Well, I'm back

After a period of what Carlos would call "desuetude", the "Hill" is once more active. It doesn't seem like a week since I last updated the blog, but I suppose that lack of time for weblogging and personal communications comes with being employed. I suppose I'll have to get used to it.

The job at "Huron State" is quite different from my previous gig. To begin with, there's no nice, enclosed office for me, only a Dilbertesque cubicle located between the departmental coffee machine and the copier. Fortunately, this means that I get to eavesdrop on incautious gossippers. Unfortunately, it means that blogging or checking personal e'mail from work is even more inadvisable than normal.

The office coffee machine, by the way, is an olive-green monstrosity, held together with rubber bands, which splutters and smokes like an ailing steam locomotive and has the interesting habit of dribbling coffee everywhere but into the pot. Worse, it's usually empty. Note to self: Buy el-cheapo coffee machine that works, install it in cubicle, set timer to make coffee automatically at 8:50 a.m., watch popularity soar! (Beware of time-wasting conversations, though...)

Reference duty here is quite different from at my previous employer. "Huron State" depends even more on electronic resources than they did, and makes it more difficult to access older printed materials. The fact that students do not have mandatory laptop computers is to some extent balanced out by the fact that the library does not (yet) charge money for printouts of electronic documents.

The "Information Desk" here is located in a three-story-tall central atrium, close to the circulation desk and an extensive bank of computers for student use. The printed reference collection and a few specialized non-circulating collections (law, business, maps, and university theses) are the only printed materials on the first floor, and they are all located far enough from the reference desk to make it awkward to use them during a typical reference query. The publicly-shelved periodicals, government documents, and books are all on different floors, which makes it difficult to refer users to them if the user is not already familiar with the layout of the building. At my previous job, where most of the printed periodicals, government documents, maps and reference books were within sight of the reference desk, I could simply walk with the patron over to the shelves that held the desired journal article or reference book, and in the process make sure that it really was what they needed. Not so here. As a result, I never feel quite sure that that patron I sent up to the third floor with the list of call numbers actually found what he/she wanted, or just got lost, wandered around for a while, and gave up. (I suspect that any day now, we'll find one of those poor students wandering around the second floor gov-docs shelves with glazed eyes and symptoms of severe dehydration, twitching and moaning and mumbling disjointed pieces of SuDocs call numbers.)

I mentioned before that this institution had made the controversial decision to place 50% of its printed collection in storage rather than on publicly browsable shelves. This does not turn out to be quite as horrible as it sounds, since such materials are findable through the online catalog and (at least nominally) retrievable in 15 minutes or less. This is accomplished through the use of a huge, two-story-deep vault in the basement of the building, where the books and old journals are stored in tubs according to size and automatically retrieved by robotic devices whenever requested through the online catalog. The electronic "request" procedure, which requires the use of a university ID number or a guest "courtesy" number, is somewhat confusing and probably deters a significant number of users. And as I mentioned before, it makes it extremely difficult to browse the library's holdings in an organized fashion.

This was demonstrated a couple of days ago by a fellow who came to the desk wanting biographies and other materials on Cervantes. After showing him a couple of entries in literature reference sources and checking the online catalog, which assured me that the library owned several biographies of Cervantes, I sent him upstairs to the appropriate Library of Congress call number. (LC, unlike the Dewey system, shelves biographies and criticism of authors with their works, rather than hiding them in a rarely-visited separate section of the library.) Unfortunately, it seems that the biographies of Cervantes were among the items exiled to the Robotic Dungeon, so the student was shortly back at the ref. desk informing me that he had found only copies of Don Quixote and some collections of criticism, but not a single biography of the author. A quick course in storage-retrieval requests followed, as well as a mental note to myself that I couldn't make the same kinds of assumptions about browsing the shelves here that I could in other libraries.

On the positive side, it's better than discarding them, and a 15 minute retrieval time is far, far preferable to the week-long waits that I've experienced elsewhere. But if you don't know what to ask for, or if the catalog record is skimpy or screwed up, you'll never know what you missed, since it's not on a publicly-viewable shelf where you could see it.

Another positive note: In looking up a number of books mentioned in the current newsletter of the state historical society, I found that Huron State has purchased most of them already, and has another one on order. Ironically, they're doing a better job of acquiring recently published materials on upper-peninsula and Great Lakes history than my previous employer, despite the latter's location. This may be a result of having a healthier acquisitions budget, or it may be a result of the fact that Huron State actually has permanent staff librarians who are interested in history, as opposed to my previous employer, where none of the permanent reference staff seemed to have any particular interest in that discipline, and acquisitions in that field lagged to such an extent that the history faculty eventually started discussing ways to establish their own departmental library so they could get the information they needed for their research and publishing.