The following examples of Library humour and/or general oddity have come my way this week. The first four items are from me, the rest from your good selves.
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From today's TV listings in the Independent newspaper:
10.00 Porridge Fletch wants to get out of the tedious task of making fishing nets, and hatches a crafty scheme to get
himself assigned to the library.
(For the uninitiated, Porridge was a classic TV sitcom of the 80s/90s featuring events in the fictional Slade prison. It starred
Ronnie Barker as an "old lag" whose life inside was devoted to running rings round the prison officers and, sometimes, his
fellow prisoners)
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An "oddity" from today's Times (and other newspapers)
A solid bar of gunpowder that may well have been part of the consignment intended to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605 has turned up - in a box in the basement of the British Library. It forms part of the archive of 17th Century diarist John Evelyn, which the library acquired in 1995. The envelope containing the bar bears the writing: "Gunpowder. Large package is supposed to be Guy Fawkes' gunpowder".
A spokeman for the British Library said: "We know our collections hold some explosive material but, until this discovery, we never realised that we were quite literally sitting on a powder keg".
The library will hand over the gunpowder to the Royal Armouries for analysis.
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In this library, we issue books by asking borrowers for their name, finding their record on the system, and assigning barcode numbers from the books to that record. It pays to phrase the question correctly, not as I once did:
"The name is?"
"Mudd"
This stuck me as funny at the time, and I told the joke to the next person who came along, a few minutes later. Having had a small chortle, I continued:
"And your name is?"
"Strange"
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Working with stored PhD theses can turn up some interesting items, given that candidates have to produce work that is totally original, and finding a topic that no-one else has tackled before is not all that easy. My favourite discovery was:
"Social sniffing in laboratory mice"
It's good to know that seven years of hard work did not go to waste!
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A resident physician came to the library and needed an urgent search on
'the prognosis in sudden cardiac death'
Some days are tougher than others.
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This info from www.libraryunderground.com.....we are just so
desirable!
From NYTimes report (3/19/02) Rock n Roll Hall of Fame induction:
"Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers introduced Talking Heads,
saying that hearing the band gave him a new sensation: "I wanted to
have sex with a lot of librarians."
(This piece was sent out on the SOLOLIB-L list this week, and has produced an interesting
correspondence regarding the sexiness or otherwise of Mr Kiedis. All these contributions,
I hasten to add, have come from female librarians, one of whom has admitted to actually kissing the man!)
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I was teaching an Introduction to Internet Searching. I was getting to the
part of showing students how to use the Meta-Seach Engines. A student went
into the site "Profusion.com" He was upset that the documents that came up
did not come from Microsoft or IBM sites. He asked me why. I tried to
explain to him that Profusion just didn't have any MS or IBM on their site.
He was very persistent and then I actually understood what he expected me to
do. He expected me to go tell MS and IBM to be on Profusion. I tried to
explain to him that I just teach students how to search on the Internet. I
have no control of what goes on it, especially big sites such as MS, IBM or
Profusion! It took awhile to explain it to him and he was still unhappy
because I was the librarian and I couldn't do this for him!
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While managing a small public library I would often give book talks to local
women's clubs, garden clubs etc. After one such talk an audience member asked
what book I was currently reading. I replied that I was reading a book about
multiple personality disorder and one gentleman in particular with 16
documented personalities. To which she exclaimed "Oh my! He must have been
beside himself."
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At this same library, which was in a rural area, we once got a phone call from
a very agitated woman wanting to know how she could get the snake out of her
car. It had apparently slithered in overnight and draped itself over the
steering wheel. After consulting the County Agent we learned that mothballs
usually do the trick.
Granted I would not have found this amusing had the snake been in my car!
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Early on in my current position as a corporate librarian a patron asked if I
had a second copy of Business Week.
Me: I just gave you your copy yesterday, what happened to it?
Him: I was riding home on my motorcycle and it blew out of my pocket.
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In my first library job I was working as a childrens librarian in Middlesex. A parent asked me where she could find a book about Ancient Romans. I guided her to the opposite corner of the small childrens section with the words "we need to look in the 900s" (refering to my newly-learned dewey) - to receive the scoffing reply - "I may not be very clever - but there are DEFINITELY NOT 900 books in THIS section!".
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Here's one I tell frequently.
When I was working in a North Carolina public library, I sometimes had difficulty with the accent. One day a man asked me if I had anything on "bales." I said, "You mean like when you put hay into bales?" He said no, "Bales, like in church. Church bales!"
(To UK readers - think "Gone with the Wind" as you read this one, preferably out loud. If you go far enough "Deep South", you'll get the joke eventually!)
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