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This website is an informal communication forum for staff members of the University of Oregon Library Staff Association. Contents and opinions expressed herein or on linked personal or external pages are those of individual authors and do not represent official statements, policies, or positions of the Library, the University of Oregon, Oregon University System, or State of Oregon.

Circ Desk Memoirs

The Janus crash came at an odd time. I'm taking part in a committee working on a display entitled "10 Years of Automated Circulation", which chronicles life behind the circulation desk prior to automation. A group of us old-timers had been reminiscing about the way things used to be--filling out charge cards by hand, card filing, hand stamping dates. "I wonder if ten years is really long enough for this sort of retrospective?" Shirien remarked thoughtfully. Fateful words! On Tuesday, Access Services staff were coping with the loss of their online circulation system for a whole day. Behind the desk, Ellen looked up from filling out down-time logs to sum up the situation for me succinctly: "Life is hell!"

Well, life wasn't hell before the advent of automated circulation, at least it wasn't if you didn't mind two or three hours of card filing per day. Things moved a lot slower. Check-out lines stretched down the hall. We spent more time writing things down by hand. The charge cards had four layers of NCR paper, and it required a strong wrist to fill them out properly.

When I first started working at the circulation desk, I had this recurring dream: I am sitting at the desk, eating a large sloppy burrito. On either side of me are signs which say no food or drink in the library! I always woke up sweating. That dream was worse than the one about being naked at the bus stop.

Neil, who worked at the circulation desk in those days, remembers that feeling of being in the public eye. Circulation desk staff have always had the burden of representing the library in a responsible and dignified manner. Late one night during extended hours, Neil went downstairs to secure the building for closing. He left two student employees in charge of the circulation desk. They decided to make paper party hats decorated with whatever was laying around the desk. Don Bishoff of the Register Guard chose that moment to come in with a photographer and take some late-night library pictures. The students obligingly posed in their silly hats. Neil had to phone Shirien in the wee hours to give her the bad news. Shirien remembers dreading the paper the next morning, but the pictures were never published.

We clerks spend hours every week filing check-out cards into the tubs, which were long wooden files. There is just no way to make this fun. We look at hundreds of handwriting samples every day. Is this a G or a Q? An l or an i missing its dot? There were also large piles of mystery pink slips for which no backings were found, so they could never be discharged. Looking for overdue backings meant another round of pouring over the tubs. Our fingers turned grimy from touching all those cards.

One of the problems with our filing system was that there was no way to index the tubs by anything other than call number. "Why can't you tell me how many books I have checked out?" was one complaint we heard often. We couldn't find patron check out records by name or ID number.

"Why can't you send me a courtesy reminder when my books are due?" was another protest. We sent very few reminders. In order to do so, we had to manually search through all of the forty tubs of backings, pulling those check-out slips that belonged to GTFs and faculty. Then, we hand addressed form letters and sent them through the mail, if we could read the address on the card. While many more courtesy reminders are now generated via our automated system, the human touch is missing. Laura recalls that at least one marriage was brought about through courtesy reminders, the groom a billing clerk, the bride a graduate student.

The forty tubs of backings were sometimes not enough, and extra backings were packed into improvised files. The important thing was not to spill anything. Duffy got a fat knuckle from trying to save a tub on the brink of tipping over. Perversely, there was a sport of throwing tubs full of backings into the bin from a distance; one clerk was particularly good at this. He never missed, which would have resulted in hours of refiling thousands of slips. This clerk, a manly fellow, also liked to scoop up three tubs at a time and SLAM them down on the thick glass covering part of the front desk. He finally managed to crack it. Anything to alleviate the boredom.

It was also our job to retrieve things from storage. There was a list of titles located in the dungeons, a curled sheaf of typed and hand scrawled notes hanging by its ear on a nail behind the main desk. When a patron wanted something from "down there"--Sears catalogs, old Merck's manuals, city directories, unaccessioned books, books classified under certain sections of the Dewey Decimal system, plus a variety of film strips, masters' theses, 16 mm educational films and boxes of miscellaneous papers--a clerk would have to brave the cobwebs and try to find the desired item. There were really three dungeons, each darker and dustier than the last. The bottom rung dungeon was part basement, and way in the back, part hollowed-out cave.

As a student worker I worked on a project once, where we moved a lot of stuff out of this dungeon. We put on old football helmets and crawled into the space where the dungeon joined one of the complex of tunnels that criss-cross campus. If you crawled far enough back, you could look up through one of the barred air vents that are visible from the sidewalk. There was an iron gate that prevented us from exploring further; plus it was so awful down there, that even bored teenaged student assistants wouldn't have pressed their luck.

The stuff in the dungeons wasn't in any sort of order--it was just layered in, like an archeological site where you find armor and bones on top of cooking pots on top of ancient temples. Clerks took flashlights and looked around, hoping for the best. There was a patron who wanted the Sears catalogs a lot, no questions asked; I mapped the rest of the dungeon by various titles' proximity to the Sears aisle.

I should mention that all the time I've spent in the darkest, spookiest parts of the library has convinced me it is a ghost-free zone. Too bad. However, I've never seen any library mice, either, and the evidence leads me to believe there must be lots of them. I did see a giant cockroach once, which looked like a refugee from the science lab I worked in years ago.

Do visit the exhibit, which is going up on Friday, March 3rd in the display cases located in the halls between the Circulation desk and Reference. It will be a fun way to remember the past (without actually longing for it) while seeing the progress we've made in the last ten years.

Here's the news from the LSA:

LSA is seeking a volunteer to collect the cans and bottles from the barrel in the staff lounge and redeem the deposits approximately every 6-12 weeks. Can you help with this task? Please contact Susan Stumpf in Media Services at sstumpf@oregon or 6-1957.

Please take a moment to fill out the House Committee's Knight Staff Lounge survey

Many thanks to all the circulation desk alumni who shared their memories of the good old days with me. L.R. Sexton

Welcome New Staff!

Audra Loyal, Billing Clerk, Access Services
Susan Scroggins, part-time Office Specialist 1, Office of the Librarian

LSA Artshow 2000

The Library Staff Association held its second annual LSA Arts and Crafts Show on February 22, 2000. WOW. Though we had fewer contributors this year than last, the diversity of talent shown by those who did display their artwork was absolutely amazing.

The few artists I had the opportunity to speak with were very informative. Jan Roberson, for instance, actually fires her clay in the sand on the beach! Also, David Grange's hand-carved wooden bowls are not only beautiful, but they demonstrate a learning process. Showing me the difference between bowls he brought for the artshow, he explained how he learned to create a smooth surface on the bases by gluing an extra piece of wood onto the bottom of the bowl while shaping it. I hope I got that right, David! Andrew Bonamici spoke of a website he visits that provides up-close and personal photographs of real flies so that fly-tiers can create more lifelike imitations, better to trick the fish onto the line! And I was astonished when he told me that he actually uses the little beauties for that very purpose!

The full list of wonderful artwork displayed includes: BEER by Terry Smith, "Ghosts" by Susan Mincks, Pottery by Susan Mincks, Stained Glass by Susan Mincks, Stained Glass Mirror and Butterfly on Flower Stained Glass by Sherrie Soleim, Paintings by Nancy Loya, Flies by Andrew Bonamici, Home Grown Colored Romney Wool by " Pam DeLaittre "Stomper" "Lightning" and "Mama", Video by David Landazuri (absolutely hilarious Accordions Anonymous rock video shown on KEZI) "Beach Inspiration" by Jan Roberson, "Bicycle Woman" Comics by Jean Murphy, Thumb Town by Audrey Robare, Pottery by James Wilson, Needlework by Stephanie Midkiff Illuminations & "Desire for the Land" by Richard Bear, Carved Wooden Bowls by David Grange, and Pottery by Michiyo Goble.

Thanks to all the contributors to this year's show!

Click here to see the full photo album!

Been to an interesting conference? Send us a brief report for publication in the next newsletter. Thanks!

Kudos!

Congratulations to Richard Bear, who accepted an offer of appointment as (Officer of Administration) Documents & Microforms Supervisor, effective February 14

Congratulations to Dr. Lesli Larson. Larson, Microfilming Supervisor and local fly-fishing buff, received her doctorate in English in February.

Fitness Corner