We're taking a bit of a breather while the world rearranges its underpants. Meanwhile, the other blog is here.

Thursday, March 04, 2010

It's all from the learning tree

How modern reference librarianship works:
  • The Reference Librarian rings the Regional Loans Assistant to say that we don't have a copy of the council's Unitary Development Plan.
  • The Regional Loans Assistant finds the UDP on the council's web site.
  • The Systems Librarian creates a catalogue entry for this online document, including the URL in the appropriate MARC tag.
  • The Regional Loans Assistant sends the URL to the Reference Librarian and tells them that the customer can also look it up on the online catalogue.
  • The Reference Librarian asks the Regional Loans Assistant if she can obtain a printed copy of the UDP.
  • The Regional Loans Assistant suggests the Reference Librarian tries the "print" icon on the computer screen.
  • The Regional Loans Assistant and the Systems Librarian wonder what the Reference Librarian is doing in that back office all day.

3 comments:

Happy Frog and I said...

It could be worse! There are places of work were you would have to write a Guidance Note for the Reference Librarian and instigate training everytime something wasn't 'obvious' to them. By the time you got the Guidance Note and the training organised and approved it would be out of date and you would need to start again!

Kevin Musgrove said...

Frog and you: has my intranet gone public again?

Happy Frog and I said...

Could be!