or, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fear and Loathing at a Public Library Reference Desk



Reference Question of the Week – 12/6/15

   December 12th, 2015

game over, thank you for playing, please try againThis week's question fits right in with the recent thread of "things that happen at closing time," but unfortunately gets filed under, "you win some, you lose some."

Wednesdays are my night to work until closing at 9pm, and in general that's a pretty quiet night. This week, at about 8:40, a patron walked up asking for help with the printer. Specifically, she didn't know how to release multiple jobs at the same time.

"No problem," I thought, as I walked over to the print station with the patron - "too bad it won't be interesting enough for the blog, but at least it's not going to keep me here late." Well, I've been wrong before.

Actually, this part of the question went smoothly. The patron had about $10.95 worth of print jobs sitting in the queue, all in 1- and 2-page jobs. Our coin box only accepts up to $9.50 at a time (so someone doesn't put a $10 bill in to pay for a $0.15 print job and get a whole jackpot of coins back in change), so I showed her how to select, pay for, and release half of the jobs - and then after those printed, how to do it again for the second half.

Once the second half started printing, I went back to the Reference Desk and made our 8:45 first closing announcement. Life was going well, until that same patron came back up to the Reference Desk at about 8:50, carrying her freshly-printed Very Large Stack of papers (by the way, $10.95 at $0.15/page is 73 pages), and said those dreaded words,

Do you have a scanner?

Arrgh, curse our patron responsiveness! Yes, we do have a scanner, and it even has a feed try. But man, she's got a lot to scan, and we close in ten minutes.

However, I tell myself, ten minutes is a long time, and although waiting next to the scanner is like watching a pot waiting for it to boil, it actually does scan pretty fast, so ten minutes is probably plenty of time. So I say, "sure," and take her to the scanner.

73 pages is too many for the feed tray, so I tell her to scan them in thirds. We open the scanner software, she puts about 1/3 of the pages on the tray, and it starts up. The scanner is loud enough, and since she's the only patron left in the reference area, the library is quiet enough, that I can go about my closing time routine and hear when the scanner finishes that first set.

When it does, I come back, get her started on the second third of the pages, and then continue closing - shutting off our OPACs, turning off lights and closing doors in the study rooms, making sure the courtyard door is locked, swapped out the daily calendar posting for tomorrow's, and generally straightening the area.

At about 8:56 we put the last stack of pages on the scanner, and I'm feeling pretty good - I think we'll run a few minutes over, but obviously the patron is appreciative. I make the final closing announcement, turn off one of the reference desk computers, and make a final pass through the stacks to make sure no patrons are hiding back there or laying on the floor unconscious (this is what I think about while closing at night).

Finally I hear the scanner finish - 73 pages through the feed tray with no jams! - and things are looking good. The next step with the scanner software is it goes through and "reads" each scanned page, to OCR the text and make a searchable PDF file. This generally takes a few seconds per page, which means it's going to take a bit to complete for this file. I explain what's happening to the patron, and then go upstairs to the circulation desk, to let the desk staff know I'm helping someone but they can go home.

And I ask the maintenance man to stay, which he's fine with. The desk staff all walk out, I go back downstairs, and I can hear the maintenance guy upstairs doing some general straightening - and then he starts signing Christmas carols. Okay, at least that means he's in a good mood and not annoyed with me.

So back downstairs to the patron, and I see the file is at 25% and making progress. Excellent. I ask the patron if she'd like to email it, and she says yes. So I open a browser, thinking she can log into her email and get a message ready to attach the file to.

She does, but then asks if she can save to a flash drive instead. "It'll be faster," she said, which I don't know that it would be, but either way is fine with me.

Then she pulls this MASSIVE external hard drive out of her bag. For my purposes it works just like a flash drive, but I am always a little surprised when people use imprecise speech. And I'm also surprised that she carries this thing around in her purse. But anyway, she plugs it into the computer, and -

Disaster!

The computer starts to recognize the new USB device plugged into it, but then freeze. Freezes solid. I don't know if it can't install a driver, or if processing the PDF file was just too much to do while also installing the hard drive, but the scanner software stops dead at 34%.

Okay, I think, it's just a momentary hangup. The memory will catch up in a few seconds, the computer will return to normal, and we won't have wasted the last twenty minutes working on this. I hope.

It is at this point that the maintenance guy finishes messing around upstairs, and comes downstairs, still singing Christmas carols, and sits on the steps behind where I'm working with the patron.

I don't know if you've ever stood with a patron watching a frozen computer hoping it will magically fix itself ten minutes after the library closes while someone sits ten feet behind you singing Christmas carols, but I would recommend against it. Strongly.

We really did wait a few minutes, playing with the mouse, pressing keys, and could not get the computer to do anything. I think the patron could see it was hopeless, and finally I just told her that I think we just ran out of luck.

The worst part is that, since it was now after 9pm, Staples was already closed, and I don't know where else she could get access to a scanner that night. I suggested trying the UMass Lowell's library, which I presume has a scanner and would be open late, but that was the only thing I could think of that might be helpful.

I felt terrible, but she was still grateful for the effort and staying late. She unplugged her external hard drive from the computer, put it and her stack of papers into her bag, and I walked her to the front door.

So, the moral of the story is, even when you try to go above and beyond to help patrons, you can still come up short sometimes.




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6 Responses to “Reference Question of the Week – 12/6/15”

  1. Thomas Says:

    So if I’m understanding this correctly…this patron printed out a large number of pages (presumably from digital files), then scanned those same hard copies back into files to take with her?

  2. Brian Herzog Says:

    @Thomas: yeah, exactly. I didn’t look closely at them, but the few I glimpsed seemed like some kind of pay stub. I don’t know who she needed to send them to, but she wanted them all in one large PDF.

    I’ve had patrons in the past who had to sign a multi-page contract someone emailed them, and it seemed like the only option we had was to print the entire thing, have the patron sign the last page, and then scan all the pages so we could create one PDF.

    It seems like there should be a better way for some of these things, but sometimes print-and-scan seems to be the only way.

  3. Jami Says:

    Do you have a bill slot for your print jobs then? At my branch you have to take your card to the circ desk and add money with us.

  4. Chris Says:

    Isn’t there some kind of PDF printer installed? The free PDF Creator(http://www.pdfforge.org/pdfcreator/download) can do exactly what you are looking for, you just have to “print” to the PDF Creator printer and it even asks you whether to save the PDF immediately or wait/hold it to combine multiple “print” jobs. The quality should be much better, no need for OCR and you don’t have to print that many pages…

  5. Brian Herzog Says:

    @Jami: we do, it accepts $1, $5, and coins, which is nice. That is, this is for print jobs sent from the public workstations in the reference area. Jobs sent through the print from anywhere service have to be paid for and released at the reference desk. It would be neat to have cash value added to the library card itself, but what we really get asked for is to accept credit/debit cards on the printer. We’re still working on Town Hall to make that happen.

    @Chris: we do, both PDF Creator and Cute PDF. And you’re right, as long as someone doesn’t need to sign something, that would work well. However, in this case, I didn’t realize the patron needed to scan them in until after I had helped her print everything.

  6. Emma Says:

    I have a mental list of the patrons who I most wish I could have asked more questions of (of course I don’t ask those questions, since it’s none of my business why they’re doing whatever they’re doing). This patron is at the top of this week’s list!

    I hope the university library was able to help her. That sounds like a good bet.