Leading up to the election, the library invited students, faculty, staff, and the public to indicate their voting preferences in the “Cole Poll,” which was part of the election display on the 3rd floor of the library. Voters could choose from three slips of paper and place them in the corresponding jar: Blue (Democrat), Red (Republican), or Yellow (Independent). With 159 participants, here are the results:

BLUE (Democrat): 84
RED (Republican): 14
YELLOW (Independent): 61

Some of the yellow slips included the names of their preferred candidates. These ranged from Ralph Nader to “Sarah Palin (not McCain)” to Mickey Mouse.

We asked Jessica Johanningmeier, our Quantitative Reasoning Consultant, to look at our poll results, and this is what she found:

“Based on the expectation that each category should get 1/3 of the votes,
a chi-square analysis shows a significant difference in what we observed
compared to what we expected (p < .001). While “Independent” received
approximately 1/3 of the votes (38%), “Democrat” received many more than
expected (53%) and “Republican” received a great deal fewer (9%). Cole Poll
voters showed a strong preference for Democrat over Republican.”

The 2008 elections brought about many changes for the nation, including the election of Democratic candidate Barack Obama to the presidency, and the library is not exempt. For those who follow developments in the Dewey Decimal Classification system (don’t we all?), you’ll be interested to note the following changes:

973.931 Administration of George W. Bush, 2001-2009
973.932 Administration of Barack Obama, 2009-

The Bush administration has received its closing date, and now we are ready to fill a whole Dewey number with works about the Obama administration. We also discovered that the cutter number for Obama (the combination of letters and numbers after the Dewey number) is “Ob1,” much to the delight of the Star Wars fans who work at the library.