Monday was such a Monday!
Apr. 11th, 2023 01:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thewayneI didn't get nearly enough sleep Sunday night: probably around 5 1/2 hours. So right off the bat I know it's going to be a rough day.
I get in and there's two returned interlibrary loan books to be processed, no big deal. One inter-library loan, the other a return from our Las Cruces campus. Technically loans to other campuses are ILL, but a different system is used that ties directly to our main computer system, so they're counted slightly differently. And I just happen to glance at the postage stamp on the one from our other campus, not something that I normally pay attention to.
It cost $12.71 to mail that book from Las Cruces to Alamogordo, a distance of about 55 miles.
This was not an exceptionally heavy or large book. Normal cost for ILL mail at USPS book rate? About $4. I contact them and tell them something weird happened, just in case there's something wrong with their post meter. Don't want them paying 3x postage on everything coming out of that school! I also send them a photo of the envelope so when my colleague goes to talk to the mail room, she can have evidence in hand.
Then I find I have two requests, one book and one document. The book is easy: a little keyboard work, print some stuff, put it together, ready to mail.
Normally document requests aren't difficult. Except this was Monday.
I go to the stacks, it's a chapter from a cookbook being requested: a classic, Diana Kennedy's My Mexico. Kennedy was considered The Expert when it came to tracking down and cataloging authentic Mexican cuisine, she lived there for ages traveling to all corners and villages in an old Toyota pickup. She passed away a year or two ago in her 90s.
I know exactly where the cookbooks are in the library, go there, start scanning the Library of Congress spine labels to find it. And I find the books are not in order.
*sigh*
I find the book in question, set it aside, do a more thorough shelf scan and only have to resequence a couple of books. Not a big deal. I have a similar problem in our art books that is going to require pulling four or five SHELVES of books out of the stacks to get them sequenced properly!
Take the book back, find what pages are needed, write them on a sticky note.
Go to our copier/scanner. When you scan documents from a book or magazine for loans, you normally scan the cover, the inner sheet that has the copyright info, then you scan the page range requested. Always check to make sure the page range corresponds to a chapter: you might have a different edition than the request was made for and the page numbers might not align! In this case, they did. I've had this happen once or twice, you contact the requesting library and either you can work out what pages are needed, or you have to pass on the request for someone who has the proper edition.
They wanted some thirty pages, and as I'm scanning, I begin thinking that I may have missed a page. I can't check what pages that I've scanned on the copier, so I finish the job, it emails a PDF to my work computer, I go back to my office and check. ALWAYS double-check to make sure you didn't screw up the scan!!!
I missed three pages.
Okay. Write down the missing page numbers on another sticky - the first sticky note indexes where the chapter begins. Back to the copier, scan the three pages, back to my office to merge them back in to the larger PDF.
Fortunately Adobe Acrobat Pro is pretty easy to merge pages between documents and rearrange them. You end up merging the second doc of three pages into the bigger first doc, then it's drag and drop to relocate the new pages and put them where they belong.
All done, I leaf through the document on my screen to make sure the new pages are in their correct spot. First page, fine. Second page, fine. Third page....
The third page was page 248. I had 247, then two copies of 249. No 248. Couldn't figure out what was going on. Did I somehow duplicate a page when I was merging things? It was weird.
Open the second document with the three skipped pages. The third page was 249, not 248. I'd re-scanned the wrong page!
Back to copier, scan page 24EIGHT. Back to desk.
Open email, the doc has ONE page in it. Merge it into the original. Flip through it and make sure all the pages are present and in the right sequence. All is good.
There's two ways to send documents for interlibrary loan. Built-in to the software is something called Odyssey, after all our interlibrary loan software is called ILLiad (with that capitalization). Librarians are weird. You scan the doc - and can have a scanner attached to your PC and scan it directly, and it can be transmitted to the requester seamlessly.
Except our Odyssey config has not worked in the years that I've been here. I don't know what's wrong with it. So I open what's called a policies page for the requester, copy their email address, and create an email to them and attach the file. AND explain all the joy I had producing it!
I expect they got a bit of a laugh on the other end. We all do stuff like this on occasion. They replied today, saying 'I hope your day goes better today.'
Well, so far, so good.
Except for this one really weird thing in Excel....
;-)
I get in and there's two returned interlibrary loan books to be processed, no big deal. One inter-library loan, the other a return from our Las Cruces campus. Technically loans to other campuses are ILL, but a different system is used that ties directly to our main computer system, so they're counted slightly differently. And I just happen to glance at the postage stamp on the one from our other campus, not something that I normally pay attention to.
It cost $12.71 to mail that book from Las Cruces to Alamogordo, a distance of about 55 miles.
This was not an exceptionally heavy or large book. Normal cost for ILL mail at USPS book rate? About $4. I contact them and tell them something weird happened, just in case there's something wrong with their post meter. Don't want them paying 3x postage on everything coming out of that school! I also send them a photo of the envelope so when my colleague goes to talk to the mail room, she can have evidence in hand.
Then I find I have two requests, one book and one document. The book is easy: a little keyboard work, print some stuff, put it together, ready to mail.
Normally document requests aren't difficult. Except this was Monday.
I go to the stacks, it's a chapter from a cookbook being requested: a classic, Diana Kennedy's My Mexico. Kennedy was considered The Expert when it came to tracking down and cataloging authentic Mexican cuisine, she lived there for ages traveling to all corners and villages in an old Toyota pickup. She passed away a year or two ago in her 90s.
I know exactly where the cookbooks are in the library, go there, start scanning the Library of Congress spine labels to find it. And I find the books are not in order.
*sigh*
I find the book in question, set it aside, do a more thorough shelf scan and only have to resequence a couple of books. Not a big deal. I have a similar problem in our art books that is going to require pulling four or five SHELVES of books out of the stacks to get them sequenced properly!
Take the book back, find what pages are needed, write them on a sticky note.
Go to our copier/scanner. When you scan documents from a book or magazine for loans, you normally scan the cover, the inner sheet that has the copyright info, then you scan the page range requested. Always check to make sure the page range corresponds to a chapter: you might have a different edition than the request was made for and the page numbers might not align! In this case, they did. I've had this happen once or twice, you contact the requesting library and either you can work out what pages are needed, or you have to pass on the request for someone who has the proper edition.
They wanted some thirty pages, and as I'm scanning, I begin thinking that I may have missed a page. I can't check what pages that I've scanned on the copier, so I finish the job, it emails a PDF to my work computer, I go back to my office and check. ALWAYS double-check to make sure you didn't screw up the scan!!!
I missed three pages.
Okay. Write down the missing page numbers on another sticky - the first sticky note indexes where the chapter begins. Back to the copier, scan the three pages, back to my office to merge them back in to the larger PDF.
Fortunately Adobe Acrobat Pro is pretty easy to merge pages between documents and rearrange them. You end up merging the second doc of three pages into the bigger first doc, then it's drag and drop to relocate the new pages and put them where they belong.
All done, I leaf through the document on my screen to make sure the new pages are in their correct spot. First page, fine. Second page, fine. Third page....
The third page was page 248. I had 247, then two copies of 249. No 248. Couldn't figure out what was going on. Did I somehow duplicate a page when I was merging things? It was weird.
Open the second document with the three skipped pages. The third page was 249, not 248. I'd re-scanned the wrong page!
Back to copier, scan page 24EIGHT. Back to desk.
Open email, the doc has ONE page in it. Merge it into the original. Flip through it and make sure all the pages are present and in the right sequence. All is good.
There's two ways to send documents for interlibrary loan. Built-in to the software is something called Odyssey, after all our interlibrary loan software is called ILLiad (with that capitalization). Librarians are weird. You scan the doc - and can have a scanner attached to your PC and scan it directly, and it can be transmitted to the requester seamlessly.
Except our Odyssey config has not worked in the years that I've been here. I don't know what's wrong with it. So I open what's called a policies page for the requester, copy their email address, and create an email to them and attach the file. AND explain all the joy I had producing it!
I expect they got a bit of a laugh on the other end. We all do stuff like this on occasion. They replied today, saying 'I hope your day goes better today.'
Well, so far, so good.
Except for this one really weird thing in Excel....
;-)
no subject
Date: 2023-04-15 12:32 am (UTC)I know I'm going to have a lot of trouble adjusting to global warming - modern mid-latitude summer gets hot enough to make me sick. I actually once tried to apply for a job at McMurdo Base in Antarctica, just to get away from warm weather. They weren't hiring, of course.