Skip to main content

How to make a librarian happy

First, start with a standard handbook for solicitors, available in many varieties, but for this example, make it a Company Law one.
Give it many, many, paper-thin pages, in order to fit the masses of information into it without it becoming large enough to risk it becoming sentient.Then give it a floppy cover: this ensures that, not only is it impossible to make it stand on a shelf itself, but its floppiness is also contagious, and it'll merrily take out neighbouring books during its slide to the ground.
Evidence: an action shot, taken when I tried to get the book to stand upright for a second while I took a photo. And its normal position/look, when placed on a shelf and left to its own devices.



















So: with those ingredients, you have created a book that annoys the librarian (as when it's on the shelf it's like a limp eel, and a Bad Influence on the other books), and the solicitors (who can't store them standing upright like the other books on their desk, so they have to lie flat / get buried under paperwork / annoy them when they can't find them due to the burying).

To make the librarian happy again, you need to do one simple thing: provide stiffer covers. Then the books can do amazing things, see?













I left them alone, unsupervised, for FIVE WHOLE MINUTES, and came back and they were still upright like that, yay!

Yes, it's the small things that make us happy...thank you Butterworths, for rescuing my shelves from the Attack of El Collapso.

P.S. The solicitors like them too: drawing most comments so far is the attractive dot design.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The mysteries of cataloguing

Cataloguing: an arcane art, where each piece of punctuation is significant, and commas and semi colons are all-powerful. Well, they are in "proper" libraries, where in-depth research of esoteric points goes on, and the precise spelling of Christian names, and information such as when a person lived and died can be crucial in pinpointing obscure facts. Here, we have our own catalogue system. It doesn't have a name, but if it did, it would probably be something along the lines of "I need this book NOW, no I don't care about the precise spelling of the authors middle name, or their date of birth." I know, I know, it's not snappy, but it's accurate. Cataloguing demands are different in a commercial law firm: we don't care about much more than what it's about, who wrote, when, and what jurisdiction it covers. And what we really, really care about is "where the hell is it". Law books are amazing: they have the power to move themselves f...
12 comments
Read more

Careering along

When I look around at the activities of information professional groups, it seems that there’s a disparity. There’s quite often a lot of support and funding available for those who’re just starting out in the profession, but a desert of nothingness for those of us who’re “just getting on with it”. If you’re a new professional, you have lots of groups to support you as you progress in your early career, various prize funds available for essay and report writing, access to bursaries for conference attendance, eligibility for awards for being new and enthusiastic. But what do you get when you’re past that bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed first 5 years (5 years seems to be the approximate cut-off point for becoming “established” and no longer new). What happens when you’ve already received a bursary from an organisation earlier in your career and so wouldn’t be eligible for one now, meaning you’re not able to attend events or training? When you’re heavily involved in a project but not at ...
16 comments
Read more

UK librarian blogs - the list so far

I’ve pulled the previous entries into one alphabetical list, with a few categories. Will be back later with more detailed discussion of what I’ve learned by doing this. And, as always, if you know of other librarian blogs, let me know and I’ll add them in! Institutional Library Blogs / Professional Group Blogs aRKive Appears to be the blog of the Reid Kerr College library, or someone related to the Library, but unable to confirm as it doesn’t have any ‘about’ section that I can find. Lots of posts about library topics, books, IT… Brit Lib Blogs Google Group There’s a Google Group for British librarian bloggers! Unfortunately it looks to be pretty much unused at the moment. CILIP Blogs CILIP has various blogs by either staff, or links to relevant blogs, available from the Communities section. Varying levels of activity on these blogs – the PTEG blog has one post from November 2007, while Lyndsay’s CILIP Blog has been going has been going for almost a year, with at le...
14 comments
Read more