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thewayneMy first one was within six months of my starting this job, it went to Thailand! While I wanted to keep that envelope as a trophy, sadly, it was thrown away when the library was deep-cleaned when the plague hit. It wasn't truly remarkable, though the stamps and cancellation was cool. But it was special to me!
Honestly, I think I could have ordered this book used from an English book store and mailed it to the library for less than it'll cost to send it there and back! It's going to a public library in Welwyn Garden City, which I'd never heard of. It's about an hour north of London by car, which I assume is being optimistic for traffic. For all I know, it's considered a suburb of London.
ILL is interesting. If you participate, your entire library's database is uploaded to a data center in Ohio. So this library in England was looking for a collection of short stories by a particular author, and they enter the book into whichever ILL program that they use. It hits the data center in Ohio and that database (built on top of Microsoft SQL Server, literally my former job!) returns a list of the libraries that have that book. You can filter it for libraries in your consortium, courier group, state, region, country, or for the entire world. This builds what is known as a Lending String, or the libraries that are theoretically capable of lending that book.
My library as at the head of that lending string!
Now, you can manually build the lending string and put preferred libraries that you'd like to borrow from towards the front, but usually you use the one generated by the system. I'm not quite sure why a British library would have a New Mexico library - how many thousands of miles away? - as the FIRST library in the lending string?!!!
One other thing to note. Libraries don't pay full postage when mailing things to other libraries via USPS. We pay Library Rate, which I think is cheaper than Bulk, but delivered with First Class. But this is going International, and I have no idea what that will entail! I went ahead and extended the due date on this from 5/8 to the end of May to accommodate longer mail times, make things a little less stressed for them.
Honestly, I think I could have ordered this book used from an English book store and mailed it to the library for less than it'll cost to send it there and back! It's going to a public library in Welwyn Garden City, which I'd never heard of. It's about an hour north of London by car, which I assume is being optimistic for traffic. For all I know, it's considered a suburb of London.
ILL is interesting. If you participate, your entire library's database is uploaded to a data center in Ohio. So this library in England was looking for a collection of short stories by a particular author, and they enter the book into whichever ILL program that they use. It hits the data center in Ohio and that database (built on top of Microsoft SQL Server, literally my former job!) returns a list of the libraries that have that book. You can filter it for libraries in your consortium, courier group, state, region, country, or for the entire world. This builds what is known as a Lending String, or the libraries that are theoretically capable of lending that book.
My library as at the head of that lending string!
Now, you can manually build the lending string and put preferred libraries that you'd like to borrow from towards the front, but usually you use the one generated by the system. I'm not quite sure why a British library would have a New Mexico library - how many thousands of miles away? - as the FIRST library in the lending string?!!!
One other thing to note. Libraries don't pay full postage when mailing things to other libraries via USPS. We pay Library Rate, which I think is cheaper than Bulk, but delivered with First Class. But this is going International, and I have no idea what that will entail! I went ahead and extended the due date on this from 5/8 to the end of May to accommodate longer mail times, make things a little less stressed for them.
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Date: 2021-04-09 07:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-09 08:08 pm (UTC)And even if not in exploration, in recreation. Brains need and deserve downtime. There's a great quote about "Libraries are one of the few places that you can be in public without there being an expectation for you to spend money." It'd be nice to have more places like that.
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Date: 2021-04-09 09:25 pm (UTC)As it happens I know Welwyn (well, the pretty bits), one of my oldest chums lived there for a year or so and I used to drive over there regularly to go on rambles in the local countryside (finishing with a pub dinner.) Only half an hours drive for me but then my place is in North London.
Couple of pics at the end of this post showing one of our rambles in the local area.
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Date: 2021-04-09 11:07 pm (UTC)How funny! Well, it's my first post to Welwyn, but you never know, it could happen again. I have several social media correspondents in England, and you're the first to mention a connection to the place, your photos of it are quite pretty.
That bit about the Ferrari owners meeting, that's pretty cool! I'm not a big fan of that particular brand, but they are pretty.
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Date: 2021-04-10 01:27 am (UTC)OCLC in Columbus (techically Dublin)? I used to drive past there twice a day. They had a big pond out front, which, for the past several summers, was home to a family of wild Swans. I may have applied there has I known it was a SQL operation. I once built an inventory control database from SQL, although that's when it was still Gold Key. I loved working with that!
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Date: 2021-04-10 02:02 am (UTC)Yep, technically Dublin. I read a technical description of how it's configured: it is quite the operation! Of course, considering the size of the data store, and the replication requirements to keep up as close to five 9s operation, it would have to be! I would so love to tour it some day. I never built anything quite that spectacular in terms of replication and such, but I love working with SQL in design and such. I've made some really cool database designs.