Wednesday, April 02, 2003

Venting a little
I distribute copies of this thing called CILP, or the Current Index of Legal Periodicals, to the faculty. It's a list of recent articles grouped by subject, so they can see a grouping of what they're interested in and request the journal the piece is in. Only two or three of the nineteen faculty I give the thing to actually use it.
And one of them is the Dean.
The list comes out every week. She lets these lists pile up for six months or more, and then sends back dozens at once. Lots of times, the journals she wants have already gone to the bindery by the time she makes the request.
The current, unbound issues of the major law journals are on reserve. Which means they only check out for four hours. But of course she lets those journals sit in her office as long as she let the copies of the lists pile up. So when the databeast prints overdue notices for her, I have to go and "renew" every single one of those journals. But, you see, reserve items can't be renewed, as such. They have to checked in and then checked back out. And because the journals in question are actually down in the dean's office, I have to type all those barcodes in by hand.
When I get carpal tunnel I'm sueing this dump.

Monday, March 31, 2003

Law Students Are Not Real Graduate Students
This girl just marched up to the desk and announced, "I want to check out Doriane Coleman's book" (a faculty member) "Fixing Columbine. How do I do that?"
I thought she was an undergraduate. I asked if she knew the call number and she said no, she'd never used the catalogue here. I thought she meant "here" as "here in the law school." I said all the campus libraries share the same catalogue, and she said she hadn't used a library catalogue since she was an undergraduate.
I started to find the call number for her and I thought about that last thing she said. I didn't want to bother with the call number if she couldn't even check the book out, so I asked her if she had a campus ID. She said, "Oh, yes, I'm a student here" - and again I wasn't sure if she meant "here at Duke" or "here in the law school" - "Do I need that?"
I never really answered that. I gave her the call number and she asked where was that, and I said, on level one, two floors down. Then she asked, "Do I have to use the twisty thingys?" The first floor has compact shelving, with cranks on the ends of shelving units to close up the aisle to save space.
And then I realised to my absolute shock that this mindless twit was a currently enrolled law student. If she wasn't she'd never have known about the cranks, the "twisty things."