The digital divide.

A patron just came to the desk with an armload of books from the 19th Century. Actually, they were not so much books as pamphlets that had been dumped willy-nilly into envelopes and given what are known as Old Widener Call Numbers, meaning that they were cataloged long before Harvard had succumbed to the tyranny of the Library of Congress classification system (fun fact: here at Widener we have three systems of classification - the Old Widener, LC, and a third that's mostly numeric but not the Dewey Decimal System and used with some of the oldest books in the library. Old Old Widener Call Numbers?), evidently by someone Who Didn't Give A Damn. None of them had barcodes attached to them. Usually this isn't a problem with materials like these, as since they're already in containers such items are considered to be non-circulating for preservation purposes.

But this patron wanted to check them out to his study carrel, which is permissable but only via a process that is extremely cumbersome for both the patron and the desk worker. A patron checking books out to his/her carrel or office normally fills out a little (blue) slip of paper that tells the stacks employees that this item at least temporarily belongs in the assigned workspace and not on the shelves, and items lacking barcodes require a little (yellow) slip of paper that needs to be filled out as well. You can probably see how combining the two processes leads to nonstop fun; now compound this enjoyment twenty times over, as my patron apparently cleared the entire section out dedicated to his subject matter, and you can see what a potential nightmare this could be.

First off, you have to keep all of the papers straight, so that you don't accidentally assign the wrong barcode to the wrong item, which just involves working as slowly and methodically as possible, despite your instincts to stamp stamp stamp! But then the trickiness of the materials comes into play. For instance, while one of the envelopes contained the remains of one pamphlet, another contained that of twelve, and to make matters even worse both envelopes had been assigned the same Old Widener Call Number. So how to differentiate them? By year, probably. But who knows? With every item being a similar judgment call, the process quickly somehow becomes tedious and nerve-wracking at the same time:

Did I screw that last one up? Should I do the next one the same way, even though it's slightly different, for consistency's sake - or, for that matter, should I go back and re-do all the other ones I've already done? When am I finally going to be done with these %#$&@ books?

At a snail's pace, I make my way through the pile, trying not to notice the ever-growing line of patrons waiting to check out their books. Without fail the complicated tasks always fall into your lap when the desk is least staffed. But somehow we muddle along - the motley assortment of pamphlets has been barcoded and stamped, the patron scurries back to his study carrel, and suddenly I feel a wave of relief coming over me. Let the day shift sort out the mistakes, if any were made; the important thing is that a whole section of the stacks that probably hasn't been touched since it was originally shelved is now in the hands of someone who is delighted at its very existence. I'm sure he'll put it to good use.