I'm starting to feel more comfortable working at the reference desk. Our patrons are, for the most part, friendly and grateful for the help we offer them. Today there seemed to be a theme of students needing help searching the catalog and locating materials in the stacks. At our reference stations there are two monitors -- one for the staff to work on and one for the patron to observe. I found this especially helpful today because it allowed me to to show the students how to find things instead of just finding the items for them.

     Jill showed me the UW libraries Forward website, which is a new shared catalog initiative through UW-Madison wherein you can search all the UW libraries' holdings. Jill indicated that the options for narrowing search queries are better here than on the UWEC catalog when it comes to searching for certain materials. An example she had was a student searching for a musical score. Forward allows for narrowing based on fromat, where "score" is one of the options. The material was easily found on Forward, where it may have taken quite a bit longer to find it in the UWEC catalog. However, whatever you find on Forward you need to bring back to the UWEC website in order to order it through interlibrary loan - this feature isn't available on Forward yet.