Spring break update and ILL

Spring break is here!

Well, not for much longer. But it’s still been a very quiet week as far as helping students is concerned. I’ve taken the opportunity to finish a few projects and clean out my office. If you’re reading this and have visited my office, you know how cluttered it’s been for the past three years. It was about 75% donated books and films I was considering adding to the collection and about 25% my own natural messiness.

No more! By the end of Spring Break, it’ll all be either in the collection or for sale on the Book Sale shelf we use to re-home any donations we don’t need. My office feels so much larger now.

We’ve also been adjusting the DVD shelves; for the past few weeks we’ve replaced nearly all of the security cases with a new batch we ordered last summer specifically for this reason. Before this project, we had three or four different kinds, requiring about the same number of magnetic unlockers, and that was a bit of a silly headache. Now we’re down to two kinds -- one for DVDs and one for VHS tapes.

Of course, the new DVD cases are a little funny in comparison to others we’ve had in the past; they’re thicker at the top than they are at the bottom. This leads to some shelving weirdness where half a shelf is tilted one way and half is tilted the other. Although it all takes up about the same amount of space, it needed to be arranged differently, so we’ve spread them out. We're also working on a better way to store DVDs in those cases that might alleviate some of these issues.

Complicating matters is the weather. It’s so incredible! Perfect temperatures, blue skies, blooming flowers, lovely breezes. Spring has arrived a little ahead of schedule, and it’s making it tough to work in the Library all day long.

It’s also been a busy semester. On top of everything else, I’ve added inter-library loan (ILL) work on a temporary basis, and it’s been an eye-opener!

Truth is, ILL is a pretty fascinating portion of what we do here. Since so much of the Deaf Collection consists of publications that are pretty tough to find -- theses, for instance, or non-profit organization reports on services to populations with hearing loss -- a good deal of ILL has to do with fulfilling requests from outside libraries for our stuff, providing nobody at our Library needs it right then. We also do a fairly brisk business for Gallaudet students and faculty who need stuff that manages to slip through the cracks in the Consortium -- those cracks are small, given our huge collective holdings of around eight million items, but do exist!

There’s a pretty good system in place that allows libraries nationwide, sometimes even worldwide, to share their stuff. It includes everything from simply being able to see that another library has what you want, to managing the shipping of those items, down to providing labels that you can print out and use for mailing.

The sheer scale of this system is mind-boggling. We’ve been using Rolodexes -- kind of like this one from Staples if you’re young and clueless about these things -- for years to keep records of institutions that have requested things from us in the past, using cards with all the information we need for shipping and bar codes for each one. This way, it’s easier to lend to them again if they ask: scan, drop in envelope, stick on label, and go. Those things are huge by now, which means there are hundreds of libraries in there.

That just covers institutions that have borrowed from us in the past. On top of that, we still get one or two new ones every other week that don’t have a card in either Rolodex and have to add one for them.

This lends itself to a new sort of perspective on how this whole library thing works. Funny, isn’t it, to think of the staggering investment involved in providing people the information they need?