Book searching

The past two weeks have been very hectic at work. Because of other people's illness or absence I have driven the storage round several times and have had a lot of desk duty. There were several other challenges recently. One student asked for the history of our old card catalog. I suggested one book containing the general history of the library but felt this was not enough. I asked my colleagues and got some old work material like call number lists and old instructions for her. Another patron asked for two specific 17th century dissertations which the staff couldn't find. I heard about this just as I passed them in the corridor and offered to help. I was given the year, author and subject, and managed to locate both dissertations. It was very difficult. One other time both the patron and the staff had failed to find a book in the open collection. I got this message when they had given up. Of course I found the book. Another case regarded a book printed 1848 not in the old catalog. The question was could we have it anyway. Yes, we did. The problem was to figure out where but I managed because the Royal Library had it in their catalog with a shelf location code similar to ours. I am only telling about the successes here...

We have also been busy moving more high circulation books from storage to the main building, attended a workshop an entire day about the future plans for our department and made preparations for what is going to start on Monday. More details in the next blog entry.