Well, it’s all in the tone. Usually I actually say “See the sign there? It’s kind of tucked away behind that wall; everybody misses it.”
Maybe you can help me with this one: I finish checking someone out (yes, I do circ all day at my branch), hand them their books and their due date slip and say, “These will be due on July 11, except your rental book which is due July 5.” To which the patron responds, “Now when do I have to bring these back?”
Well, imagine how that comes across to somebody with dumbass problems? 
I enjoyed this part way, way too much. Good one.
You all have good points, but I have had truly terrible Reference experiences at my own library here in town. The Reference “librarian” did not know what whirlygigs were and told me that she would have to get up (so?) and look through random books on arts and crafts (in their indexes) in order to find what I was looking for. Of course I told her not to put herself out in any way. I was at home (this was a called in request for help) and got on the computer–in about 3 minutes I had found 3 books on whirlygigs–all present in our system, if not at out actual library.
She hadn’t bothered to even look. What I had been asking is if there were any books on our library’s shelves. I wasn’t having any success in the catalog, so I called. After talking to her, I thought of Amazon–input whirlygigs, got an author and then re-accessed the catalog and bingo!
I do think Ref is hit or miss. I was taught in LIS school that often librarians aren’t successful in find what the patron is looking for, but that if respect, courtesy and civility are used, the patron usually is ok with the failure. I find this true enough, but a bit odd, since when I want to find something, I am most pleased when I actually find it!
I have also had great Ref experiences where I asked the person for the book with the picture of the red knight on the front (for my son). She found it–a Gerald Morris book. Now, for me, that was impressive!
So, I have sympathy for the OP, but also feel he’s out of line a bit. Re other students in library grad school. I found them to be a very mixed bag. Some of them lack basic social skills–seriously and sadly. Some of them were avoiding the real world by going to grad school right after undergrad (not all undergrads were doing this), some were second career folk like me. The weird thing was that we all vied for position in the crucible that was school–some by touting their superior intelligence, others by spouting about being an ER doctor for many years, others by claiming to have slept with Dewey or similar (the name droppers were the worst–especially since they played to soooo the wrong audience. Having never heard of People to Know in the Field, the names were meaningless to most of us).
The social misfits were the most troubling since they um, didn’t “fit”. These are people who would monopolize class participation time or come up to various others after on campus class and say things like “I think you have a verbal tic.” or “You didn’t have to share your experience at the Bodlian (sp?) like that. We were bored.”
:rolleyes: My personal favorite involved a woman who told 3 of us in excruciating detail about her hysterectomy (down to the size and frequency of the clots prior to her procedure). To picture her behind a Ref desk or planning programming makes me blench.
Years ago, my husband made friends with the chief librarian in the small town we lived in. As a result, we got to see the really interesting stuff that was normally kept far, far away from the conservative public eyes that patronized the place.
To this day I wonder if all libraries have that kind of stuff in the back room hidden somewhere.
Oh, no, we keep all the smut on the shelves for you to steal and deface.
I was a student assistant at my undergrad university in Texas. There was a Rare Book Room, and in it were the Playboys, each year’s worth sent off to be bound into a hard-cover volume. They were kept in there because this was Texas, and they did not want the public to have too easy access to “smut,” so patrons had to leave their ID if and when they checked them out. Except some little old lady prude librarian had cut out all of the nudie pictures.
None of the librarians I work with are morons. Well, one of them does have a thing for “energy healing” and idiotic crap like that, but it doesn’t effect her ability to do her job damn well.
I have absolutely no idea why, but people routinely walk past the outdoor book drop, into the library, past the indoor book drop at the circ desk, wait to get my attention, and ask “Can I return this book?”
No, we’re a one-way library, idiot. (Also, yes, the copiers are right over there and I just saw you walk past them, yes we do have bathrooms, no you cannot use the phone*, no you cannot take our newspapers out of the library and for the love of everything good in this world, when you put in an ILL request I need something more than “I think the title was Blah Blah Blah, but I’m not sure and I don’t know the author”.)
*Seriously, what is this? The library is the only place I’ve worked where people ask this and we get it all the time.
Yeah, you think she cut 'em out because she was a prude.
The only thing we keep in the back is Fine Woodworking, because people steal the plans. Uh, that’s woodworking as in building furniture, not, you know. Like I said, we keep all those books out for you to steal.
Other things we constantly replace: Bob Marley biographies. Wicca and witchcraft. Homosexuality, not limited to actual sex. GED test prep. Freemasonry. New Age of all sorts, particularly dreams. Travel. Bird guides.
ETA - and Zane. GodDAMN do people steal those. Must be pretty hot! I’d read them, but I haven’t spotted a copy in the wild in ages and the request lists for all of them have at least 30 people on it at all times.
Urrraggghhhh! I hate that one! Worse are students who return books onto the carts of books that are to be reshelved (which means the book gets reshelved and never checked in and the patron gets pissy at the overdue notices).
Then there are the students who insist on putting their papers on the left hand top corner of the copier plate and are perplexed why it doesn’t copy correctly. You can only say “try putting it in the opposite corner” so many times before you want to finish it by shouting out “by the big red arrow under the PLACE COPY HERE decal”.
I’m not a people person but I fake it well, so that keeps me smiling and civil when having to show the same patron how to use the same catalog/database I’ve shown them how to use 13 times before or other quotidian frustrations. My favorite thing though is when you get the reference question on something you’ve never heard of but find more interesting than the student does and continue reading the articles after s/he leaves the desk. Or when you find the answer to something through some interesting “back door” searching.
Example: once I had a student who needed articles on a disease but couldn’t remember it’s name- she told me “it’s that disease that makes children die of old age”. I knew exactly what she was talking about but couldn’t think of the name either, and keyword searches kept bringing up Alzheimers and other geriatric conditions that somewhere mentioned children as well. Then I remembered there was a child actor who had the condition, and that he played a space alien in a movie with Jack Elam- so I went to imdb, found Jack Elam, then the movie under his credits, then the actor and in his bio, the disease (Progeria, which I’ve remembered ever since). Those are the times that I feel most “librarian-ish”.
My long ago paean to modern librarianship, which was later translated into Thai believe it or not.
Group work seems to be something emphasized in LIS classes these days, and I’ve met a mixture of people of different age and skill levels, a bit like what you’ve experienced. However, I’ve done just about all my classwork online, so you only get to know certain facets of an individual’s personality. Some of them I’ve come away from class feeling like I learned something from them, and some of them I can’t recall at all. Some of them are memorable because of strange personal attributes or just being annoying.
One guy I had group work with got the nickname Chicken Little because he clearly was not ready for graduate school work and the responsibility to do work without having to have it checked several times by the other groupmates and the professor for accuracy before submitting it. He also was a bit of a procrastinator, so with some of our group work stuff (article analysis), he’d provide us with the wrong type of article for that week two days before it was due, then get pissy that he was told it was the wrong type of article. This led to us more or less letting him hang himself in front of the professor before playing the “this group member sucks” game in evaluations.
I had another person whose main personality issue was that she didn’t understand the nature of a family emergency and the idea that sometimes things happen and you have to go on without a group member. She wasn’t particularly sensitive about the issue that caused the group member’s family emergency related absence and was summarily chewed out for it by said group member after giving enough jabs about it.
As for fellow staff, most of the people I work with in my library are smart and pretty easy going. We do have our occasional raincloud or a situation where someone makes remarks that make me wonder about them as a person, but they’re all pretty smart people. Since I work in a public library, it’s pretty common to do reference research for people who don’t know how to explain the question for the answer they want.
Zsofia: I hear you on all the genres you mentioned as being regularly stolen. If you had religious glurge self-help books to that, you’d have our frequently stolen or “borrowed for over a month” categories.
All the librarians who are both good and people I like are exactly like that. Me, too.
I once was assigned a group project right before Spring Break. Now, most people in grad school don’t go anywhere for Spring Break because they’re grownups, but that one time a friend and I said, hey, we’re too old to go to Daytona Beach - let’s go! We’ll never have the time to do it again, you know, and we can pretend to be ironic about it but secretly have fun. So my professor calls me on my cel phone while I’m drinking a 50 cent beer at noon on some hotel patio and watching a contest the rules of which were essentially “You puke, you forfeit”, after having tracked me down to tell me that my group members were going insane and why didn’t I talk to them and did I understand that this project was a major part of my grade and etc. etc. etc. I mean, she really yelled at me! Seriously! The project was due more than a month from then, and right after the assignment was given we set up a time to get together and talk about it, you know, after Spring Break. So I had fulfilled any reasonable obligation. And then evidently they got in a little library school tizzy freakout. I know that’s why I got a B in that class; nobody believed me that it was them who were the crazy-ass ones. (It probably didn’t help my case that in the background you could hear “SHOW US YOUR TITS!”, but there it is.) Yeah, that meeting we had wasn’t the most comfortable one I’ve ever been to. My e-mail inbox was bursting at the seams when I got home to check it.
And yes, you will have the same stupid group work throughout your career, only once you get hired it’s called a “committee.”
I’m just wondering WHO Spezza is planning to serve, once s/he graduates. It’s kinda hard to enjoy, much less succeed at, a helping profession when you can’t handle idiocy.
- fessie, World’s Worst Librarian Assistant, Cincinnati Public Library System, 1988-89 (hey, I thought I was “embracing knowledge”
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When I worked in the public library as a teenager, I got put in charge of signage. One spring, I did an extensive set for helping patrons find the free tax forms. I had read that black markings on yellow grab attention particularly well (which critters like yellowjackets exploit), and that red on yellow was runner-up. I ordered a batch of bright yellow tagboard in poster size.
I put one 8"x10" sign on each set of airlock-type entrance doors at eye level. You could not enter the library without seeing at least two.
YES, WE HAVE
TAX FORMS
I put a full-size sign on the front apron of the front desk, just below the smiling face of the seated desk attendant.
←TAX FORMS
← THIS WAY
I put a little table-tent on top of the front desk, right where patrons would place their hands if they leaned on the desk to talk to the librarian.
←TAX FORMS
The table with the tax forms was about 10 feet to the left of the front desk. I hung a big sign off the front edge
↑TAX FORMS↑
and suspended a big sign from the ceiling with string to hang at eye level.
↓TAX FORMS↓
I will give you one guess what the most common question asked of the front desk attendant was in late March and early April.
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Did you guess?
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No, you’re all wrong. It was
“Do I have to go to City Hall to pick up tax forms?”
I think it’s not that people are idiots, so much as that they’re in visual information overload when they step into a library unless they visit every day. There’s just too much to see.
Question:
If you’re such a genius, why aren’t you in med school?
Linty Fresh
Former reference librarian
Current circulation Desk Librarian who still has to deal with geniuses who think they know more about libraries than I do, although they can’t find their way to the reference stacks even with big-assed signs that Helen Keller could follow.
Pure WAG, but perhaps stating the dates doesn’t register all that well with people, and that it’s time spans that are the important thing - “you’ve got these for three weeks, except the rental book which is just two”.
Or better yet, a “team”, that’s really just a committee, but you have to call a team because that’s they’re called where you work.
I’ve been a long-time proponent of land-mines in Libraries (as well as a mandatory year and a half in customer service when you finish High School, but I digress). I did the math on it once upon a time, at work. (Hotel Reception, night watch. Time was an ample resource, along with paper and pens.) The cost/benefit of the occasional loss, as well as the PR hit to libraries’ reputation, worked out in favour of the land-mines. Greatly so.
- Guku
Customer Service since the day I turned 15.
Heh. Rule #1 of library work: no one ever reads any signs.