The first three items are from me - the rest from you, and it's a real bumper bundle this week!
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A former colleague of mine once worked for the music department of Westminster Reference Library. One day, a customer
walked up and demanded "Opus 234. Full score". Not unnaturally, the librarian asked, "which composer?" , to be given the
"don't you know who I am?" look and the answer, "Vivaldi, of course!"
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One of our young engineers came to join the library a few months ago. He was a very sober looking
gentleman, dressed in suit and tie, polished shoes, short hair. When I asked for his first name he said
"Woodstock". I couldn't let this go, so I got the full story. Apparently his parents had been a pair of 60s
hippies who had travelled in their youth and met at the famous Woodstock festival. When they finally settled down
and started a family, they could think of no better name for their son. It would appear that they are still a pair of
hippies, and that son Woodstock has been rebelling against his parents for as long as he can remember!
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It's amazing what you can come across whilst looking for something completely different on the Internet! This is a message lodged on a Google newsgroup: (apologies if you've seen it before)
"Libraries are for socialist welfare scum.
All public libraries are socialist institutions and invariably are sites of wholesale theft of intellectual property that is
being sanctioned by a corrupt, evil state.
Respect for Intellectual Freedom demands that all state run libraries be shut down immediately as they are a site
of ongoing and wholesale theft of intellectual property.
The contents of these dishonerable, immoral and illegal institutions must be returned to the authors or other
financial interest holders or shredded or burned so that the theft of the intellectual property contained within the library
walls will not continue.
Libraries will only be legitimate when they are taken out of the hands of the state and only when the authors and
or publishers of the works within have WILLINGLY donated their works, and then ONLY upon condition that those
works be distributed in strict accordance to whatever written agreements or stipulations that may have been made
with the rights holders.
Among the Libertarian community it is often noted that the primary use of public libraries is provide sleeping quarters
for unemployed bums and welfare slobs, and other parasites who are unworthy of existance who are looking for
another handout from the nanny state. These people are intellectual property thieves at best and often simply vermin
worthy only of extermination.
Libraries exist as a method of wealth transfer and rights violation like every other form of government corruption of the
marketplace. They exist as a result of government fiat, stealing wealth from intellectual property holders and transfurring
that wealth to low income vermin, and do so with money stolen from the public.
The simple truth is that Libraries are nothing more than an immoral and illegal form of welfare."
So now you know! They do say that the best things in life are illegal, immoral or fattening, so at
least we score on two out of three! Or is it all three? - see the next item down!
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There haven't really been any funny items from the corporate law library
except that there seems to be an awful lot of food around. People are
always sharing chocolates, doughnuts, muffins, cookies, etc. and they
are usually left on the table at which I work. It is definitely a good
thing that I am only there once a week!
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We got a fax request for an interlibrary loan for the title "How to Deal
With Difficult People" one day. Scribbled on the bottom was a little note
"PLEASE hurry!!!"
We got a bit of a giggle from it.
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A few weeks ago a colleague at the reference desk at York University was
asked, on a Saturday afternoon, how to retrieve a cell phone from the
toilet. The answer to this had simply never been covered in library
school and she sent them down to security.
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My favourite from my first year as a reference librarian occurred when I
was going off shift and a young man flagged me down. "Miss, the
computer's broken. It won't scroll down all the way." It turned out he
was in a citation index and didn't understand that the abstract was not
actually the first paragraph of the article. I informed him that the
rest of the article was upstairs.
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I run a small special library in Seattle, U.S., a couple hours drive from
the Canadian border. A couple months ago I began to get emails from
someone in Vancouver, Canada who wanted to visit the library, but needed
an invitation. After I explained how to go about making an appointment to
visit, the person informed me they need a written invitation from me to
take to the U.S. Consulate to be allowed into the country. Eventually I
was able to convince them that perhaps there were libraries in Vancouver
that would be of use to them - particularly since it turned out they
wanted information in a subject area I don't collect! Still have no idea
why they thought my library was the place to start.
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Then there are the procrastinators, some of whom are remarkably library
savvy. One such student had a nearly comprehensive knowledge of
limiting as applied to some of our indices. However, she did come to
the reference desk to request instruction on limiting by article
length. It seemed her paper was due the following day and she wouldn't
have time to read any articles longer than five pages.
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Last month, I attended a class on using focus groups in librarianship,
taught by a wonderful English librarian. We got to talking over dinner
about my time in the Army libraries in Europe during the 80's. I explained
that we would have quarterly meetings in Heidelberg, where all the army
librarians would meet from their respective countries, and how it was such
a great time for CE and fellowship (in the days before email connections).
She asked, "what countries were the librarians from?" I said, "Oh, Germany,
Italy, Belgium - but not England, since there hardly any army bases in
England in the 80's." She looked very shocked, and said, "oh, surely you
are mistaken!". At that moment, I realized I had neglected to say " *U.S.*
army bases"!
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My shift includes working one Sunday afternoon a month, which is no
great strain. However, when my daughter was younger I used to bring her
with me and leave her in my office to do her homework or otherwise
entertain herself. However, this particular Sunday our public
workstations (including the reference desk computers) went off line but
we came up with a novel way to serve our patrons. I called my daughter
on the telephone (my office computer was not affected) and had her log
on to the University of Toronto catalogue to do subject searches to
obtain the LC call numbers so that at least our patrons could find books
by shelf reading in the appropriate areas! I took her out for dinner
after that one.
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One day the then archivist at our museum was performing a search of the
computerized book catalog when he came across the following bizarre title of
a book written by Stephen Ambrose: D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climatic Battle
of World War II. Bringing the title to the attention to the librarian, he
wondered aloud what information the book might have about the weather during
World War II in general and during D-Day in particular.
Later that day the librarian sent an email to the archivist, in which she
reported, "Today I brought up a book catalog record and made a change which
was, to say the least, rather anti-climatic!"
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Our former Director of Marketing is an avid reader. She would often come
to the library on Fridays and gather the most current books on many
different topics, often returning most of the books on Monday after she
read them. At the time, I did not have an automated system for checkout
but rather a series of signout sheets. One day, Maria sent an intern down
to the library with the message -- "Tell Barb I need the blue book I read
last summer". The intern was not told what the book was about to even give
me a clue. Amazingly, I did manage to locate exactly the book she wanted
but as expected it was not blue!
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My clients often expect miracles. We have an old, historic hotel in our
city that has gone through about 15 years of problems and is in its second
(or is it third) bankruptcy. About two months after the bankruptcy was
announced, one of our regional account representatives called me up with
the following question -- "Can you tell me who is going to own the Hotel X
when they come out of bankruptcy?" I was so shocked by the question that I
just accepted the challenge. When I got off the phone, I started to think
again. I wondered if I could contact the Amazing Kreskin or Miss Cleo (she
is a psychic here in the States that is having some legal problems) to help
me respond to this question. In the end I spoke with our bankruptcy
attorney with whom I was working on the same bankruptcy, who practically
fell of his chair laughing that this person thought I could figure this
out. And, by the way, the hotel is still not out of bankruptcy!
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I met my boyfriend on an Internet dating service on which I'd placed a
profile. In this profile I stated that I was a librarian. In his initial
email to me, he wrote: "so you're a librarian, I like being in them." I
choose to believe that he meant he liked being in LIBRARIES and not
LIBRARIANS! He was mortified when I pointed out his typo. Not exactly the
first impression he wished to make. (By the way, despite that - we're still
together six months later!)
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Here's one from when I used to work in a medium sized public library in a small North-West town. A couple of men came up to the reference desk and asked for the "Cat Book".
"Just follow me" I said and I led them down to the Pet department of the lending section and showed them our cat book collection.
He looked at me uncomprehendingly and said "No, I want the Cat Book, names and addresses". He then mimed opening a shutting of said volume.
Light dawned. It turned out he meant the Thomson Local which is a private Yellow Pages type directory which was advertised on TV and the print media with a cartoon cat called Thomson.
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