Meme me up , Scotty!

Because all the cool kids are doing it, here are five non-librarian blogs that I read on a regular basis:

1. Miss Snark, the literary agent. A daily hit from the cluegun keeps this wannabe writer on his toes.

2. Parent Hacks. Crowdsourcing child-care wisdom since 2005. I only wish I'd discovered this site sooner!

3. Whedonesque. All things Joss. Because I have a problem.

4. Simply Recipes. Food porn at its best!

5. High Maintenance Machine. The online sketchbook of Matthew Reidsma, one of America's up and coming indy comic artists (the fact that I occasionally appear in his strips have absolutely nothing to do with this plug*).

* Don't believe me? Check out Fleen's recent review of the genius that is Matt Reidsma!

Why don't you Twitter?

In case you missed it, there's a new Web 2.0 craze making the rounds: Twitter, a social networking service which allows you to post short dispatches from your browser, instant messenger, or even your cell phone. Posts are instantly broadcast to anyone who subscribes to them in their preferred method of delivery, making Twitter a real-time method of communication regardless of the platform. Since the format is intentionally truncated - 140 characters or less - Twitter encourages rapid-fire posts and is thus best suited for updates on the fly.

Not surprisingly there's been a lot of skepticism about the whole Twitter thing, not just from the Old Media (which reflexively hates on anything which threatens its hegemony, a la a recent article in the WSJ which went out of its way to knock both social networking and Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards) but from the established powers of the blogosphere as well - Wil Wheaton wonders what the point of it is, although that hasn't stopped him or someone impersonating him from creating a Twitter account - along with a coterie of 69 followers waiting for him post something!

I think this lack of interest may be a function of one's ability to blog in an unfettered capacity, as what Twitter does is enable someone who might otherwise be inclined to blog if not for his or her daily constraints of work and life to blog nonetheless, albeit in attenuated form. Perhaps my newfound obsession with Twitter would be less intense were I not so busy these days that blogging has become a rare luxury for me? I like to joke that Twitter is the crack cocaine of blogging, but maybe it's actually more like methadone - a way to get your fix, when the real thing ain't forthcoming.

At any rate, Twitter is worth a second look, especially for those of us in library-land.

(And if you feel like stalking someone, I'm oodja)

UPDATE: The folks at The Joy of Tech give us an amusing summary of "what not to tweet about on Twitter".

Dispensing all kinds of reference

"Excuse me."

I look up from the Reading Room desk to find a very perplexed-looking elderly gentleman. "Yes?"

The man looks at his wristwatch, up at our wall clock (which is still running an hour behind, natch), and back at me. "I was under the impression that this room closed at 10pm."

"We do."

The man looks at his watch again. "Was there some sort of time change that I missed?"

Daylight Savings - always good for at least one chuckle at a public service desk, though usually it's not three whole days afterwards! The frightening thing is that this guy has been running late for everything in his life since Sunday, kind of like Kramer in that episode of Seinfeld when he decides to spring ahead before everyone else.

Mmmm, delicious feeds

Like any good information professional I'm always on the prowl for interesting and useful RSS feeds. Well, here's a whole boatload of them, courtesy of Resource Shelf:

ResourceShelf friend Pete “RSS” Weiss sends along the following. For some of you, these might not be new. However, for others they will be and worthy of a quick mention.

+ Library of Congress and U.S. Copyright Office Feeds
Feeds include:
++ Library of Congress Subject Headings Weekly Lists
++ Library of Congress Classification Weekly Lists
++ New on the Web
++ New Webcasts
++ What’s New in Science Reference
++ Copyright Office: Current Legislation
++ Federal Register Notices

+ Historic Documents from the National Archives
Always something interesting. To see a historical document from another date, use this url:
ResourceShelf friend Pete “RSS” Weiss sends along the following. For some of you, these might not be new. However, for others they will be and worthy of a quick mention.

Share and enjoy!

The Library Ass gets a gig

No, that's not a gigabyte, it's an actual (non-paying) gig. A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Sourcebooks, Inc., an independent publisher located in Naperville, Illinois, who wanted to know if I'd be interested in reviewing some of their more recent imprints with no strings attached. Flattered as all get-out, I of course accepted, and yesterday I came home to find a DHL package on my doorstep that was chock full of books. So expect a couple of readers' advisory-style posts over the upcoming weeks!

Apropos of my imminent mancation to Florida to take in some Spring Training baseball with my brother and his friends, the first book I'll be featuring is The Entitled, a work of baseball fiction by six-time National Sportswriter of the Year and NPR commentator Frank Deford. At least now I'll have something interesting to read on the plane!

Coolness

Remember that thing I couldn't tell you about the other week? Well, now I can...

Ever since I made the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox, I've been enamored with the plugins that allow you to do a search via the engine of your choice through a simple text box and drop-down menu interface. Wikipedia, Amazon, IMDB, tags for Flickr and del.icio.us, and even OCLC/Worldcat are now just as easy to query as Google, but what I've really wanted has been a plugin for searching HOLLIS, the online catalog for Harvard University Libraries.

Well finally I got my wish, as this week the good folks on the MetaPAC Committee officially unveiled Harvard LibX, a Firefox extension developed by Virginia Tech University Libraries -- that's right, the folks who brought us ILLiad! LibX not only offers a HOLLIS search toolbar, but other embedded search functionality as well, such as the ability to right-click on selected text anywhere in the web and search it against Harvard library resources.

Is there anything that those Hokies can't do, I wonder?

What it's all about

This video created by Michael Wesch, a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University, has been making the digital rounds via just about every conceivable method of sharing (email, Google Groups, Facebook, etc.), but it's so damned good that it can't possibly hurt to share it one more time:

Can't stand losin'

So I get a call over the weekend* from my regular staff member, who is freaking out because her workstation crashed and she can't bring it back to life. While normally such hardware problems simply boil down to plugging in an unplugged doohickey or a cold restart and a kick to the CPU, this time it's the dreaded Blue Screen of Death™, which means IT is more than likely going to have to swap out the machine. The fact that this leaves our desk with half its operating capabilities means that having two people at the desk all weekend is just plain silly; moreover, my staffer not having access to "her" machine is a morale issue in and of itself.

Unfortunately however our IT department doesn't do weekends, and it's a long weekend to boot, which means that we're going to be a computer down until Tuesday morning at the earliest. Since I was scheduled to come in today anyway, I decide to make an early shift of it and see if I can't coax the bloody thing into booting past the BSOD - I restart in Safe Mode, try to restore to the Last Known Good Settings, and even try to make a boot disk only to be rebuffed at every attempt. Almost ready to resign myself to sending my work-study student home and flying the desk solo for the day, it then occurs to me that I could simply swap out a CPU from downstairs, as the Circ Desk uses identical hardware to ours and has a ton of idle machines on a holiday like today.

IT will doubtless not like this solution, but then again they aren't exactly making house calls today, are they? And it seems silly to declare ourselves dead in the water and put ourselves at a staffing disadvantage when all I have to do is unplug the wonky CPU and replace it with a fresh one. So this is exactly what I do, and now I don't have to worry about extraneous desk help or an irate evening and weekend staffer. Besides, it's always better to ask forgiveness than permission when these things happen anyway...

I get a kick out of exactly this kind of problem-solving. It makes me feel like Captain Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, who found his way around the dreaded Kobayashi Maru no-win scenario by reprogramming the simulation to allow for victory. When asked by his son why he would do such a thing as cheat on what Starfleet regarded as the ultimate test of character, Kirk responded simply: "I don't like losing."

Me neither.

* Yeah, somehow I'm always on call. Go figure...

Live by the Meeting Maker, die by the Meeting Maker

As continue to settle into my job as supervisor, I've noticed that I go to a lot more meetings than I used to, as what was billed as primarily a desk job takes on increasingly managerial (and dare I say professional) aspects. While some of this is a function of a recent change in leadership, I would hazard that a lot of this is simply the result of my being interested in the big picture and stepping up to take on additional duties and responsibilities whenever possible.

The price for such a go-getter attitude is a perpetual scheduling crunch that only seems to get worse as my available free time on the clock moves closer and closer to zero. This has been a blessing in disguise, however, as it's forced me to do something that I probably never would have done under my own steam in a million years: i.e., get organized.

Right now I'm using Google Calendar instead of the customary Meeting Maker supported here in the workplace to keep track of my time, as well as Remember The Milk! for staying on top of my tasks. What I like about this combination is that it's possible to do a mash-up the two services, so that your RTM tasks can be imported directly into Google Calendar. Remember The Milk! can also be updated by IM or text messaging from your cellphone, so it's relatively easy to jot down a task on the fly without having to completely stop whatever else you were doing.

I've also been experimenting with Zirrus as a to-do list manager, as I'm fond of the very simple "whiteboard" interface featuring colored tags that grow in font size depending on priority. In the end I might keep Zirrus as a personal to-do list and RTM as my taskmaster for work, since I don't seem to want to spend as much time fiddling around with the latter when I'm not on the clock. After all, isn't the point of productivity tools to save time?

Darn it

I was all set to gush about a cool new development here at the Big Library, but realized just a few seconds before hitting the "publish" button that we're not supposed to say anything about it publicly for another week and a half.

Darn darn darn darn...

What's so funny about alphabetical order?

"How does it work here?"

"Huh?" I look up from my computer, still at least three cups of coffee away from full functionality, to find a patron with that oh-so-familiar vaguely confused look on his face.

"I have a book on hold here. What's your system?"

This is of course where it gets tricky. 'On Hold' means a couple of different things in our Reading Room:

1. That the item has not been picked up yet since the patron ordered it

2. That the item has been placed on our 10-Day Hold Shelf by the patron

I can't tell you how confused both patrons and staff alike can get trying to determine which of the two above situations is in fact the case. Most of the time patrons are unaware of the fact that there are two separate 'hold' operations going on, and assume that an item once ordered will go out to 10-Day Hold rather than being held behind the desk until it is picked up for the first time. Insofar as many of our patrons use the Reading Room (which deals mostly in non-circulating items) much more infrequently than they do the Circulation Desk, I try to make sure that my staff is as patient and forgiving as possible in the process of figuring out what our patrons are actually looking for.

But sometimes it's hard, even for the supervisor.

"Umm," I dig deep for every last available ounce of my pre-noon social graces and empathy, as this is where the interview process can go south in a hurry. In these situations we have stock questions we ask of patrons without thinking that can very easily be interpreted as being accusatory in nature.

For example, my least favorite is 'When did you get the email?' From a staff worker's point of view, this is a perfectly rational question to ask, as it helps us determine where the item is located in our somewhat complex filing system. To a patron however this question can sound a lot like the staff member is challenging him or her for proof that there actually is an item on hold; even if not, about a third of a time it is a question that requires additional clarification and/or explanation from the staff member, somewhat defeating the time and labor-saving purpose of asking it in the first place (especially since the staff member can quickly determine the item's precise hold date by scanning the patron's ID and looking at the transaction record). Personally, I find this kind of Socratic method to be unnecessarily passive-aggressive at a public service desk, so I always try to find a more intuitive way of eliciting my patrons' needs.

But as I said above, however, some mornings you just have to settle for the "20 Questions" method.

"Did you order the item from the Depository?"

"Yes."

"Have you used the item yet?"

"Yes. Then I returned it to your desk. You hold those items, right?"

"Did you ask us to place it on hold for you?"

"I think so." This is another potentially confusing point of Reading Room procedure. Often a patron will pick up an item at our desk, use it in the room, then return to us assuming that we will automatically continue to hold that item... which we don't, under normal circumstances (the exception to this rule is in the case of non-circulating Interlibrary Loan materials and special collections, which remain behind the desk until their specified due dates as stipulated by the lender -- with these materials the exact opposite procedure applies!). This is why I try to train staff members to ask a nice leading question when a patron returns the item, such as 'Are you finished with this?'.

"Okay, well then it should be on the 10 Day Hold Shelf."

"Yeah, but how does that work?"

"It's alphabetical, by last initial." You'd think this part of the process would be pretty straightforward, but you'd be wrong. A long time ago the Reading Room used to assign its Hold Shelf space to specific patrons, going so far as to charge these items to separate 'pseudopatron' accounts in the Circulation system that were created specifically for each designated portion of the shelf. Mercifully we junked this system soon after I took over as supervisor, as not only was it a time-consuming process but one which ate up an inordinate amount of shelf space. Now we simply file everything together, using the patron's initials instead of last names or ID numbers in order to protect their privacy and shelving the material spine-down to make the books 'invisible' to browsers while they're checked out to the room.

Piece of cake, right? Well, aside from the not-as-rare-as-you'd-think instances when patrons think the item is being filed by the author's initials, there seems to be a little difficulty with the idea of arranging materials by last initial (using the first initial to file within that letter range and any possible middle initial as a way to further disambiguate in the case of popular 2-letter combinations, such as 'JS'). Either that or alphabetical order is becoming less and less second nature to a generation of human beings who search for things primarily by keyword.

"Oh, I see!" I'm not sure how the patron was looking for his book before he ventured up to the Reading Room desk, but now he seems to know where to find the missing item, and lo and behold after a couple of seconds he's retrieved it from the shelf at long last. Whew! So at least I didn't have to troubleshoot beyond that point, because from there on in things get unpleasant. If any item isn't on the Hold Shelf where it should be, sometimes it's merely been transposed when the patron's initials were accidentally reversed by a desk staff member or the patron him or herself when filling out the Hold Slip. This is why I would almost always rather that we fill out these forms, although I can understand when there's a rush (say at closing time) that pushing the onus back onto the patron might make sense, especially if he or she has a large pile of books to be held.

Of course if the item hasn't been misplaced in such a manner, it is almost certainly the case that the 10-Day hold period on the item has elapsed and the material has returned to whence it came -- either the Stacks or the Depository. Given that items on this kind of hold aren't attached to a patron's record in any way, shape, or form and thus can't be tracked and renewed electronically as normal loans, it's perfectly understandable that patrons will lose track of when these items are due to come off the shelf. This is why we try to be as accommodating as possible in removing materials from 10-Day Hold, holding the expired returns in the room until the end of the day before sending them to Stacks for reshelving. But even then it's inevitable that we'll get at least a couple of patrons per week who are caught off-guard by the date and are forced to track down or re-order the materials they had placed on hold, sometimes after exerting no small amount of painstaking effort in order to gather them up in the first place.

But this one was an easy save. And on Thursday mornings (especially when you're short both on caffeine and additional desk staff), we like easy...

So how was YOUR day?

From the NYT Books section, a fascinating and harrowing account of Iraq's chief librarian and the trials and tribulations he endures to keep both his collections and his staff safe:

"Saad Eskander, the director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive in Baghdad, finally had some time to catch up on his diary after a couple of very busy weeks. As he wrote in his latest entry, he was having trouble repairing the Internet system; the Restoration Laboratory “was hit by 5 bullets”; and “another librarian, who works at the Periodical Department, received a death threat. He has to leave his house and look for another one, as soon as he can; otherwise, he will be murdered.”"

(You can read Mr. Eskander's Library Diary here, courtesy of the British Library.)

I am never, ever* complaining about my job again...

* Never, ever = approximately 15% of the time

Our new motto

"The customer is always* right."

* Always = approximately 85% of the time

Jersey goes Google

Princeton University's library will become the 12th library to join Google Book Search, according to an article this morning that I found on Lifehacker's Daily News Roundup (credited to Yahoo News, ironically enough!). Score one for the Garden State!

This is of course wonderful news, as it demonstrates that after an initial period of uncertainty about getting involved in large-scale third party cooperative digitization projects, the big university libraries are beginning to see the benefits of letting the private sector help them with some of the heavy lifting. And from a practical standpoint, the more libraries that get involved with Google Book Search, the better chance they'll have to smooth out some of the rough edges in the existing service.

While it's great to have even just one copy of a rare or out-of-print text available, a lot of these books have experienced some significant wear and tear, so it would be nice to be able to consult multiple copies of the same edition scanned from other libraries. Not only would also vastly improve quality control to have additional copies available online, but from a digital Preservation angle the built-in redundancy would help Google and the library profession guard against any accidental data losses that may crop up in the medium and long-term.

And although as a librarian I naturally frown upon the practice of writing in a library text, in the digital aggregate these marginalia could one day prove as valuable as those found in the Medieval manuscript tradition. Imagine if these handwritten comments were also indexed by Google Book Search, such that when you looked at a particular item in a library's collection you could compare it against annotations made in every other known copy of that book as well. It seems a trivial thing until you reach a certain critical threshold of participation, at which point the study of library book marginalia could easily become a legitimate field of inquiry!

(Hmmm. I think I may have a thesis topic for a future Ph.D. here...)

Chaos

The transition from semester to semester in an academic library is always an unpredictable thing, especially if you depend on work-study students to fill out your desk schedule as much as we do in Access Services. Sometimes you switch from Fall to Spring with nary a hitch, maybe bumping a shift here or moving some hours there, and other times everything goes to Hell, as if the schedule had been written on an Etch-a-Sketch and someone decided to shake it up for no good reason.

This is one of those latter transitions, I'm sorry to report -- it seems every single one of my work-studies wants to swap out their hours as they settle into their new class schedules, so it'll be a legitimate miracle if I can somehow get them all situated and not have huge Mack Truck-sized gaps in coverage here at the Reading Room Desk. Ah, well! And I thought the end of the semester had been a bumpy ride!

However what this situation does do is give me the impetus and opportunity to hire a new crop of students to help fill out the schedule. Ever since we've had a change of supervisor I seem to acquire a new responsibility with each passing week. Mind you, this is a good thing, as not too long ago I'd begun to worry about stagnation on the job (whereas now the situation is anything but, although I'm still keeping my eye out for a chance to land that first entry-level professional gig). What this means though is that I have to schedule myself off the desk much more than I have up until this point, so I can give myself at least even odds of getting all this extra work done without clocking in overtime.

But that will take more coverage, which means more students. Which of course means more hiring and training, which naturally takes time -- the one thing that is in painfully short supply (and isn't that the reason why I'm doing all of this in the first place?). Oh, well. No one ever said life in the Big Library was going to be a cakewalk...

Some new media business advice

Hey, content providers! Want to guarantee that your ebook venture will not exist in 5 years? Create a business model by which you force end-users to wait in a queue for the "copy" of the ebook you've sold access to. I'm sorry, maybe I've missed something here, but isn't the whole point of electronic books the fact that patrons can have these items when and where they want it, rather than placing holds and recalls and all of those other annoying dead tree library antics?

Unfortunately NetLibrary doesn't seem to have gotten the memo on this one. A rare misstep for parent company OCLC (short for Online Computer Library Center, Inc.), which is normally out on the cutting edge of the intersection of technology and books, NetLibrary tries to turn back the clock to the days when library patrons would literally come to blows over who got to use the Silverplatter CD-ROM next. It sucked then and it sucks now, especially when there's no reason on God's green earth for a library to agree to such crippling restrictions on ebook resources.

Maybe this is the library world's way of trying to persuade the publishing houses that we librarians are in fact not the enemy, but if the price to be paid for soothing Big Paper's nerves is committing to products that are as user-unfriendly as NetLibrary, maybe it's not worth it. I Googled "netlibrary sucks" just for the hell of it and got some independent confirmation of the kind of frustration its engendered among academic library users. Sez Leigh at Video Game Spaces:

It’s not very functional. It loads each page of the e-book (if you could call it that) separately. This means that, for one thing, it’s very slow to turn the page. It takes anywhere between 1-2 seconds to much longer than that to load the next page, depending on the time of day and the site traffic. The other aspect of the single-page loading feature is that you can’t just save the pdf to your hard drive and view it offline. No, you have to load the slow site with its clunky interface to view the book one page at a time.

That sort of interface is appropriate for something like Amazon, where it makes a lot of sense to put limits on the book viewing because they’re trying to sell a physical copy of the book. However, with an online library service it’s severely limiting. This sort of restricted viewing would be nearly last on my list of choices of how to read a book… slightly below a smelly and heavily highlighted used copy of the book, and slightly above a smelly and heavily highlighted used copy of the book that also has dead insects and vomit stains on the pages.

One of the other things that consistently irritates me about Netlibrary, other than this slow loading time, is that it logs you out after 15 minutes of inactivity. This means that you can’t take a break from reading or eat lunch or whatever unless you first write down the page number, because when you come back you’ll have to go through the lengthy process of loading the web page, logging in, finding your e-book again, and finding the page you were on, which is pretty slow because of the delay in loading each page individually.

It’s also only compatible with Windows, which means that if I want to read a Netlibrary book while I’m at school, I have to find the time to install Windows on my Macbook, which is really annoying. I’ve seen a lot of students with Macs this semester and these are all students that don’t have access to the service because of the poor design and limited compatibility. Also, it also doesn’t work for me in Firefox. I have to instead load Internet Explorer, with all of its security issues. Plus it occasionally hangs for no apparent reason (other than poor design), leaving me to spend a few minutes either trying to get it to load, or starting all over again with logging in, finding my book, and then slowly loading my page number.

Of course, the really insulting thing about Netlibrary is that they put all these restrictions in place at all, when they are a library service. I should be able to save the book to my hard drive, to be viewed offline at my convenience in the pdf reader of my choice. What am I going to do, try to sell it? You have to be a student at the library to even use the service in the first place… and who’s going to be interested in pirating academic books in the first place? It’s not going to be highly sought after like a new blockbuster film or new popular music. They should follow the model of allowing downloading, like article search sites do. Sure, I could download an article and then email it to someone… but who would I email it to that isn’t already a student somewhere — someone who’s already paying for their own access to these services? And then there’s the really insulting element of proprietary control of knowledge in the first place (emphasis mine).

I couldn't have said that any better. Not to sound too much like new media prophet Jeff Jarvis, but it's this simple: evolve or die. Any ebook scheme involving DRM so strict that you might as well check out the paper copy is doomed to failure. End of story. So that's the first and last time I'm going to use NetLibrary -- someone give me a call when publishers finally come to terms with Google and let them offer copyrighted works alongside of their growing library of public domain books, because right now this dog won't hunt. If the purpose of ebooks is to replicate all of the shitty features of paper books, why bother with the new technology at all?

Update: The Wired Blog has a timely post about the library world's flirtation with dubious forms of DRMfor its electronic content, focusing on the OverDrive Media Console. The amazing thing about both this and NetLibrary? No Mac functionality. While I'm by no means an Apple conspiracy theorist, you have to wonder how deals like these get made with public institutions and institutions of higher education.

Strange geographies

We have somewhat of an odd arrangement for materials on hold here in the Reading Room. Items which have not been picked up yet are assorted first and foremost by the date of arrival: those which come in today are shelved on their own truck (marked "Today's Delivery", natch), which after 24 hours gets bumped one slot over and re-labeled "Yesterday's Delivery". Anything that isn't picked up within those 48 hours then goes to our infamous Cage, where they will spend the next eight days if not claimed before being returned to the Stacks, the Depository, or whencever they originally came.

This would be an ideal arrangement if people picked up most of their materials within those first two days, but quite a bit of it ends up going back into our Cage, which isn't even in the Reading Room but a dedicated section of secure space within the Stacks that we have to access by leaving the room, which means leaving the room unattended when there's only one person working the desk. That and it can be a real pain in the ass to run back and forth to retrieve the material, if the patron has ordered a large quantity of them, not to mention the unnecessary wear and tear we put on the Cage's lock by turning it dozens if not more times a day.

The solution of course would be to install some bookshelves behind the desk, and I have heard rumors that such a thing may actually be in the works. Until then, however, it's the Reading Room dance for me. At least I'm getting my exercise!

(And I haven't even mentioned the twenty-odd stairs just to get in and out of the room...)

I'm just a barcodin' fool

Although I always sort of kind of regret it when the alarm goes off at 5:30 in the morning, I really do enjoy working on these Monday holidays. The subway is nice and empty and yet still runs reasonably on time, the lines at the Dunkin' Donuts are short, and since we don't have a Depository delivery the desk is fairly quiet unless we get a bevy of visiting researchers trying to take advantage of the rare day off from their own regularly paying jobs as faculty, students, or whatever it is that independent scholars do when they're not writing the next monograph. As it turned out this morning, we didn't get so much as one book page request through lunchtime, nor did we have to retrieve any material from the Cage for Harvard ID holders.

(Yes, we have a Cage. Where else are you going to lock up your problem patrons and/or student werewolves? Okay, just kidding about the problem patrons...)

What we did have, however, was about an entire book truck piled with returns consisting of items without barcodes. Most of these are volumes of periodicals or monographic series, both of which escaped the purview of our "Smart Barcoding Project" (our most recent attempt to get the majority of our holdings online and trackable down to the item level). So when a visiting researcher either pages these things or a Harvard patron asks to have one of them put on hold in the room, it falls on our shoulders to barcode the thing before re-releasing it back into the wild that is the Widener Stacks.

Most of the time we're only dealing with one or two volumes here and there, so my students and staff can fill out a barcode form and I'll generate the item record for it the next morning or thereabouts, but in the case of large amounts of books -- say, an entire run of an obscure 19th century serial -- I'll let the desk workers skip filling out form and just catch the books when they finally get returned. Even though we may lose a little bit of transparency by doing so, this way we can prevent tying up desk workers with filling out dozens of little yellow forms and get the material to our visiting researchers as soon as humanly possible. Besides, most of these items can't leave the Reading Room, let alone the library, so if an emergency arises and we need to locate these materials in a pinch they're not going to have gotten too far away from our Tracing staff.

This morning a couple of visiting researchers' primary source materials were coming off the Hold Shelf, which is why I ended up getting swamped with unbarcoded returns. Thus far I've been able to knock out one of the series, but I'm afraid that the other one may have to wait for tomorrow or later in the week, as not only does it have extremely irregular enumeration (not to mention mostly unhelpful data printed on their spines), but many of the items are experiencing some serious red rot as well and are in generally poor condition overall. So I had better remind myself not to wear light-colored clothing this week!

Size matters

Noticing that our patrons were constantly jamming our Swingliner trying to staple their photocopies or computer printouts at the Reading Room desk, I asked my boss to purchase a heavy-duty stapler. Unfortunately when we ordered it we also got the absolute largest staples you can possibly get for such a stapler -- 15/16 of an inch, which are meant to staple 200 pages at a time! Try to do any less than that and you end up with an ugly mass of twisted metal instead of a staple, which doesn't exactly help anyone. So needless to say the heavy-duty stapler will be taking a sabbatical while we order some new staples which don't also double as construction rivets.

Do no harm

As the supervisor of a "medium-rare" book collection, there's nothing more cringeworthy for me than to see one of our items with Post-It notes attached to the pages. While I love Post-Its as much as the next person, even the gentlest of adhesives can leave a chemical residue on the paper that can shave years off the life of a book when the glue breaks down (little critters enjoy eating many kinds of adhesives as well).

So what's the poor bibliophile to do? Use Book Darts! These thin metal clips will not only mark the page you want to remember, but since they're fashioned in the shape of an arrow you can actually use them to highlight the exact line of the text you're interested in as well. The brainchild of a former teacher, librarian, and archivist (as well as a boat builder, woodcutter, and printer!), Book Darts seem to be the perfect alternative to sticky Post-Its or who knows what other kind of horrors employed in the service of marking one's page.

I'm seriously thinking about buying a couple of boxes for the Reading Room and loaning them out as we do our bag weights.