was almost 9pm) so we donned hats (with a "guide" theme -- a safari hat, an italian guide hat complete with feather, a sort of camping-guide hat and my new Miss-Marple-y hat -- and yes, it was mostly an excuse to go back to the very cool costume shop and visit my favorite sales guy there -- and Jean and Stephanie had their own hats already), gave out chocolate globes and a souvenir box.
We also asked four quiz questions at the end (actually had classmates ask them so we had double the class participation) and gave out Kinder Surprise Eggs as internationally-themed prizes to the people who answered correctly. It was definitely fun -- and somehow we managed to cover quite a lot of material on maps, atlases, gazetteers (my part), and travel guides. Plus, since my final example of a gazetteer was the Dictionary of Imaginary Places, I switched over at the end to my witch hat from Gizmo, which seemed to be quite a hit. Special thanks to Alan for all his advice on gazetteers.
Here are our questions so you can play along at home (no additional prizes though, sorry):
1. A student is completing a geographical treasure hunt and one of the questions is to determine the latitude and longitude of San José. Which resource would you use?2. A patron comes to the reference desk and asks, "I'm going on a vacation to the Netherlands and would like to know the best places to go for Paas festival celebrations?" Where would you look? [This is an inside joke, since the Paas festival figured prominently in our recent class reference treasure hunt]
3. Ten librarians are pooling resources to buy a house together in the Bay area. In deciding where to buy, you'd like to know the magnitude and location of earthquakes and the faultlines in the area. Where would you look?
4. After determining the only houses your group can afford are those right on top of a faultline, you sadly say goodbye to your nine librarian friends and start looking for another area that has a similar climate to that of San José. Where do you begin your search?
Plus I just turned in my last Online Searching assignment, so I'm officially done!
2 weeks until summer courses start...
[Answers: 1: Gazetteer, 2: Travel Guide, 3: Map, 4: Atlas]
Posted by Emily at May 17, 2004 10:39 PM