Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Case in point, late April I mailed out a double DVD, The Curse and The Curse 2, a flippy DVD. I doubt it's a very good movie, but whatever. If someone wants it and I have it, it gets mailed.

Now, we initially cataloged this movie in 2013, so that's when we acquired it. Since then, and I don't know exactly when, we changed cataloging systems and lending history prior to that change was lost. It was, I'd guess, a decade ago. Since that 'decade'-ago conversion, it has had one in-house use plus me mailing it out once.

Very high-traffic item. :-)

Since I sent it out three weeks ago or so?

I've received two or three requests for it! I'm guessing it was featured/mentioned in a podcast or something.

Unfortunately I can't pull up cancelled requests in WorldShare. I could in our previous ILL program, ILLiad, but that cost a fair chunk of money annually whereas WorldShare is free because we already pay a goodly amount of change to OCLC for other programs that we need.

It'll be interesting to see if there's still demand for it once it's returned from the borrowing library.

After digging into IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB gives it a 5.1 out of a 1-10 scale and RT gives it a 27% score. I also found out that it's based on a HP Lovecraft story. So definitely sounds like a very bad movie. I didn't bother looking up Curse 2.

And IMDB had a footnote comment that Wil Wheaton, teen star of the film, noted that he and his sister were horribly abused during the production of this film and he talked about it on his blog in 2022(?).

I run interlibrary loan (ILL) for our university branch campus library. Effectively we're a community college, but we don't yet have that in our name. Anyway, I had a lot of books to process today - two incoming, no big deal, but five outbound and one was a monster two volume set!

And that two volume set is the cool part.

The title of the book is The History of New Mexico. Okay, that's not terribly notable or interesting, in and of itself. There's lots of books on the history of New Mexico. We have quite the storied history going back over 400 years to Nuevo Mexico. As I said, this is a two-volume set. Hardbound. Over a thousand pages. One of the things that I do when I mail out books is I flip through them to see if there's any apparent damage: loose pages, writing, highlighting, etc. And I note them on a sort of transaction invoice that goes with the book so the receiving library knows if it comes back from their patron the worse for wear.

Well, flipping through this, the first thing that's apparent is that it's a old photocopy of a very old book. Like, the copy was made back in the '60s or '70s perhaps, though this printing is somewhat newer. Usually the Library of Congress code on the spine of the book lists the date, but that's a newer thing and this one doesn't have that. So I look up the publish date.

1907.

For those of you without instant recall, or knowledge of when states were added to the Union, that is FIVE YEARS BEFORE NEW MEXICO BECAME A STATE! (Arizona and New Mexico both became states in 1912, NM on Jan. 6, AZ on Valentine's Day, then Alaska and Hawaii rounded out the 50.)

Now, in my book (honestly, no pun intended), that's pretty cool. I can't wait to look at it a bit more closely when it comes back.

Discoveries like this is why I think ILL is the coolest job in the library.

I 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....

;-)

We employ two students each semester part-time. There are two basic qualifications to get hired: you must be receiving financial aid, and you have to pass an interview and a basic computer literacy test.

We had a new guy who started this fall semester unexpectedly quit on us last week before the semester ended. That was a bit annoying, having to rejigger the schedule with no notice. And if you quit, well, we're not going to bring you back. So we start looking at applications. And find a young person who allegedly wanted to work with us.

Their interview was this morning. And it became a "not only no, but hell no."

Well, this person was receiving financial aid. Completely blew the second half.

It rapidly became apparent that they held what we refer to as the 'Google View' of the information universe, that is, that all information can be found via Google searches. Well, it can't. There are huge tranches of information that aren't indexed by Google and never will be. The astronomer and author (of the Cuckoo's Egg, recommended read*) Cliff Stoll said it quite nicely in one of his books, though he might have been quoting someone - I can't remember - but the saying was that the internet is an information resource infinitely wide but only a millimeter thick.

ANYWAY, they were asked the question: what programs or activities would you like to see in the library to encourage students to use it. And the reply was "Well, people will use the library or not, libraries are on their way out." Yep, the Google Answer. Everything you need to know is online.

Additionally, they needed to complete a very basic Microsoft Word exercise. Load a document off a thumb drive into Word, follow the instructions in the document to make specific changes, save the doc, close it, return the flash drive. Should take no more than 5-10 minutes. 30 minutes later, they were not done. My boss goes to see what's happening: they'd plugged the drive into a monitor port that was not connected to the tower PC. Apparently they were not very familiar with PC hardware and couldn't be bothered to look at cable pathways to see if a USB cable lead from the monitor to the PC. Some basic PC knowledge is also considered useful for the job, as is asking for help if you're having problems, not wasting a half an hour of time.

"Thank you for coming, we'll be in touch." Or not, in this case.

* * * * *

*Cliff Stoll was an astronomy graduate student at Lawrence Berkeley Nat'l Lab (LBNL) in 1986, he ran out of grant money and was given the task of finding why two different computer accounting systems were off by SEVENTY FIVE CENTS. And he found it: in an account of a professor who was on sabbatical and out of the country, and thus did not have computer access - keep in mind that at this time there was the internet, but mostly only available at universities and gov't labs/military bases. No World Wide Web, that started in the early '90s.

Cliff was not a programmer, at this time he's an astrophysicist working on a PhD. To find what caused the error, he taught himself programming to understand the code of the two accounting systems to find out why the discrepancy.

Unix, in a server environment, has/had an internal accounting system for billing time/resources against individual accounts. On top of that, LBNL had written a second accounting system for whatever reason.

In studying the code, he figured out that a properly logged-in account would be accounted for by both accounting systems. But if someone hacked into LBNL's system, there would be a discrepancy because the hackers knew about the Unix accounting system and how to bypass it. They didn't know about the second accounting system and thus didn't know to bypass it and thus generated the discrepancy!

Stoll kept digging, and uncovered - I kid you not - an East German spy ring! They hacked into LBNL's system and used it as a gateway to bounce around the internet and get into various government and military networks across the country.

And it was all discovered because of a seventy-five cent error.

Cliff wrote two other books, Silicon Snake Oil and High-Tech Heretic. The quote about the internet being a millimeter deep came from, I think, Silicon Snake Oil. But as I said, I highly recommend Cuckoo's Egg, it was made into a PBS movie! All three books are fun, and I think Cuckoo's Egg includes a cookie recipe.

The spy ring incident also resulted into a pretty gruesome murder and conflagration in East Germany when the identities of some of the people involved were subsequently uncovered by police.

*sigh*

We have a courier service. We mainly use it for moving books back and forth with main campus that students request from each other between our campuses and also a couple of other community college campuses in Las Cruces. The cool thing about it is that students can request books without librarian help through the system. Also, when I send books out via interlibrary loan (ILL), some remote libraries - both public and university - sometimes return them via the courier network.

Late Friday I get an email from the courier company. Usually there's two types I get from them, actual correspondence and "buy courses from us" blather. This was different, it named a library that was no longer receiving service from them. The email had a list of other libraries, and I idly scanned the list, thinking it was a list of libraries in our region that were subscribers and noticed that main campus was on the list but we weren't.

Then I re-read the header. No longer receiving service from the courier.

The bastards had cancelled the courier service without telling us their plans.

We renewed our service for the next year LITERALLY last week to the tune of THIRTY EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS.

Farking bastiches!

95%+ of our courier traffic is back and forth to main campus and the community colleges in Las Cruces! They have a huge budget, both for people and everything else. We have 2.5 people plus two student workers. It would have been nice to have an extra $3800 to spend on other things.

This is going to complicate my ILL job as now I'm going to have to dig in to requests more deeply and if they are on the courier network, it's going out via courier rather than USPS to make sure we use the courier as much as possible before we cancel it next year.

AND now, whenever a student at another campus requests a book, that's another thing I'm going to have to pack up to mail via the post office, which takes a good 20 minutes compared to printing a slip, scanning it, and throwing it into a courier bag.

*sigh*

Farking bastiches!

Oh my Effing Gee!

Public libraries have been coming under a ridiculous amount of fire, the worst that I've recently heard is a town DEFUNDING THEIR LIBRARY! I can't imagine a more stupid thing to do!

Well, in this case, a library admin decided to not allow a banned book display! I don't know if they wanted to avoid controversy or what. I'm not sure if this was a city-level decision or within the actual library administration hierarchy. And the Reddit poster did not say which library or where it was.

Still, heck of a thing. The suggestions posted to sidestep it are brilliant! I think my favorite was the Ted Cruz Book Club!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Libraries/comments/wm5goj/weve_been_banned_from_doing_a_banned_books

As I have mentioned before, I run interlibrary loan (ILL) at the library at which I work, a branch campus university library. And perhaps my favorite borrowers that I like to provide service to are prisons. Interestingly, I only seem to receive requests from New Mexico prisons. I mean, I'd send books to any library - I ship items all around the country, I've sent them to the Harvard Medical Library, I've sent books to Thailand and England. But when it comes to prisons, I only get requests from NM.

Curious.

I know that when it comes to borrowing, my system weighs in favor of New Mexico libraries that carry what I'm looking for (physically shorter means normally faster delivery), but I can expand that to search literally around the world. Every library that participates in ILL has their entire inventory (catalog) uploaded to a database in Ohio for central searching for borrowing and lending purposes.

Anyway, prisons have one restriction: they can only take softcover. Paperback and trade paperback. Because hardback cardboard can be made into shivs! Now, aside from a prisoner getting into trouble for having a shiv, they'd also lose their library borrowing privileges for damaging a book! But who knows, maybe a cellmate would do the deed.

Back to the story.

Last week I had a request for a book. It's called Waiterrant, by the author The Waiter. It's a collection of blog posts that won an award. The anonymous blogger took a job as a waiter to help him through a tough patch, and that expected short-term period turned into a seven-year stretch. I subscribe to it through LJ and have enjoyed it for several years.

I had no idea that we had that book in our collection!

I was kind of overjoyed to find it on our shelves. I was also kind of surprised as it was in our cookbook section, and I've been through that section and missed it! No matter, we had the book, I pulled it, and took it back to my office for further processing.

And then it struck me. It's a hardback. And it was a prison that requested it.

I had to pass on the borrowing request and the request went to the next library in the search string. (A search string is a list of libraries that probably have the book on their shelves, they'll all receive the borrowing request in order until someone can fulfill the request or the last library passes, in which case the request is unfulfilled and the requesting library can tell the patron 'sorry, no can do' or they can do another request with different libraries)

Well, there was a somewhat sunnier side to this - I could look up The Waiter's blog and tell him that my library had his book! So I did! I told him of my joy at the serendipity of finding it here, and some of the other cool finds that I've discovered, and my sadness at not being able to send a copy to the prison and why.

He replied that if I send him my library's address, he'll send me a softcover that I can send to the prison!

WOW.

Now, I didn't ask for that, I was considering ordering a softcover. But he's going to send us one!

THAT IS SO AWESOME!

I replied this morning with our contact information. And just now I told my boss about it, she was pretty happy. Free books are a good thing - not that we'll take just any book! But since we already have this book in our collection, it clearly has been judged to have some merit by a previous selection process.

I wonder if he's going to sign it or otherwise personalize it?

I'm off tomorrow, but I'm going to call the prison Thursday morning.

Just got an email from my boss. The library has been shut down indefinitely. COVID.

Just the library.

Working from home "for the next few weeks", but no info on us having to get tested, I expect we'll have more info and directives come Monday.

I was off last week and I feel fine, aside from a strep throat infection which I'm on antibiotics for and it's improving.

I just looked for A Number of Things.

We actually have a book of that title.

I received a transfer request to send it to main campus, which meant our catalog sowed it as being available, couldn't find it. My associate couldn't find it, and another book requested by the same person also couldn't be found.

So I contacted my counterpart at main campus and told her that the two books could not be found, then we went in to our catalog and marked the two books as missing.

Then I processed the four massive courier bags that came in last week while I was "working from home".

And there I found A Number of Things and the other book.

The weird thing is that every single book in this pile, over a dozen books: I scan them in and every last one comes back Item Not On Loan. WTF? If they're coming back from main campus, clearly they were on loan!

I've been filling requests but first emailing the library wanting my books to confirm that they still want them - that way we both don't waste money and time shipping books back and forth if they already filled the request and don't need my copy. I had to call an in-state library because I didn't have an email address for them. I ask for the ILL person. Eventually a woman answers and says the ILL person retired FIVE HOURS AGO!

I laughed out loud. She said she used to do ILL, and was able to help me. They want the book very much, and I'll be mailing it out to them tomorrow.