![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksOther people, according to all report, have an ability that fascinates me. They go into a library, with a generalized or specific idea of which materials they wish to check out, search out the call numbers of those materials, head to the area in which those call numbers are shelved, and check out the materials they had in mind.
I have been a patron of various library systems for, I believe, twenty years now, and worked in one for more than two, and I can honestly say that I do not think I have ever done that.
No, I do something that goes more along the following lines: I go into a library, with a general or specific idea of what it is that I wish to check out, and look it up on the computer. It is at another campus. If I am at Bryn Mawr, it is at Haverford. If I am at Haverford, it is at Bryn Mawr. If I look it up at Bryn Mawr, notice that it is at Ford, and check for it after Chorale, someone has checked out Ford's copy, and it is at Swarthmore. This is an unyielding and inevitable law of the universe which I have begun to anticipate and work into my everyday behavioral patterns. So then, after deciding whether I really need/want to read whatever it is that badly and either requesting it or not, I go card-catalogue surfing. Anything that looks really interesting is at another campus. Again, this is by definition, and I've really gotten used to it. Eventually, I figure out something I do actually want to read that should be in the building, and look it up. Let us say that it is the collected essays of Virginia Woolf, because, frankly, it usually is.
So I head up or down the appropriate staircase to find the collected essays of Virginia Woolf, muttering to myself over and over 'PS6045.o27, PS6045.o27, PS6027.o45, PS4507.60...'
When I get to the call number I have in mind, I find myself faced with a wall of, possibly, the essays of Benjamin Hazlitt. This is only discouraging in the sense in which being faced with a wall of the essays of Benjamin Hazlitt should discourage anybody, since, after all, he is English and they are essays. Probably I am in the wrong aisle and should follow the call numbers alphabetically.
Alphabetically, the call numbers skip directly from Wilde to Wordsworth, which seems unlikely. Probably I am in the wrong time period and should try a different aisle, but one over puts me face to face with a selection of James Joyce, who is actually Irish, which means that there is not much hope, and somehow at this point I realize that I have been leafing through a chronological checklist of the novels of Dorothy Sayers because it was next to my left hand while I was staring in confusion at Mr. Joyce, and anyhow everyone has always told me that Gaudy Night is a wonderful book that I really ought to read someday. They do not have Gaudy Night. Gaudy Night is probably at Swarthmore. The complete works of Kahlil Gibran, mind you, are directly in front of my nose, leading me to suspect that I am not only in the wrong aisle but actually somehow on the wrong floor or, logically, in the wrong universe. Also the lighting is broken when I try to turn toward the downward side of the alphabet, meaning that it takes me a ridiculously long time to notice that the copy of Goodbye to All That which I was looking for last time I came in here is adjacent to my right elbow next to Gibran, where it logically has no business being for reasons of nationality and genre. Of course, I am no longer in any mood to read Graves, since cynicism was not what I had quite in mind for the evening. I could, of course, go and look up the call number again, but the nearest working computer is up or down three flights of stairs, and anyhow I have got turned around in Edith Wharton and will be lucky to locate the elevator at all through the local profusion of Waverly Novels. (Woolf? I mean, such Ws, even though the Waverlys are actually by Scot... No luck.)
By the time I eventually leave the building, I will be carrying Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers in a nice red leather binding under my elbow, and will have remembered after hiking down off the top floor that what I actually wanted in the first place but forgot to look up was Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory, which I need for a paper, and which is probably on said top floor, but which is also at the other campus, and in a location I can pinpoint precisely, if only I can remember to go looking for it when I get there. When I get there it will turn out to have been checked out this morning.
I enjoy libraries greatly, mind you. They warm the heart. There does, however, seem to be this gap between the way I function in a library and the way other people, at least theoretically, function in a library.
Probably there is an explicatory pamphlet at Swarthmore.
I have been a patron of various library systems for, I believe, twenty years now, and worked in one for more than two, and I can honestly say that I do not think I have ever done that.
No, I do something that goes more along the following lines: I go into a library, with a general or specific idea of what it is that I wish to check out, and look it up on the computer. It is at another campus. If I am at Bryn Mawr, it is at Haverford. If I am at Haverford, it is at Bryn Mawr. If I look it up at Bryn Mawr, notice that it is at Ford, and check for it after Chorale, someone has checked out Ford's copy, and it is at Swarthmore. This is an unyielding and inevitable law of the universe which I have begun to anticipate and work into my everyday behavioral patterns. So then, after deciding whether I really need/want to read whatever it is that badly and either requesting it or not, I go card-catalogue surfing. Anything that looks really interesting is at another campus. Again, this is by definition, and I've really gotten used to it. Eventually, I figure out something I do actually want to read that should be in the building, and look it up. Let us say that it is the collected essays of Virginia Woolf, because, frankly, it usually is.
So I head up or down the appropriate staircase to find the collected essays of Virginia Woolf, muttering to myself over and over 'PS6045.o27, PS6045.o27, PS6027.o45, PS4507.60...'
When I get to the call number I have in mind, I find myself faced with a wall of, possibly, the essays of Benjamin Hazlitt. This is only discouraging in the sense in which being faced with a wall of the essays of Benjamin Hazlitt should discourage anybody, since, after all, he is English and they are essays. Probably I am in the wrong aisle and should follow the call numbers alphabetically.
Alphabetically, the call numbers skip directly from Wilde to Wordsworth, which seems unlikely. Probably I am in the wrong time period and should try a different aisle, but one over puts me face to face with a selection of James Joyce, who is actually Irish, which means that there is not much hope, and somehow at this point I realize that I have been leafing through a chronological checklist of the novels of Dorothy Sayers because it was next to my left hand while I was staring in confusion at Mr. Joyce, and anyhow everyone has always told me that Gaudy Night is a wonderful book that I really ought to read someday. They do not have Gaudy Night. Gaudy Night is probably at Swarthmore. The complete works of Kahlil Gibran, mind you, are directly in front of my nose, leading me to suspect that I am not only in the wrong aisle but actually somehow on the wrong floor or, logically, in the wrong universe. Also the lighting is broken when I try to turn toward the downward side of the alphabet, meaning that it takes me a ridiculously long time to notice that the copy of Goodbye to All That which I was looking for last time I came in here is adjacent to my right elbow next to Gibran, where it logically has no business being for reasons of nationality and genre. Of course, I am no longer in any mood to read Graves, since cynicism was not what I had quite in mind for the evening. I could, of course, go and look up the call number again, but the nearest working computer is up or down three flights of stairs, and anyhow I have got turned around in Edith Wharton and will be lucky to locate the elevator at all through the local profusion of Waverly Novels. (Woolf? I mean, such Ws, even though the Waverlys are actually by Scot... No luck.)
By the time I eventually leave the building, I will be carrying Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers in a nice red leather binding under my elbow, and will have remembered after hiking down off the top floor that what I actually wanted in the first place but forgot to look up was Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory, which I need for a paper, and which is probably on said top floor, but which is also at the other campus, and in a location I can pinpoint precisely, if only I can remember to go looking for it when I get there. When I get there it will turn out to have been checked out this morning.
I enjoy libraries greatly, mind you. They warm the heart. There does, however, seem to be this gap between the way I function in a library and the way other people, at least theoretically, function in a library.
Probably there is an explicatory pamphlet at Swarthmore.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-02-18 09:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-18 10:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-19 06:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-19 06:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-19 08:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-19 09:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-19 12:02 pm (UTC)I have a similar problem (on a much smaller scale) with the Columbia library system. The book is either checked out by a professor until the end of May (despite the fact that it's January) or the only available copy is at the library furthest from where I currently am. Or the library system just plain doesn't have a copy of what I'm looking for.