The mission of Harvard vs. the mission of librarianship.

An interesting quandary: I got a call this morning from a man in New York City, who after years of negotiating for the rights to turn a famous old British movie into a musical theater production finally got the green light from the copyright holder, and was now in the thick of putting his magnum opus together. About nine or ten years ago he had secured a photocopy of the novel on which this movie had been based (via his sister, who I guess had either been a Harvard alum or otherwise had some access to our collection at that time), but when he picked it up again recently he realized that it was missing two pages that were naturally key to the whole story's plot. Seeing that this book was exceedingly rare - in fact, only a dozen copies of it exist here in North America, according to OCLC - he asked me if there was any way someone could fax him the missing pages from our copy in the stacks today.

I started to answer him like a desk worker would - well, you could always submit an Interlibrary Loan request through your public library on Monday and I'm sure they'd be happy to fax you those pages - but to wait for as long as a week or two just to get a hold of something I could pull and copy for him in the next five minutes just seemed absurd to me. Granted, the man didn't have a Harvard affiliation, but according to the rules he would have been able to get at this material eventually (albeit in a roundabout way), so why not help him out now? It's not like we have a line of patrons queueing up out the front door on a Saturday morning anyway. So I went on down to the stacks, fetched the book, copied the pages, and faxed them lickety-split. Now this fellow can get to his life's work - isn't that why we're here?

Considering that I was the supervisor at the time, I guess it really was my call to make, but I can see how other people might not have been so understanding or accomodating. I think my five years in Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery over at Countway - where these sorts of odd requests cropped up much more frequently - makes me naturally inclined to want to help. It's no skin off our back, and good for Harvard's name at the same time. I've also noticed that this is the sort of thing that, had I referred it on to a librarian, would have been resolved by him or her in exactly the same way that I resolved it myself. So why not steal a little glory? Those guys get it all the time!