how to intimidate librarians [without really trying]

[trochee]

This is a followup to my interlibrary loan fiasco:

But at the same time, I had already sent a request to the linguistics graduate student group. Since several of the faculty read this listserve, one most appropriate ([E]) piped up that she would be interested in that book as well, and she hadn't heard of it. We exchanged a few rounds of email and she offered to loan me one of her books that's currently checked out of the library.

are you in your office today? I wrote to [E]. when might be a good time for me to come by and pick up your book?

Then I sat down to write to the librarian [A] in charge of linguistics, I cc'ed [E] and the ILL folks. [A] -- a godsend among librarians -- tracked the book down at a Dutch library and verified that it existed. He responded (cc'ing me and [E]):

ILL was having a problem with this title, because it exists in no North American Library, nor in any of the libraries in Europe which enter their catalog holdings in the massive OCLC database. ...
I believe, however, I have the answer to your problem. [he found it in Nijmegen; details omitted]
I'd suggest you resubmit your request giving the both the verification record source and the library source. That should be sufficient to move your request forward.

And then [E] responded (to my query about "are you around"):
actually, I'm in my new office at the Dean's offices (I'm acting divisional dean of arts and humanities this year.)

... which explained the panicky, excuse-laden email I got from the supervisor of ILL later that afternoon:
We will re-start the request and attempt to borrow from Nijmegan University. The odds aren't good, but we will give it a try.
[trochee], we will let you know what we hear back from the Netherlands regarding this loan. Our experience is that most European institutions won't lend books overseas; often they do not even respond to international requests. It may we a long process.
--[Supervisor of ILL group]

The short version: how to intimidate librarians? CC a dean when asking for interlibrary loan requests. it gets things done.

Comments

[beckyb.livejournal.com]

Power to the people!

[cat-whisperer.livejournal.com]

Good for you!

[isolt.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's awesome. I had no idea ILL could be an overseas thing!