6A: Reflection on Class 10-4-16

The warm-up for the class was to write down what questions we would ask a patron in response to asking for our help with a paper on motes. I originally was thinking dust motes, but it didn’t say “dust”. So I wasn’t sure. One classmate brought up a good point that if this was a verbal transaction, then one could think that the patron was talking about castle moats. A few classmates brought up that one question that could be asked is some version of “How much have you already researched on the topic?” I forget about this question EVERY SINGLE TIME. I don’t know why, but I just do. I think I need to start thinking of this question as the very first question I need to ask. The motes that the question was about is the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium which is located in Florida. Tricky question.

At one point, the word “satisfice” came up in discussion. It means that when you are doing any kind of activity, you get to the point where you believe that it is good enough. I can definitely relate to this. I hate cooking and often I get tired and just stop, saying that’s good enough. I did it with the first and only time I made a stuffed pepper soup. I got so tired of chopping peppers that there was no way I was going to also chop an onion up, so instead I used onion flakes. And then I didn’t have fresh garlic so I used minced garlic. I kept stirring and tasting and it didn’t taste great. It didn’t taste bad, but I just got to the point where I no longer cared. I believed it didn’t taste great because I didn’t use fresh onions and garlic. Plus, I suck at cooking. I let it cook without stirring. But it ended up tasting awesome! I just had to let it simmer for awhile. That was the trick.

Last week, I had a transaction with a patron where “satisfice” comes into play in relation to searching for a book. He wanted a book for his class and wanted to know if we had it. We didn’t and I told him we could do an inter-library loan request for it. He didn’t want to because he procrastinated and it was due very soon. He then thanked me and hung up. Well, I don’t like giving up, and I wanted to see if any of the local libraries had it. But instead of going to Worldcat, I just googled it. Well, I found it. And it wasn’t a book. It was an article, to which you can have free access to. So I called him back and left a message that I found it, telling him that it was the third hit on the yahoo search engine (Yes, I know. I said “googled” but I wasn’t using the Google search engine). Shortly after I was off the reference desk, he called circulation and said he wanted to thank the person for finding it for him. If he had just stayed on the phone for a couple more minutes, instead of thinking the searching I did was good enough, I wouldn’t have had to call him back.

One classmate mentioned how he wished course reserves had an online reservation system. I think that’s a great idea, but I can see it having the same exact problems as we have involving reserved study rooms at my library. A person could check the book out having reserved it, but they may not return it when they are supposed to. Or someone may reserve the book, but don’t show up at all to check it out, so someone else could have had it the whole time (this happens with the study rooms all the time. We had to put in place a policy that stated that if you are not here within the first 30 minutes, then you forfeit the room. We recently went down to 15 minutes, which reminds me to make sure I updated the document to say 15 minutes).

                Towards the end of class, we talked about our missing course reserve. After class, I decided to go look for it. I cannot stand it when a book is missing. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves in relation to my work. Plus, I was the last person to check it out, so what the heck?! I first checked Shapiro’s main collection for it then headed to Askwith where the course reserves are. When I entered a girl was drawing the main Harry Potter characters playing Quidditch on a whiteboard (she’s a really good drawer). The whiteboard is moveable and what they use as their door to go back behind the counter. So I was able to see books closer than if I were to stand at the counter, plus any other time the stack of books would be hidden behind the white board. Right away I spotted the professor’s book which she gave to the library to put on reserve since the library’s copy was missing. I had looked up the call numbers before leaving class, so I definitely knew that it was her book. I then scanned the rest of the books on the stack and saw the missing one. I then went up to the counter and asked for a book on course reserve. I gave the guy the course number and he actually looked it up correctly (2 out of 4 now). I told him I wanted the missing book. He said it was missing. I told him I know, but I would like to know where it is supposed to be shelved and he said I couldn’t go back there, to which I told him that’s ok, just walk to where it’s supposed to be. He walked around the corner to the left of where I found it. So then I pointed to him where it was, that it was one shelf down from the professor’s copy. I’m thinking that the stack it’s on is for the professors’ personal books which are on course reserve, and that it got shelved there instead of with the rest of the library books. But I could be wrong. They might have their course reserves set up differently than my library. He looked at me in surprise and I told him I work in a library and know how course reserves can get messed up, plus that I was the last one to check it out.

Now if I could find all the books that we are discovered are missing from doing inventory at my library, I’d be very happy. So many are missing. But what’s weird is that every time I give students the list of the missing books to go look for, every single time they find more books that were missing that others had looked for. Long ago, I thought it was one student saying a book is missing, but found out that wasn’t the case by looking at the pages and seeing who initialed them. Now my suspicion is that the books were “checked out” but were not properly checked out in the system, so they weren’t registered on the patron’s account. Why else are books constantly found every time I have sent them out to look for them since we discovered them missing a year ago (I’ve done this around 5 times now)? One of those mysteries that will be unsolved. Maybe there are gremlins in addition to the ghost.