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Vintage popular mechanics covers rock. Super Aasimov-ian.
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Feb 21, 2021 04:08
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Current task: manually extract the image files from the absolutely ancient xml config file we're using for our new self-checkout machines to facilitate upcoming task: conjure up an entire UI design concept for our new self-checkout machines from thin air in 5 weeks, and implement said
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Feb 24, 2021 15:32
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JacquelineDempsey posted:I demand pictures of tree trunk Lil' Free Libraries. That sounds cool as heck, and our city just cut down a big rear end tree right around the corner from me. Sadly, they are currently wrapped up in foam and taped shut with big COVID warnings on them. I would be surprised to learn someone had contracted COVID from a germy book, but I guess I should be grateful for people being over-careful! In case anyone ever wondered what happened with my old school, and the library I was supposed to build for them... well, they still do not have a library, although I heard they have a locked office with a handful of IB-required volumes that students are permitted to borrow upon request. (Translation: they are still defrauding the IB)
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Feb 24, 2021 16:10
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Here are some more brief donation tales: Occasionally we get stuff from the Church of Scientology. Once we got a box of books from Bridge Publications, who "publish the non-fiction works of L. Ron Hubbard", which ended up going to the recycling center. We also used to get sent copies of their magazine Freedom, although with how erratically it gets published I rarely see it anymore. Another time our former head of reference went over to a man's house because he wanted to "donate" a collection of books. Not only were the books in poor condition and not of use to the library, but he also asked "how much will you give me for them?". Needless to say she didn't take them. Finally the strangest donation happened one Saturday before the Superbowl. A man donated two cases of Miller Lite.
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Feb 25, 2021 22:13
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The_Other posted:Here are some more brief donation tales: You should ten hundred percent keep any books the CoS throws out because they are doing so because something officially changed and they're forcibly collecting and replacing materials from their followers like GODDAMN STALIN sorry I'm drunk and obsessed with Scientology.
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Feb 25, 2021 22:17
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I doubt they donate stuff they want suppressed to libraries.
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Feb 27, 2021 09:32
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"We need to put this somewhere absolutely no one will ever look at it again" We don't get a lot of donations but when we do it tends to be technical manuals and engineering specs from the 70s that we either already have or weeded in the 90s, scattered issues of arts and crafts magazines, or crackpot conspiracy literature (often by the author, I suspect). Thinking about the latter, it occurs to me that the job has been a bit less stressful since we've stopped letting non-university visitors in due to covid measures. Feeling a bit sorry for the guy who showed up like clockwork every week to check out five DVDs and never seems like he's got much else going, not so much for the guy who always gets, well, crackpot conspiracy literature by ILL.
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Feb 27, 2021 09:45
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Scarodactyl posted:I doubt they donate stuff they want suppressed to libraries. It wasn't poo poo they were suppressing when it was released, it's that their orthodoxy has changed and they're going around trying to repo all earlier poo poo.
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Feb 27, 2021 10:23
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Scarodactyl posted:I doubt they donate stuff they want suppressed to libraries. My thought too, but perhaps a bit of risk management? You don't want them seen again and you know the library thinks they're worthless and will destroy for you. Church gets some credit for donating them instead of costs for destroying. If the changes are not major, go for it. If the changes are major, destroy then yourself.
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Feb 27, 2021 15:32
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Yeah the whole donation thing is a scheme to get onto bestseller lists among other things. That could be why they're republishing as well. In any case the works are made-up, I doubt there's anything worth archiving
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Feb 27, 2021 16:54
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Not quite library-oriented, but a mildly amusing tale about donations from when I worked for a thrift store: I was a processor, meaning I was the grunt in the backroom sorting through the garbage bags of clothing covered in cat hair/piss, hauling around CRTs and plugging them in to see if they even powered up, and occasionally laughing my rear end off when we got stuff like the 3-foot tall hookah (yes, I'm sure the thrift store that gives proceeds to a children's hospital is gonna put that on the sales floor). Anyway, one thing we absolutely had to do when sorting a box of CDs/DVDs was pop 'em open real quick and see what was inside. Sometimes it was an empty jewel case, sometimes the disc was wrong or an salvageable mess. And sometimes --- more often than you'd think, though this was back before streaming porn everywhere --- you'd open a case for something innocuous and inside was someone's secret stash copy of Anal gently caress Sluts 3 or whatever. I'd be whipping thru DVDs: "yup, Nutty Professor; yup, Milo and Otis; yyyu--- ahahaha, Bend Over Brazilian Babes 5!" Anyone ever get porn donated to the library, either deliberately or on accident?
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Feb 28, 2021 19:43
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Anyone ever get porn donated to the library, either deliberately or on accident? Not quite, but I had a good number of patrons try to indirectly ask me where to find porn in the library. For example, there was the guy who had seen "a movie" recently, and they had this book in it from India that was all about, uhm, uh, you know...? To which I responded, unphased, "The Kama Sutra?" "Yeah, that's it." So, I take him over to the 300s and get our copy, a boring red covered academic translation. "This doesn't look like the one from the movie." "Well, it's been translated many many times over the years--" "It doesn't have any pictures." "Nope." "Then what good is it?" And all this is while we're standing literally next to a shelf full of "How to improve your sex life after marriage" and "Better intimacy with your partner" type books, many of which have detailed illustrations and/or photos, which I then gesture to.
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Feb 28, 2021 21:20
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Anyone ever get porn donated to the library, either deliberately or on accident? We recently had some sort of busty nuns with guns DVD left in our dropbox overnight. It wasn’t an “oops, put this in the wrong case” thing, it was in a clearly-labeled sleeve nothing like our cases. Not sure what happened to it afterwards. A few years back there was a guy going around calling libraries looking for racy titles under the guise of looking to give his wife some spicy reading while on vacation. He seemed to like getting people to read the titles out loud. My library had one caller who would ask serious questions with porn on in the background. Kusaru fucked around with this message at 03:03 on Mar 5, 2021 |
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Mar 5, 2021 02:54
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Re: The Scientology stuff. Most of what they donated wasn't related to Scientology directly. IIRC it was Hubbard's other "non-fiction" writings, it actually looked like those old Time-Life encyclopedia style book series. The revision to the Scientology doctrine Fleta Mcgurn is talking about were mostly for the high level "Operating Thetan" (or OT) courses, that cost anywhere from $500,000 to $2 million dollars and can only be taken at certain locations, one if which is the ship Freewinds. There mainly doing that to get more money from their wealthier members, Chick Corea, for example, had to redo OT8 back in 2016. Incidentally if you are interesting in Scientology reporting check out the website I linked, The Underground Bunker, the author, Tony Ortega has been reporting on Scientology for decades.JacquelineDempsey posted:Anyone ever get porn donated to the library, either deliberately or on accident? Never got porn directly donated to us, but one time someone did leave a hentai VHS in our book swap bin. The_Other fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Mar 9, 2021 |
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Mar 5, 2021 04:42
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Welp as a thread lurker I don't have any stories of porn in the library but I did find something that was missed by both a thrift store processor and me. Years ago I bought a Scrabble Cubes set to use for artwork and looked inside real quick in store to check that the cubes were indeed in the box. It wasn't until I got home and started emptying it out that I found someone's hidden deck of nude pin up playing cards. If I had to guess they'd be from the 60s or 70s and were surprisingly tasteful compared to modern porn/pinups at least.
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Mar 5, 2021 05:52
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Turbinosamente posted:Welp as a thread lurker I don't have any stories of porn in the library but I did find something that was missed by both a thrift store processor and me. Years ago I bought a Scrabble Cubes set to use for artwork and looked inside real quick in store to check that the cubes were indeed in the box. It wasn't until I got home and started emptying it out that I found someone's hidden deck of nude pin up playing cards. If I had to guess they'd be from the 60s or 70s and were surprisingly tasteful compared to modern porn/pinups at least. Haha, that's great. A friend of mine got employed in the Spanish National Library, she got to catalogue materials donated by deceased writers' families to be kept there for conservation, manuscripts and letters and such. One of them had a small notebook full of handwritten poetry, and also, turns out, full of magazine cut-up naked girls stashed between pages in the back.
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Mar 6, 2021 10:13
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Turbinosamente posted:Welp as a thread lurker I don't have any stories of porn in the library but I did find something that was missed by both a thrift store processor and me. Years ago I bought a Scrabble Cubes set to use for artwork and looked inside real quick in store to check that the cubes were indeed in the box. It wasn't until I got home and started emptying it out that I found someone's hidden deck of nude pin up playing cards. If I had to guess they'd be from the 60s or 70s and were surprisingly tasteful compared to modern porn/pinups at least. As someone else who makes art out of old boardgames, and adores old tasteful porn, holy poo poo that is the score of the year, I'm so jealous! PM me some of your art, fellow Scrabble fiend.
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Mar 6, 2021 21:59
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So at my library today, during the shift before mine, a woman somehow got her hand stuck in our book drop. The morning crew were able to get her out but she lost two diamonds off the ring she was wearing.
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Mar 7, 2021 01:59
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JacquelineDempsey posted:As someone else who makes art out of old boardgames, and adores old tasteful porn, holy poo poo that is the score of the year, I'm so jealous! how old does an old boardgame need to be, to qualify as old enough?
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Mar 7, 2021 03:42
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The_Other posted:So at my library today, during the shift before mine, a woman somehow got her hand stuck in our book drop. The morning crew were able to get her out but she lost two diamonds off the ring she was wearing. Time to sweep out the drop box.
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Mar 7, 2021 03:54
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Captain Monkey posted:Time to sweep out the drop box. Wouldn't want to scratch any book covers.
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Mar 7, 2021 12:32
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Leperflesh posted:how old does an old boardgame need to be, to qualify as old enough? Doesn't necessarily have to be "old" per se. More accurately: whatever I can get for 25 cents to a buck at the thrift store that looks cool and I don't feel guilty about raiding for its parts. Like a Stratego in a beat-up box at Goodwill is probably missing pieces anyways, so I don't feel bad about turning it into art, vs landfill. Current grail is an unloved copy of LIFE, for the spinner and the little cars.
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Mar 7, 2021 14:02
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JacquelineDempsey posted:As someone else who makes art out of old boardgames, and adores old tasteful porn, holy poo poo that is the score of the year, I'm so jealous! It was many years ago in college but I'll look later and see if I can find some pictures. I went for jewelry design and was trying to incorporate found objects into the pieces, and it was an excuse to raid the thrift store. Never did wind up using the scrabble cubes for anything but I still have a pile of "found objects" in the basement. One day I will use these wooden Sorry and Parchisi pieces for something dammit!
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Mar 7, 2021 15:18
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The_Other posted:Re: The Scientology stuff. Most of what they donated was related to Scientology directly. IIRC it was Hubbard's other "non-fiction" writings, it actually looked like those old Time-Life encyclopedia style book series. The revision to the Scientology doctrine Fleta Mcgurn is talking about were mostly for the high level "Operating Thetan" (or OT) courses, that cost anywhere from $500,000 to $2 million dollars and can only be taken at certain locations, one if which is the ship Freewinds. There mainly doing that to get more money from their wealthier members, Chick Corea, for example, had to redo OT8 back in 2016. Chick Corea was a Scientologist? gently caress.
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Mar 9, 2021 11:40
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Jedit posted:Chick Corea was a Scientologist? gently caress. I thought Chick Corea was like an all-female Asian Punk band?
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Mar 10, 2021 03:22
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No, it’s an all female coffee company.
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Mar 10, 2021 05:13
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Thought it was the peninsula's premier poultry provider.
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Mar 15, 2021 17:14
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Another "adult" oriented story, this time about Overdrive. For those lurkers who don't know, Overdrive is a service that allows you to borrow MP3 audiobooks and ebooks. Used to just be a website, but now its app based. Pretty nice little program that, if you feel guilty about  but also want to save money, will let you get books on your phone or tablet via the library rather than torrenting or whatever. Very popular service, especially among older patrons and/or the homebound, who can't physically make it to the library.So, I get a call from an older woman who is baffled as to why this service exists. She's looking on the app, and can't find any books to check out. Well, none she'd want to read! I look into her account, check her login info and all that, and everything looks correct. And since there's something like 10,000+ books available, she shouldn't be getting zero results from her searched. So, we do a sample search (something innocuous like "wuthering heights"), and she (rather embarrassedly) reads a couple of the titles that come up in the search. They are all EL James and Sylvia Day style super dirty romance novels. I do a little more looking at her account, and it turns out she had changed her search settings. As she is an adult, and has no interest in children's things, she had checked the box to only search "Adult" books.
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Mar 15, 2021 21:21
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Folks, I'd like to pick your brains a bit on if we've got our English terminology right at my library. We're only introducing the system were requests from the closed stacks and such are placed near circulation for people to pick up (as opposed to having to ask us). I'm involved in translating the signage stuff and I think I've got a grip on it, but we don't want to run into false friends so I'd like to run it past some native speakers. You request an item from the closed stacks, making a stack request, and we'll place your item on the Hold Shelf for you to pick up. You can also place a hold on an item another patron has checked out. This will likewise be found on the Hold Shelf. When you return an item you simply place it on the Returns Shelf. The staff will sort any items other patrons have requested and place them on the Hold Shelf. Alternatively: when you return an item requested by another patron, you'll be directed to place it in a special section of the Returns Shelf. [I'm not sure what that should be called. But I'm favouring the first option anyway. Bless our patrons but I barely trust them to find our entrance let alone do our sorting.] A third shelf is reserved entirely for Periodicals. Or Journals. Any preference in common usage for a university library? Does that all check out, is it what you'd normally say in your library, or does any of it sound off/need more detail? (This is probably all moot, most of our patrons would be ESL speakers anyway, God only knows what terminology they know from home.) My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 08:50 on Mar 16, 2021 |
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Mar 16, 2021 08:43
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My Lovely Horse posted:Folks, I'd like to pick your brains a bit on if we've got our English terminology right at my library. Returns go on the Book Heap. Stick everything else in the Book Hole.
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Mar 16, 2021 09:38
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good god we really have been overthinking everything
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Mar 16, 2021 10:28
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My Lovely Horse posted:good god we really have been overthinking Actually to make things clearer for ESL patrons maybe the Book Hole would be better labelled the Book Pit. In the interests of conservation I suggest that the library be build on well-drained sandy soil so as to keep the pit dry.
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Mar 16, 2021 10:47
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Some information for library workers depending on your service area. https://twitter.com/hamdia_ahmed/status/1371556484266475521?s=21 https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_helping-consumers-claim-eip_guide.pdf I no longer work at a library, but my old co-workers were excited when I shared the info and you might be too!
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Mar 16, 2021 18:21
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That was fun. Walked up to the library on my lunch break (I work in a generic administrative and data entry office job now), and while I was there a woman was with her two small children at the entrance, arguing with the staff that she couldn't be legally required to wear a mask to enter the library. It's about government control of free citizens, not health, you see. I restricted myself to just going "Really, lady?" as I walked past her on my way out.
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Mar 17, 2021 17:55
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Cythereal posted:That was fun. Walked up to the library on my lunch break (I work in a generic administrative and data entry office job now), and while I was there a woman was with her two small children at the entrance, arguing with the staff that she couldn't be legally required to wear a mask to enter the library. It's about government control of free citizens, not health, you see. I once had an older guy go all in about his 1st amendment rights on me after I saw him tell some little kid to be quiet and I asked him nicely to let staff deal with problems.
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Mar 18, 2021 01:30
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My Lovely Horse posted:Folks, I'd like to pick your brains a bit on if we've got our English terminology right at my library. We're only introducing the system were requests from the closed stacks and such are placed near circulation for people to pick up (as opposed to having to ask us). I'm involved in translating the signage stuff and I think I've got a grip on it, but we don't want to run into false friends so I'd like to run it past some native speakers. Yeah those sound fine. You can also just use "Holds" and "Returns" for your signage. All the libraries around here have entire stacks for holds, so it's the "Holds Section", but the signs generally just say "Holds". Re: periodicals vs journals, it depends on what you mean by that. "Periodicals" would be a broader term and include glossy magazines for general consumption (eg Popular Mechanics). In an academic setting, "journals" tends to refer specifically to periodicals in which formal academic papers are published (eg Science, Nature, Cell, etc).
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Mar 18, 2021 07:05
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Thanks We're getting a big info screen in our building and by volunteering for everything from setting it up and picking signage software to designing the layout I've now successfully wormed my way into a semi-design job and probably become the de facto sole info screen administrator. My only persistent worry that grows stronger the deeper I go setting things in stone for the thing is that so far no one told the university's communications department about this thing, and I can't help but think if they don't like the way it looks they will have my rear end. It's a 55 inch screen right when you come in, it's gonna be hard to deny.
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Mar 22, 2021 15:20
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My Lovely Horse posted:Thanks I have no idea if this is a thing at your school, but I know my university had a couple approved fonts. They were downloadable from the IT department or somewhere, but you might check to see if there is a school-wide font policy. I just checked and my alma mater has a typography page on their communications department website that runs through allowable fonts for digital versus print media.
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Mar 22, 2021 22:39
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Nobody reads signs, lol
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Mar 23, 2021 01:18
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Every university has a style guide. If you can find it or have access to it is another story, but it’s there, somewhere.
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Mar 23, 2021 01:56
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