- Click here. Try different keywords.
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Brief, Being
A professional librarian's time is precious. And so is your patrons'. Shorten your library instruction lectures into as few words as possible...
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12 comments:
. . . or taking longer lunch breaks.
I refuse to believe this post is about me.
Wow ... that's pretty much what our administration wants to reduce the OPAC to, anyway!
Our OPAC is so efficient, that instead of reporting an item as "Missing" it says "Consult Librarian". We politely point out to patrons that "Consult Librarian" means "Missing".
Sometimes we draw straws as to which librarian to consult.
We are boxers here.
Ours does the same - I think that missing means that we don't know what happened to it, and that lost means that we don't know what happened to it, but we do know who had it last.
Sometimes students come to the library with research assignments so impossible that "Click here. Try different keywords" is about all you can tell them.
I'm an British librarian - what does 'shelf-reading' mean ?
Hmm, never worked in a library that does this. We have shelf-tidying, where we check every book is in the proper place, and we have a missing list, that gets checked to see if the items are indeed missing. I guess I've only ever worked in messy libraries that would never attempt to do this.
Oh - could this be what we call 'stock taking' ? But again, this would only be done with either very small or very tidy libraries. So, again, none I've ever worked in...
In my library, "missing" means we're still searching for it and "lost" means we've given up on it (it's been "missing" for a while and it's been searched for multiple times).
We do the shelf-reading without a shelf-list; we worry about the wayward titles at another point in time.
Our clerck are also doing a kind of shelf-reading without a list. They simply look the shelves for misplaced books. We don't want to know how many books are lost or stolen each year, too much trouble :-)
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