Suppose you are a patron at XXXbranch. Suppose you gaze across the Circulation Desk and glimpse the 6 VHS tape set of the BBC production of Pride & Prejudice (popularly known as “the one with Colin Firth”). Suppose you got the P&P fever from this fall’s One Book/One Chicago program, or perhaps you just have a fancy for Regency television productions, or for Colin Firth. Who could blame you? Not any librarian, that’s for sure!
What you might do if you found yourself in this situation, is you might ask a librarian if you could use it next. A perfectly reasonable request, no?
And yet, one which can take me an hour to complete.
Why, oh why? My biggest obstacle has to do with our hopelessly outdated 20th-century ILS (or, Integrated Library System). This is the system which, when I started at XXX Public Library just over a year ago, was still a command prompt interface (!), and which ties in with the confusing and clunky GUI and web-based OPACs our patrons are forced to try to use. The good news – nay, the Great News – is that XXX, after something like a decade of contract negotiations, is getting a new ILS, to be unrollled over the next year, and it’s supposed to correct all the little things that never quite worked on this ILS, and introduce lots of new functionality.
There is no bad news. I can’t wait! Come on, New ILS!
Anyway, the precise obstacle is just that you can’t order multivolume sets through our system. Or order parts of a multivolume set, for that matter. I mean you CAN, but you can’t specify which part you want.
In other words, I could place a hold for my patron on that “edition” of P&P, but any single tape will fulfill that request. So I can order you a tape, but it might be volume 5. I can even order you 6 tapes, but you might get 6 copies of volume 2.
The way we work around this right now is: we (branches) call each other on the telephone – a 19th century technology – and explain precisely what it is that we want from each other. An example would be the time I was called and asked to get the workbook to volume 2 of the Side-By-Side english-language instruction series. Once the other branch has found exactly what we want, we place the hold, and then have them fulfill it immediately, all while chatting on the phone. It’s kind of like two people holding hands with a robot and helping it cross the street. It’s no big deal, and sometimes it’s just nice to say “hi”.
My problem: nobody seemed to have all six tapes in the same location. So I had to call around and try to get volumes 1 & 2 from one place, voumes 3-6 from another, and go through this (fairly elaborate) dance of calling a branch, being put on hold while a librarian is found, getting the librarian, being put on hold while they finish with a patron, asking the question, being put on hold while they do the shelf check… for about an hour. Think of something that takes you an hour at your job. That’s an hour I was tied to the desk doing telephone work, ie., mostly being put on hold, that I wasn’t, say, retrieving the Router requests, or working on my Classics order. (Contributing to the problem: there was someone in the wait list ahead of my patron. No volume specified. So I also had to find a copy that I *didn’t* want, and have that one triggered first. Poor guy – I hope he likes Volume 2!)
My point is just: Isn’t this one area where Instant Messaging could create some efficiency in the workplace? IM is this amazing 21st century technology that is fast and allows for immediate dialog, but also handles long pauses and silences really well. I don’t know if enough decision makers are even familiar enough with the medium to see these strengths. I’m still waiting to see if we can get AIM after our Scholars in Residence program made a case for it.
And my other point: the genres and formats perhaps most plagued by this glitch are comic books, DVDs, and videocassettes, because these are the genres and formats that contain popular longform serial narrative. For reasons I disagree with, many of the trade editions of comic books we order are cataloged as a multi-volume set. Ultimate X-Men Volume 1 shares a record with Ultimate X-Men Volume 2. Ultimate Spider-Man volumes 1-14 share a record. Same with The Complete Peanuts. (But not the same with novels, like the V.I. Warshawski series or The Chronicles of Narnia. Go figure.)
They aren’t ordered as a multi-volume set. (Typically we get systemwide orders for volume 1 and a couple of later volumes, while a few ambitious branches might find resources to complete their own set – only to see it constantly circulated through systemwide holds). And they certainly aren’t read as a multi-volume set. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a kid ask me for the next volume of Ultimate X-Men or Ultimate Spider-Man, and I couldn’t get it for him because of the lack of a systemwide order, or the design flaw in our holds system.
So part of my job has become telling kids they can’t read Spider-Man. Oh bitter irony! I love Spider-Man. Sometimes I get teary just thinking of good ol’ Peter Parker putting on that costume and taking his pummelling every day. (Peter Parker, c’est moi!) But it really does take a super-heroic effort to track down and order this material. Needless to say, I am ecstatically looking forward to any changes (AIM, a new ILS, a dedicated comics guy placing systemwide orders) that will make it easier to get Spider-Man to my kids…
Or, as Jane Austen once said, “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.”