Last Tuesday we met in Memorial library. I showed the three students how to use the library catalog not to look for a particular book but instead to get a sense of the general call numbers where most of the books in/about their languages are housed. They spent about 10 minutes looking through the catalog and then we headed up to the stacks. I've been using the book delivery service all year and I think this might have been the first time I've been in the stacks since I came back to Madison last year. It brought back memories of grad school.
We spent most of our time in the PL section on the fourth floor, and each student got about 3 or 4 books. I recommended that each get at least one textbook, one grammar, one dictionary, and one narrative book (short stories or a novel). Some had already acquired some of these.
We went to look at one other section that was coming up a lot in the catalog and it turned out to be proverbs. We talked about how hard it would be to use such a book because you can't tell from a list of proverbs which ones are most commonly used. I suggested they instead get native speakers to write lists of common proverbs for them to learn.
Finally we sat in a study carrel for a few minutes and they gave updates on their progress over the past week. All of them are finding using the website challenging — I'll have to figure out a way to streamline that in the future.
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