One of the complaints I have with my library are the questionable architectural decisions made when the building was designed - lots of glass, so even small sound echos a great deal, aisles that are blocked because fixtures stick out to far, not enough meeting space, etc.
Another quirk is our Quiet Study Room - it sits at the end of the Reference collection, next to one of our computer areas. Half the computers face it and half face away, and whoever is in the Quiet Study Room could look up and see a lot of computer screens (but so can anyone walking by).
One afternoon, the phone rings, and the patron says,
Hi, I’m in your study room right now. I can see the computer screen of the first guy right outside the room, and he’s been looking at graphic porn for ten minutes.
Most of the time we get porn complaints, it’s after the porn viewer has left, so there’s not much we can do about it. When we’re able to “catch someone in the act,” I print our Computer Use Policy and hand it to them saying something like,
Another patron objected to something they saw on your screen. This is a public building, so please remember that anything appearing on your screen must be suitable for children who might accidentally see it walking by.
I did that in this case, and then went back to the Reference Desk. A few minutes later, the phone rang again:
Hi, this is me, in the study room. Thank you for talking to him - he stopped looking at porn.
Her calling back made me laugh, but I hope she wasn’t continually monitoring what the guy was doing.
You may have already seen this, as it was published a few days ago (which on the interwebs is like being over 30), but it is so true that I had to share. And add XKCD to your feed reader.
In this funny video, replace “dad” with “library patron” and it’s a reference question many librarians know all too well. At least, for the first third of the video - after that, it gets kind of weird and definitely violates the appropriate library behavior policy.
Since the outages caused by the ice storm on Thursday, my library has been slowly reestablishing our affected services. First back up was our power and heat and catalog (day two), then wireless internet (day three), then internet to the public workstations (day four).
This progressive-improvement situation made for a good quote. When asked by a staff person if things were working again, the response was:
Everything is working, but we’re still working on making it patron-proof again.
It made perfect sense in context, but when I thought about it later, it sounded both funny and counter-intuitive.
Recovering from an unintended power outage really draws a stark line between having something work, and having something work the way we want it to. Just having a computer that turns on isn’t good enough - ours also need to automatically log in, track time, connect to printers and the internet, and protect the user’s privacy and data. And ideally, do all this without intervention from the user.
On the surface, the answer above might sound like our goal was keep the computers safe from the public. The goal is actually to make sure the public needs to do as little as possible to use our computers (making sure they can do no harm is a side effect).
One of the complaints I have with my library are the questionable architectural decisions made when the building was designed - lots of glass, so even small sound echos a great deal, aisles that are blocked because fixtures stick out to far, not enough meeting space, etc.
