Wednesday, March 23, 2011

ID please

I have never been a fan of the library.  I've always thought it was like this secret club for all the smart kids. Where you have to knock a certain amount of times and I can never remember it's 2 or 4  and then the librarian gets aggravated with me (quietly of course) and says, "ID please"and after its been scanned they point me over to the Nancy Drew books and say, "well good luck with that."

After I had my first child I embraced the library; we would go to story time twice a week and check out numerous books every visit. I never ventured past the young readers section, and I was totally fine with that.

My first semester at KSU dropped me right back into the knocking 2 or 4 times dilemma. I needed the library for a project on South Africa, most of my sources came from on line sites but for the sake of presentation (and my grade) I needed a "real book" source. When your not familiar with libraries in general, having your first real experience in a college one is a little nerve racking.
Which floor are the TR books located?
Why are the references books always so far away from the bathrooms?
And where in the hell is the card catalog?!!

This semester my English class has been as hard core as they come(well for a non-English major anyway). We've had a paper due every week, sometimes 2 in a week. 40% of our final grade will be based on a 4 page-10 source annotated bibliography that's due on Monday, followed by (a few weeks later) a 12 page research paper on a topic that we had to come up with based on the book the Omnivore's Dilemma, that we've been reading this semester.

Needless to say, I've had to find my "hidden inner love" for the library. The first time I ventured in to get some research done, the kids at the information desk were a tremendous help. They might of been laughing at the old lady with all the questions but they at least pointed me in the right direction and NOT towards the Nancy Drew books.

I found myself today needing to add a quote to my paper that I found in one of the millions of reference medical books that I've looked through in the past month. I walked to my aisle, dropped my bag on the floor right in front of my book, popped a squat and started writing. When I was done I looked around and chuckled to myself. I laughed because, the old lady was feeling pretty good in the old smart kids hangout. I realized that there never was a secret knock, it was (once again) my own insecurities holding me back all these years.

Then I looked around again to make sure no one was watching me because getting down on the floor that I was now so comfortable on, was so much cuter than getting up off of it :)

1 comment:

Kristin said...

I've been thinking about you and wondering how the semester was going!! You can do it. Don't let those obnoxious 20 year olds do you in.....you can slap mine if she bugs you!!!

I often wonder if you and K cross paths. I need to get your schedule each semester just to see!!!