This week I seem to have passed some sort of unknown test because one of our regular homeless patrons (a very nice man who always straightens up the table area before he leaves) decided that this was the week to tell me about his theories involving The Da Vinci Code, masons, religions, the holy grail, and all number of other related topics. This went on all day and was quite frustrating for me by the end, but I wasn't sure how to let him know I was not interested in these theories, but would be happy to help him if had an information need. He did however provide me with the title of today's post when he said "Librarians are supposed to be educated... with reading, not computers."
Our computer that holds the catalog is still not working, so all catalog searches had to go through me. I hope this is fixed tomorrow, because it is somewhat ridiculous to have patrons not be able to search for their own materials.
A patron called looking for the book How to Make Dances in an Epidemic. It looks like a fascinating book but neither our nor any of the other local systems had a copy - although must of the local universities did.
A patron asked if we had Stoner by John Williams. We did not. She then asked how long we kept the New York Times Book Review - a question I answered by walking over with her and taking a look. We had back to the beginning of the year.
A young woman was looking for three books: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, the new John Grisham (Playing for Pizza), and The Choice by Nicholas Sparks. Only Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was on the shelves, so I placed the other two on hold for her. She also wanted a guidebook on Dublin. We didn't have any Dublin specific ones at our branch, but I took her over to the travel section and showed her the general guidebooks on Ireland that we had.
A man was looking for an article in the Washington Post from March. We don't keep copies that far back, but I offered to call the central branch and see what they kept there. They do have the full run on microfiche, but the librarian let me know that the system provides database access to the Post online and I showed him how to access that. It was a good reminder for me to not forget about the databases.
A patron was looking for the phone number of a restaurant downtown - Food Docker. After talking to her for a minute, I realize she was looking for Fuddrucker's and looked up the number for her on yellowpages.com
In computer news this week, two of our public access computers were down, but I enabled both of them and they were working fine, so sped up the computer wait.
I helped a woman who was word processing her resume with edits and then showed her how to attach that to her email and send it on to someone who had promised to proofread it for her.
Finally, I helped a patron connect to our wifi, which was working that day!
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"Food Docker" -- classic!
Just had to see what "Stoner" was all about, and it's not what you think, according to PW: "This remarkable 1965 novel offers a window on early 20th century higher education in addition to its rich characterizations and seamless prose. Sent by his hard-scrabble farmer father to the University of Missouri to study agriculture, William Stoner is sidetracked by an obsessive love of literature and stimulated by a curmudgeonly old professor, Archer Sloane."
In terms of back issues of the newspaper and accessing them via the databases, bear in mind that the databases don't always have the accompanying photos. Also, in one of my past posts, I noted that they don't have the ads, including the legal notices that one patron was looking for...
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