Librarian Ire

Pass the Stupid Stick this way

What amazes me is that most people who patronize the libraries have little if any common sense. I mean libraries and their use are fairly straightforward. As much as I enjoy my job, it isn't brain surgery.

I have an example that came up recently. There is a patron who has repeatedly asked us to page books for her from our library. It is not our policy to do this because we have open stacks so you can do it yourself. We have sent numerous e-mails during the semester telling her not to do this. Which haven't worked. Over the weekend she call slipped more than 20 books from our library alone.
And she call slipped items from every library on campus. We had a 4 box delivery, 2 boxes of which were all her books. The guys who make the deliveries were not happy today. I mean come on. If you want books from every library on campus why don't you go to them instead of making us do all your work. Not to mention hogging two shelves in the hold area. What was everyone else going to do?
She actually asked if the pile of books(which took 10 minutes to check out) was excessive.
HUH?! You ask for 48 books (actually more. Closer to 60 if you count the ones from our library that we wouldn't get) andyou want to know if it's excessive?! She spent an entire day in the library on the computer asking for all these books. Probably in the stacks sitting next to them.

And the reason she asked for all these books was that she is teaching a class at another college. She wanted to put our books on reserve at this place. When she was told that was not possible she actually asked me how she could get the books she needed for reserve if we didn't provide them. I couldn't believe that! I had to explain to her that she needed to contact the place where she was teaching and find out their reserve policy. Then she wanted to know if she could copy parts of books to put on reserve. Well, yeah, but only a certain amount and only with permission. The copyright law is pretty specific. Not to mention the authors find out you could get sued into the afterlife. But she was stunned that we wouldn't let her put our books at another library.
We don't have an obligation to supplement another libraries collections. That should be obvious.
Pass me the stupid stick.

posted by Nike at 1:50 AM