Librarian Ire

Not As Loud As You'd Think

That is, when an eyeball explodes. March is supposed to be a decent month - entrance of spring, school breaks, looking forward to the end of the term, summer. Instead someone went and lit a match under the BOTBOAL and I have suffered cruelly! I have pretty much accepted that my objectivity in any of her goings on is nonexistent, however for this I KNOW I do not over-react. Thus, the eyeball exploding when I heard...

Reference Service. Library Open to the public, whose professed mission is to help any person - member or community - with their reference needs regarding this discipline. I get a call from someone in the community, a doosey of a question, but one that fell within our realm of expertise here. I am unsuccessful, so I ask some of the other, more seasoned, reference librarians for advice finding the answer. BOTBOAL comes up to me: "Is this person you're helping a student or faculty member?" "No, they work for some office in the government." "Then you've helped them enough. You shouldn't be wasting your time helping them."

WHAT?! I could not believe this! My entire job is to help them! I can't quite determine what exactly her problem was with this. I didn't spend too much time on it (about 10 mins before the query), no one responded to my query with any additional pointers for search - so no wasting there. My sole duty at that moment was to provide reference assistance and there was no one else waiting. Not to mention that just 2 days before at a big staff meeting she gave a little talk on how important it was for us to serve the community, that we shouldn't provide service any differently to different peoples/groups.


This is just a tinsy little annoyance on top of 2 hellish weeks. I expect my other eye to go by friday, and my head? Well, I can already feel the swollen brain putting pressure on the skull. I'm expecting a beautiful red explosion of blood and matter by memorial day.

posted by Loki at 2:10 PM