I’ve gotta run back to the library now, but if I may. . .
Jesus. You know, if you’re too fucking lazy or too fucking stupid to put the book back where it goes, I can handle that. There are people who work in this goddamned library who will do that for you. Just put the books in one of the 500 bins that are there for just that purpose: lazy (or busy) shits who can’t (or won’t) put their books back. Hell, you can even drop them on the fucking floor. I’m sure someone will be around to put them back eventually.
BUT DON’T FUCKING PUT THE BOOKS BACK IN THE WRONG FUCKING PLACE!!! How fucking lazy and selfish can you fucking be?!?! Do you know how many times I’ve looked for books that weren’t fucking there??? Shit. Then I wind up fucking rearranging the goddamn shelves personally, since the library personel will have no fucking way of finding the fucking books that you fucking misplaced.
It’s these fucking people that are making it difficult for me to put everything off to the last minute.
In high school I had a part time job working as a page in a library. We really didn’t care if people took books off the shelves for us to reshelve. That’s easy and its part of our jobs. But it really is a pain in the ass to have to inspect shelves to make sure that everything is in the right order. If people would just not put a book back somewhere if they weren’t sure about it, it would probably make the library run about twice as efficiently.
When I was going to college, you were not permitted to reshelve books. If you took them out, you had to drop them in the bins or on the cases provided for this reason. It made perfect sense to me in a library that was seven stories tall with three different wings on each floor. Trying to find a misshelved book would be almost impossible.
We call it Shelfreading… shudder… after about thirty seconds of reading Dewey as quickly as possible, your vision goes blurry for at leas 15 minutes.
I my library, we have a shelving cart every twenty feet for thsi very reason. In fact, we have signs that say “Please do not reshelve materials.” Yet people think that they’re still doing us a fucking favor. Cheezuz.
Shudder. I had to shelfread one month two years ago and it’s not an experience I care to repeat.
There are enormous signs all over our library going DO NOT RESHELVE BOOKS! YOU SHALL SMART FOR THIS!
NEVER reshelve books. Even if you’re SURE you can find the right place. Because someone who can’t will see you and will think they ought to. And then we get Canadian history in with multivariable analysis, and that’s horrible.
You’d think a rule that requires people to be lazy would be a big success, right? sigh
Oh jeez, I’ve done more shelfreading in my life than many of you could comprehend.
You think shelfreadin normal books in Dewey is boring, try shelfreading the University of Washington periodicals collection, in LC. That’ll roll your eyes back.
“AP2 .A2 vol. 1, part 1, copy 1; AP2 .A2 vol. 1, part 1, copy 2; AP2 .A2 vol. 1, part 2, copy 1 . . . AP2 .A2 vol. 146, part 4, copy 3 . . .”
I worked the periodicals collection at UW for FOUR YEARS. Let’s just say that not many people are using the library during summer and we were expected to read two ranges per shift.
The only thing I can think of that would be worse is newspaper microfilms in a drawer (can’t agree with Double Fold on everything but microfilm really does suck).
That’s why I became a librarian, so that I could cackle with glee as I made some work study student shelfread for an entire summer.
On a more entertaining note, though, it is amazing what you’ll find on top of the books on the top shelf.
Do you know what’s worse? When there’s an assignment due, and a particular book is in high demand, some people:
a) Rip out pertinent pages (or even entire chapters), ensuring that others won’t be able to use it and completely ruining the book. Use a damn photocopier - that’s what they’re in the library for!
b) Deliberately hide books so that nobody else can find them.
In principle, I agree with you guys, but do you have any idea how long it takes the library staff at my university to reshelve anything? At least a week. I can’t see taking an item out of circulation for a week, especially at the end of the semester when everybody else in the class is looking for it.
I hear you. I’d like to rip out there eyes. One day I was reading a book and it took me a few minutes to try to make sense of an incoherent sentence that continued from one page to the next. It finally hit me when I saw that one page was numbered 140 and the next 161. Luckily for me there was another copy of the same book on the shelves which had not been similarily violated. Nonetheless, it still left a sour taste in my mouth knowing that there are pricks out there who think they have some sort of right to take from the rest of us in this manner. (It is stealing, as far as I’m concerned).
Another problem nowadays, thanks to technology, is cell phones. Okay, I’ll let it go if it rings and you hurry to turn it off, but what’s the deal with flipping it on and having a full scale conversation amidst so many people reading? Don’t these people have any sense of responsibility?