Reply #9: Librarians will be very happy [View All]

When I worked for a publ;ic library, I owuld have to spend HOURS every day gathering articles for people to l;azy to cone in adn do their own research for classes, and thne fact the damned things to them

I remember we had one guy, who didnt want to spend money making copies of magazine articles, so he would go into the small local branch near his house, and then call; the main library or a regional branch with the cites, and demand that we fax him as much as 400 pages of articles a day. THe policy was that there was a ten page fax limit, but he screamed yelldd and threatened and complained dso much that the director made us do it. THjis went on for several months until it became so bad that we had to cut him off from getting the pages faxed to him and told him he would have to come in for the copies (the phone was tied up for so long each day that we couldnt respond to requests for other custimers). When the administration made all of the branch managers attend a meeting to yell at them for having gone through an entire yearts office supply budget in five months, I was the only person who was keeping track of the cost per page for making copied for this one guy, and I came withing ten cents of showing where our office supply money had vanished to, and the other libraries were then able to go back and calculate how much this guy had eaten up of their budgets. Finally, the administration told this guy he could only get ten pages a day per branch for free, and after that he had to pay 15 cents per page. For a while he started trying to spread hjis requests out over a bunch of branches, but not all had the journals he wanted, and having to drive all over the county was too much trouble for him, so he stopped. If ibrarians can no longer do this kind of research for the public, there are going to be a lot of happy librarians, because this has always been a major pain in the ass. It will be rather difficult to enforrce, becasue people have to do a lot of gathering of news and journal articles for college research, graduate work, and so on.