musings

Apr 24, 2007 19:29

Today at work I had a phone call that scared me. The young lady on the line needed a book that was checked out, something along the lines of "Applied Pharmokinetics." She wanted me to recall it for her. This is a process that is much simplier if done online, so I asked her if she had access to the internet. I then proceeded to walk her through the process step by step. By step-by-step, I mean things like
Patron: "Wait, there's two rectangles."
Me: "Yes ma'am. One says 'Title' and the other one is blank. Type the title you want into the blank one."
Patron: "ok, now what?"
Me: "Hit enter."
...
I walked her through every bloody information blank in the form.

Yes. You do need to hit "submit" after you have filled out the recall form. It doesn't do anything otherwise. That's why they have a nice prominant "Submit" button at the bottom of the page. The computer isn't trying to get you into S&M. It just needs to know that you're done giving it information.

I then went home and made split-pea soup with bacon for my co-op. There's nothing like frying four pounds of bacon to make people come out of the woodwork, walk into your kitchen and say "Mmmmm. Bacon."

On another note, Max sent me: http://shigabooks.com/books/bookhunter.html.
Having just attended the AIC conference on Fakes and Forgeries, this was fricken hillarious. Particularly since it sounds really technical if you're an outsider, but it's all really bad. The book's ink was thinned with water (it's usually oil based, for the non conservators reading this), a picture of a sewing frame is labled as a book-press, tattle tape is placed "in a random page" of a rare book, things like that. On the otherhand, they have a fairly accurate picture of a lot of random bits of the field. It feels like one of those "what's wrong with this picture" things, except for the obvious things like a public library that can afford an apache helicopter and an attack squad.

Oddly enough, there ARE people out there paid to do stuff like this, and there IS a crack FBI team of investigators that would be available for something like this; the federal crime kicks in at items of historical or artistic value over $5000. I went to a talk by one of their lead investigators at the conference. So while it seems far out there, the LoC does have people *kinda* like this on hand...
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