So a very good friend has a class presentation (graduate level) on Monday and discovers, late this afternoon, that a paper she absolutely needs to acquire is unavailable at her university library (checked out, no digital version) and that there are no librarians on hand until Monday (only students who basically shrugged). I am not a librarian, but she is clearly exhausted and demoralized and so I’m trying to lend a hand and locate this (for free or cheap, of course):
I have my kid with me and am somewhat limited on time, but I told her I’d do my best to help out and have begun the wide sweep. I’ll hit every library in the region I know of, by www or by phone/email/chat where possible. So far I’ve searched a couple of library web sites and come up empty, and learned that NYPL Express is open Monday through Thursday which isn’t any help. Surely there is the reference equivalent to a hospital emergency room, only one that doesn’t make you wait. If there is a librarian in the house who happens to know where to locate a somewhat obscure response to a 1996 international symposium on Art History, in which will presumably exist this one particular essay, I would be much obliged. The two long-time librarians whom I know personally completely failed me and gave the weakest advice I could have hoped for (which is not all that dissimilar to many doctors I have known). Edit: Ironically, it was just this week when I decided I would take a foundation research course at a Journalism school just for my own sake.
They don’t have info on the person who checked it out? Even when I was volunteering for a crap public library in high school, we could just look up who had the book and contact them about it. Presumably anyone checking out a book from a uni library would have their information recorded somewhere, at the least for delivery of fine notifications.
So, uh, demand it in a most furious way?
No doubt you’ve already thought of this, so if you get a sec do tell what their response was.
Yeah, that’s definitely on my check list of things to look into tomorrow during waking hours. I tend to be fairly good at getting people to help me out on the phone. And although it’s not something I really enjoy doing, when dealing with their idiocy during an urgent situation, it’s often the case that the more idiotic they are the better at dealing with them I get.
Well, call off the dogs, she made a strategic decision to get some much-needed sleep (which was my original recommendation upon hearing her news) and do without this particular work after I had already spent a little over an hour teaching myself emergency research strategies on the fly. Turns out she was having a huge panic attack about the event on Monday and poured all her fearful, frenetic energies into this one little obscure essay as a means of feeling shamefully ill-prepared, when she can probably deliver the presentation without it (granted, it would have adorned the whole thing very nicely).
God knows how many legions of expert Qt3 researchers wasted their efforts here this evening.
No luck. I tried both JSTOR and Ebscohost, and got only one review of the book itself. My University Library doesn’t have a copy of the book either, else I would have gone and gotten you a scanned version of the essay.
If you want the review though I can just grab a PDF version and send it to you.
