Today I had someone say they were sorry for bothering me at the reference desk because they were worried I was studying. Either I look like a young college student, or I need to stop appearing so studious!

Sometimes I hate hate hate the format/source formulas professors expect students to follow when they are doing research for their term papers, especially if they are too strict. I was helping a student today who needed books for her research. The best sources were books. We had plenty of books! But because she was permitted to use only 2 books and needed 10 journal articles we were stuck attempting to find journal articles on her rather general subject. It was like she needed information on ping pong, we had ping pong books, but whenever we searched for articles we were finding very very specific stuff that wasn’t that relevant to her interests, like a statistical survey of the snacking habits of left handed hungarian orphan ping pong players. We found a few articles that looked good, but the books that she wasn’t able to fit into her prof imposed research quota would have been better.