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Lurking Haro posted:Do I have to call The Police? No, that's not Granos.
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Nov 30, 2018 20:59
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Y'know, usually I have that unfortunate goon luck to learn about celebrity deaths from PYF Funny Pictures. Like, "holy crap, so-and-so died? Aw, that's not funny at all!" Imagine my astonishment when the situation was completely reversed today, and I learned in that thread that Danielle Steele is still alive and churning out shelf-clogging tripe! I just looked it up and she's only 71, so I guess y'all will probably have to suffer for a few more years. Goondolences, library peeps. Unrelated, just remembered another fun animal story after reading other goons' memories of Snakes Alive: But THEY Brought Animals! Another popular, annual summer reading program was having folks from the Virginia Living Museum come in. The VLM is a super cool small zoo; if you ever find yourself in Newport News, VA, go check out their adorable otters. :3 I'm checking them in, helping carry various enclosures with owls and small mammals and reptiles and such, and making sure all their A/V needs are met. The library isn't open yet, but eager patrons with their squirming, excited children are already lined up to see the fox and whatnot. On one trip outside to get more stuff for them, there's a woman who stops me. "Excuse me, can I get inside? It's really hot, and I need to bring my turtle inside to get him some water." She is not wearing a VLM polo shirt nor sporting the lanyards/name tags they all wear. And she's just holding a turtle in her hands, no cage of any kind. "Uhhhh.... Are you with VLM?" I diplomatically ask, knowing full well that the answer is "no". "No, I'm just here for the program, but I thought I'd bring him along. The kids might want to see him." "Ma'am, I'm sorry, but if you're not with VLM, I can't just let you bring a random turtle in." Especially since, being a major nature science nerd myself, I know turtles are hardcore carriers of salmonella, and gently caress if I'm letting you bring that potential disease vector into my meeting room so kids can pet him and then schmear their unwashed hands all over the youth services area. She flips the hell out, yelling how that's unfair, "But THEY brought animals!" I keep my cool (as much as I can both mentally and physically, it was actually stupid hot that day, already somewhere around 90 degrees at 9am and I'd been running back and forth since I got there at 8), and restate, "I'm sorry, I can't allow that ." She storms off back to her car, dragging her poor crying kid who was now going to miss the program, loudly declaring how the director was going to hear about this. Nothing ever came of it, either she chickened out on her threats on getting me fired, or the director just laughed and hung up on her. JacquelineDempsey fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Nov 30, 2018 |
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Nov 30, 2018 22:02
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I lived in Norfolk in the late 80s and, being a small child, the Living Museum was probably my favorite place in the world.
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Dec 1, 2018 00:03
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I lived in Norfolk in the late 80s and, being a small child, the Living Museum was probably my favorite place in the world.  I only moved to Hampton Roads in 2000, but I loved that place. Actually applied there when I started getting disgruntled with the library around 2011 and was shopping around. The nice woman who interviewed me was actually honest enough to say "you sound like you'd be a great fit, and we'd be happy to have you as our volunteer coordinator, but you'd be taking a big pay cut. Think about it, and call me." At the time I was in crushing debt, so I stayed with my increasingly miserable library job. In hindsight, I should've just taken that job and helped inquisitive kids play with starfish in the touch-tank, I would've been much happier.  Well, lesson learned.
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Dec 1, 2018 00:52
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another question: is it mandated by law that there's exactly one guy in every library who drat near hacks up a lung, or is it just more obvious in a quiet environment?
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Dec 1, 2018 00:54
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Y'know, usually I have that unfortunate goon luck to learn about celebrity deaths from PYF Funny Pictures. Like, "holy crap, so-and-so died? Aw, that's not funny at all!" Danielle Steele and her daughter are both nightmares to wait on as well.
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Dec 1, 2018 06:53
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MAKE NO BABBYS posted:Danielle Steele and her daughter are both nightmares to wait on as well. If you bring tea, you better spill tea!
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Dec 1, 2018 08:20
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MAKE NO BABBYS posted:Danielle Steele and her daughter are both nightmares to wait on as well. Not to derail the thread, but this is a story I have GOT to hear. 
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Dec 1, 2018 17:24
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Zamboni Rodeo posted:Not to derail the thread, but this is a story I have GOT to hear. Yeah, as OP and someone who now works in restaurants, permission to derail absolutely granted, I'm dying to hear it as well.
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Dec 1, 2018 17:48
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JacquelineDempsey posted:On the subject of collections and shelf-reading: who other library vets here is old enough to remember having a half shelf worth of space taken up by books about the Y2K bug issue? Even as a new hire, I was all "Okay, it's been over a year now, and the world didn't end, and I don't have anywhere else to stuff all these new-fangled books on HTML in the 000s, can we PLEASE get rid of these?" I still found some books when I started interning in 2004, I had to move heaven and earth to get rid of them. Man, deselecting was such a fight and whenever I was assigned a bunch of shelves I knew I was "the enforcer".
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Dec 1, 2018 20:18
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DONT TOUCH THE PC posted:I still found some books when I started interning in 2004, I had to move heaven and earth to get rid of them. St. Jerome bless you. I mean, even as a lowly shelver I loved the fact that my job was a preservationist of history, an archivist, The Keeper of Knowledge... But at some point you just run out of shelf space and there's no reason to keep crap like that around. You can get all that info online, and if it happens that Trump pulls a nuclear war and all the computers get EMPed, I don't really think anyone's gonna care about a PC bug from 18 years ago. We need to keep physical shelf space for more important things that will help the human race and culture survive. ...Now I really want to write some fiction about a librarian in a Walking Dead situation.
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Dec 2, 2018 02:00
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is there a way to be a librarian who doesn't do a lot of talking to other people? like sorting, stocking, etc? or do librarians generally share duties? do you guys like awfullibrarybooks, and what do you think of their weeding philosophy?
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Dec 2, 2018 02:14
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bad posts ahead!!! posted:is there a way to be a librarian who doesn't do a lot of talking to other people? like sorting, stocking, etc? or do librarians generally share duties? Get into cataloging and you won't have to talk to people. Otherwise, you are going to talk to people a lot - either at the circulation desk, doing reference interviews, teaching classes, etc.
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Dec 2, 2018 02:30
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JacquelineDempsey posted:St. Jerome bless you. I mean, even as a lowly shelver I loved the fact that my job was a preservationist of history, an archivist, The Keeper of Knowledge... But at some point you just run out of shelf space and there's no reason to keep crap like that around. You can get all that info online, and if it happens that Trump pulls a nuclear war and all the computers get EMPed, I don't really think anyone's gonna care about a PC bug from 18 years ago. We need to keep physical shelf space for more important things that will help the human race and culture survive. The university library I worked at last still had some books with extra materials that came on floppy discs, and the head of the computer science department would fight tooth and nail to keep some public terminals that still had floppy drives. That, I figure, is completely okay because in the university setting, you may need the historical perspective. Questionable if the floppies are even still readable, of course. Uh, I hope I'm not coming off as criticizing you harshly here. I totally agree with the Keeper of the Knowledge stuff in general, just in my experience, some institutions are better suited for it than others. bad posts ahead!!! posted:is there a way to be a librarian who doesn't do a lot of talking to other people? like sorting, stocking, etc? or do librarians generally share duties?
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Dec 2, 2018 11:17
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Lurking Haro posted:Do I have to call The Police? *circa 1980 Sting is staring at his notepad, there must be SOME way to sneak in a reference to the topical book and show everyone how cultured he is, no matter how awkward*
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Dec 2, 2018 20:07
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My Lovely Horse posted:
Oh, absolutely not! I was essentially making the same point, just not as eloquently as you did. Keeping the knowledge is great, but weeding the knowledge is equally important. And yes, my computer section was a shelving nightmare (and an out-date shitshow), since being in 000s, you couldn't shift "backward", only "forward" when the stacks got tight. On a vaguely related note, I was at a thrift store yesterday and picked up "Here's Fun With Science" by Vernon Howard. (I tried to find a pic of the cover, but even Google shrugged at finding this children's book from 1954.) I'm a sucker for old science books and their illustrations, and laughed my rear end off because the introduction actually starts off with "BOYS --- READ THIS!" Apparently girls are not allowed to do a science. In fact, on the copyright page, they list related books by the author and his wife, and they are divided between "Books for boys" and "Books for girls". Girls got "Here's Fun With Cooking" --- which I would love to get a copy of, if anyone ever sees one in the wild. So, yeah, there's a prime example of something that should be kept somewhere (I guess my living room) for historic purposes, but serves no place in a public library. I was toying with the idea of doing a Let's Read thread on it, because the book is so stupidly outdated and hilarious, and it would give me an excuse to try some of the science experiments and document them. Y'all think that would be amusing?
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Dec 2, 2018 20:53
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Yes! Yes, please. I think I'd really enjoy a Let's Read of either an old kid's book or an old science book, to get a sense of different perspective/knowledge.
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Dec 2, 2018 21:09
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Dec 2, 2018 21:25
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Vavrek posted:Yes! Yes, please. I think I'd really enjoy a Let's Read of either an old kid's book or an old science book, to get a sense of different perspective/knowledge. 
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Dec 3, 2018 02:12
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I commiserated this evening with a friend of mine I made at the previous library I worked at, a public library system. She was brand new to working in libraries from working customer service at a grocery store, and if she can survive without her soul getting crushed by the godawful management at that county library system that fired me last year, she'll probably do well. Tonight, when closing, a patron pulled a knife on her and threatened to kill her if she didn't leave him alone. Turned out he was drunk and homeless and the police had to come in, but getting a knife pulled on you seems to be a rite of passage for librarians these days. It's happened to me twice to date.
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Dec 3, 2018 06:16
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Cythereal posted:I commiserated this evening with a friend of mine I made at the previous library I worked at, a public library system. She was brand new to working in libraries from working customer service at a grocery store, and if she can survive without her soul getting crushed by the godawful management at that county library system that fired me last year, she'll probably do well.  Holy shitsnacks. Give her a hug for me, and two hugs for yourself.I never had a patron threaten me, aside from the weirdness that was Antonio, but I did learn what the legal size knife you can openly carry in my state is when I got a complaint about a guy that was vaguely belligerent and hanging out in the youth services section with an 8" knife strapped to his belt. (In retrospect, it's a wonder we didn't have the county attorney's number on speed dial.) Thankfully, Pitbull was around to directly deal with that one.
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Dec 3, 2018 10:47
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Pitbull? Please explain!
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Dec 3, 2018 12:27
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Cythereal posted:I commiserated this evening with a friend of mine I made at the previous library I worked at, a public library system. She was brand new to working in libraries from working customer service at a grocery store, and if she can survive without her soul getting crushed by the godawful management at that county library system that fired me last year, she'll probably do well. That's scary, but you're right. Violence against library staff seems pretty common. I hear about it more and more from my friends still in the public library system. I thankfully haven't had a knife pulled on me, but one night I was closing the library with my coworker (a small public library so we were the only staff that evening) and a regular patron and his girlfriend were taking forever to leave (he was always bad for this). We had been trying to get them out for 10-15 minutes, and finally we had them in the entranceway. The lady was getting more and more vocal, yelling about us rushing her. Finally, she rounded on my coworker and started cursing and screaming at her that she was going to come back with her friends and stab her. Her boyfriend muttered some vague excuse about her coming down off of heroin and we finally got them out the door. Needless to say we waited around the library for another 10+ minutes, keeping an eye out through the windows (they never came back that night) and I drove my coworker to the train (she normally waited outside the library for the bus). The lady got banned as soon as we figured out her name. Yeah, things I never told my family.
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Dec 3, 2018 15:46
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Nihilistic Magpie posted:That's scary, but you're right. Violence against library staff seems pretty common. I hear about it more and more from my friends still in the public library system. Yeah, my family was horrified when I off-handedly mentioned the knife thing at Christmas one year. One was while I was at an academic library, a known problem student to us whom I was pretty sure was autistic or otherwise mentally ill - he was extremely rigid in his schedule, and you could set your watch by him doing the exact same thing every day at the exact same time. There came a day when the library had to close early because of some big event or other, and when I swept through the library reminding people we were closing in five minutes, this guy freaked the hell out and pulled a knife on me. The other time was less remarkable, just a homeless guy on a really bad trip who apparently thought I was a giant spider when I was going out to retrieve the outdoor book drop during one of my public library stints. At the same university as the first knife incident, though, I once caught a student with a katana in the library - a legit edged katana. He was a drama student and a member of the anime club. He never caused any trouble, he was just a bit weird and once we realized his katana wasn't just a stage prop we had to remind him that bringing swords into the library wasn't allowed. But it was at the same public library that I was fired from last year and my friend still works at that another coworker and friend was on the phone when a guy called in threatening to shoot up the library. Our branch manager was extremely confrontation adverse, and had to be ganged up on by the entire circulation staff to even make an official record of the incident. Myself and another staff member were able to confirm that we knew who this guy was - he used something to block our caller ID when he called, but we knew the voice and how he only called to ask detailed technical questions about guns and gun maintenance, and would always start rambling about how America needs a revolution and how everyone who works for the government should be strung up as traitors. It was during this time that someone genuinely was shooting at county government buildings with a .22 rifle from out of a car, which had been going on for a couple of weeks at that point.
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Dec 3, 2018 16:03
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StrixNebulosa posted:Pitbull? Please explain! Oh, as I briefly mentioned in a previous story that was the nickname given to our part time security guard. She was gruff, used to work for the NY prison system, and had a brush cut. And she was tenacious about enforcing library policy. My former boss in circ loved coming up with nicknames for the other staff so she could gossip about them, and our guard got named Pitbull. We also had Snackies, The Snorter, Heffalump... I shudder to think what she may have called me behind my back (we're still FB friends and go out drinking when I go back to that town, though, so hopefully nothing too bad.) Cythereal posted:
Aw dang, that reminded me of an incident I'd forgotten about. Our system had two branches about 15 miles away from each other. You could put books on hold from either branch, and return at either as well as a book drop we had outside a supermarket on the outside of town. So we had a couple cargo panel vans, fancy livery of our logo on them, that would make runs 3 or 4 times a day to deliver transfers and empty the remote book drop. One day I go out back to the loading dock for a smoke, and Sugarbear, the guy who drove the van, is out there with 2 cop cars and a few officers. As I'm wondering what the hell is going on, I glance at the van and see that two of the windows are shattered. The glass is still there, but totally spiderwebbed and with a couple small holes in them. Turns out while Sugarbear was on his routine run, some nutball fired a few rounds at the van while it was cruising along a fairly major road. I can't imagine just tooling down the street, probably around 35 mph, and suddenly getting shot at, even if it was "just" a BB gun, as the cops determined. Plus, Sugarbear is black, so being in the south, it freaked him out extra hard. He's 6' 4" at least, built like a linebacker, and one of the chilliest, most unflappable guys on the planet, so seeing him shaking in front of the cops was terrifying. Quick fun story time, after all these spooky stories of violence! We had a kid who came in like clockwork, much like Cy's autistic knife-puller. He most certainly was autistic or had some developmental disability, because he'd head straight for the kids section and read picture books or play games on the computer meant for kindergarteners, despite being as tall as me and probably in his teens. Nice kid, never caused any problems, always full of smiles. One day the automatic doors at my entrance had been flaking out. Sugarbear was also a maintenance guy and was fussing over them. This kid walks up with an armload of books he's returning, and the doors don't open right away. He looks terrified, you could practically see his brain processing "omg the magic doors don't work, how will I get into the library". There were probably 3 or 4 of us on desk, plus Pitbull, watching this, as he always came in during afternoon shift change at 4pm. Sugarbear sees him and pops the manual override on the doors so he can come in. The kid's face instantly turns to relief, then joy. And as he gets through the vestibule, he turns around and yells: "THANK YOU, BIG BROWN MAN!" We wait until the kid gets down the hall and into YS, and then all burst out laughing, Sugarbear hardest of all. Needless to say, anytime Sugarbear fixed something for our department, or did a solid like take out some heavy trash for me, it was "THANK YOU BIG BROWN MAN!"
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Dec 3, 2018 19:50
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I can for sure tell the Danielle Steele stories next time I’m not on my phone!
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Dec 3, 2018 19:55
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MAKE NO BABBYS posted:I can for sure tell the Danielle Steele stories next time I’m not on my phone! Yes, please. I once ate a few pages of Malice during a "performance art" piece it was totally IRONIC and EDGY and I didn't want to be there but this girl did soooo and I think it's still in there. Also, she is a really bad writer. So, so bad.
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Dec 3, 2018 20:08
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"THANK YOU, BIG BROWN MAN!" indeed.
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Dec 3, 2018 20:12
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Dang, you guys have eventful lives. Only threats of violence I got were from campus police and one of the librarians. I did my stint in the municipal library world in the Southeast. I'm kinda curious as to how it stacks up compared to elsewhere - did you guys have more Danielle Steele or Nora Roberts? We had waaay more Roberts at all our branches.
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Dec 3, 2018 21:06
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grassy gnoll posted:Dang, you guys have eventful lives. Only threats of violence I got were from campus police and one of the librarians. I did my tour of duty in southern Virginia. Just went to my system's catalog, and a quick search is showing Roberts beating Steel, at 343 to 286. Note that these numbers include audiobooks, downloadables, and book-to-DVD adaptations. As far as physical books, though (we were just getting into ebooks when I left), I definitely recall Roberts moving more than Steel. Our biggest mover was local darling Patricia Cornwell. I finally read some of her poo poo while doing a 45 day stint in jail, and omg was it terrible. I mean, imagine me, a voracious reader, being bored out my mind while in the pokey, not being able to finish a book. I read the entire Bible* just to see if I could, and yet couldn't get through the second book by her that I got from our laughably small jail library. Which reminds me to post this PSA: if you're a librarian doing weeding, or a book hound looking to pare down your paperbacks, consider donating to your local correctional facility. 99% of the stuff in the women's wing was romance novels and religious self-help. Of all authors, I found myself getting excited about seeing a Dean Koontz I hadn't read yet in there. "Ooh boy, some supernatural stuff, and it probably has a hyper intelligent dog in there!" (Koontz does love to put a clever dog in his books, as I found out. Koontz:dogs::King:Maine) Inexplicably, I did find Middlesex in there. I tried to savor it as long I could, having finally found a good book, but despite its hefty page count, plowed through it in 3 days. *Okay, yeah, I did skip some of the OT books that were nothing but "so-and-so begat what's-his-name" for pages on end. Edit: oh, yeah, and jails/prisons can use kids' books as well. Visiting hours were just that, vague hours when visitors could show up. Parents brought their kids, but had no idea when they'd get their 15 minutes of actual face time with whoever they came to visit. So the jail I was in had a small stack of books to keep kids occupied while they sat in the waiting area until it was mommy/daddy's turn to see them. If you're looking to do something nice for the holidays, make a poor kid in a poo poo situation happy and donate The Hungry Caterpillar or Dr Seuss or something to your local jail/prison. JacquelineDempsey fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Dec 3, 2018 |
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Dec 3, 2018 22:58
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Koontz:dogs::King:Maine I think I’ve read a single Koontz book back in the day but this is the best endorsement that I’ve ever read about an author and now I’ve got a terrible fever and I’m about to raid my local library or used book store for more Koontz because that is the only cure for what ails me
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Dec 4, 2018 21:06
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Based on my one experience with Dean Koontz many years ago, "have got a terrible fever" seems like an appropriate accompaniment. (It's certainly better than the cousin of mine who had the flu and read The Stand.)
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Dec 5, 2018 02:18
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So, funny bit from when I was volunteering with my county's public library while attending library school. As part of a supervised work-study thing with the university for course credit, I was doing some original cataloging work for the library under the supervision of their cataloger. A good forty years ago, the library staff at the county public library had started doing annual scrapbooks of stuff going on at the library, including lots of newspaper clippings. Duly assembled, about twenty of these annual scrapbooks had been moved into a back cabinet in the then-new central library building and forgotten about, for 'a project for the cataloger in their spare time.' It ended up getting handed off to me. One year's collection, in the early 1980s, included a set of photos of a pet show hosted in the library. One of the biggest pictures was the winner of the Other category drinking from a water fountain still there and in use in the library to this day. It was a horse.
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Dec 5, 2018 02:57
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That's cute, it's not like horse–human herpes is a thing
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Dec 5, 2018 03:00
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i like nice words
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But there are several other zoonoses that horses carry. https://www.cdc.gov/healthypets/pets/horses.html Still cute though.
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Dec 5, 2018 03:58
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therobit posted:But there are several other zoonoses that horses carry. This is probably the longest zoonose to be concerned about 
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Dec 5, 2018 04:09
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el dorito posted:I think I’ve read a single Koontz book back in the day but this is the best endorsement that I’ve ever read about an author and now I’ve got a terrible fever and I’m about to raid my local library or used book store for more Koontz because that is the only cure for what ails me Just get Watchers. It doesn't get more Dog Story than that. You move beyond Watchers at your own peril.
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Dec 5, 2018 07:52
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JacquelineDempsey posted:St. Jerome bless you. I mean, even as a lowly shelver I loved the fact that my job was a preservationist of history, an archivist, The Keeper of Knowledge... But at some point you just run out of shelf space and there's no reason to keep crap like that around. You can get all that info online, and if it happens that Trump pulls a nuclear war and all the computers get EMPed, I don't really think anyone's gonna care about a PC bug from 18 years ago. We need to keep physical shelf space for more important things that will help the human race and culture survive. I have a minor in archive management, they taught me the archivist mantra: evaluate, select and destroy. It's been an immense help to my weeding habits. regarding violent patrons and me: The one time I was a witness to this, it was an older white dude getting an earful from a dude he told me to look out for because he was Morrocan. I let that one play out and then told the white dude to leave because he was being a massive racist. The rest of the stories from my libraries involve overdosing junks, the most well-behaved patron being a massive drug dealer and a prostitute using the disabled toilet as a service station.
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Dec 5, 2018 12:58
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Today I got to educate a new fellow part-time worker at the library on a unique aspect of working in the South: when interacting with elderly female patrons, especially those who are black and/or have a palpable Southern accent, don't take it personally when they routinely call you 'sweetie,' 'sugar,' or 'honey' like it's a form of punctuation. It's just a little old Southern lady thing.
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Dec 8, 2018 05:58
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One of the main jobs I did as a part-time shelving monkey was throwing stuff away. You wouldn't miss anything I threw away--most of it was many-volume sets of indexes to other books, none of which is necessary in the era of LexisNexis and Westlaw. Probably the only sorta-worthwhile books I threw away were enormous records of state legislature proceedings--some of the books were interesting purely as physical objects, having been bound in an era when beautiful paper marbling was standard practice. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 01:18 on Dec 11, 2018 |
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Dec 11, 2018 01:13
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