Dear Miss Manager:

My child's grade school is having "Career Day", an opportunity for parents to come in and share information about their professions. I'm assuming this event is intended to spark interest among the children who will then go on to become doctors, mechanics, business owners or whatever. I would love to share with my daughter's class everything I know about acquisitions and law libraries, but am afraid I will end up speaking after her dentist (who always brings his "Tuffy the Tooth" and hands out cool pink stuff that they can chew to make their mouths look gross.) If I were a children's librarian, I would have the advantage of being able to bring in something to read to her class, but for some reason I don't think a passage from "Moore's Federal Practice" will be overly inspirational to them. Can you please share some ideas for me to help my daughter and her class appreciate the joys of acquisitions and law librarianship?

Going Back to Grade School

Dear Going:

Although "Tuffy the Tooth" is undoubtedly a tough act to follow, and the disadvantage of having nothing for the children to chew on other than some old invoices cannot be overcome, I think you could probably still appeal to most of them, and maybe reach those few who are real librarians in the making. And, really, those few who are likely to want to go into the profession are the ones we want to attract most. So, you should go with our strengths, and throw in what razzle-dazzle there is. You laugh? What razzle dazzle? Well, Moore's Federal Practice may not get their adrenalin going, but computer games do. You might tell them that one of the hardest games in computers is "finding good information." Show them a sample search that first of all produces a million hits ("star wars") and then show them how such a search can be narrowed by adding terms, refining the request, analyzing site quality, etc. If you happen to get to a web site or two with space ships, explosions, or theme music, you will keep your presentation humming. Then you might ask for some favorite book titles. How does a library go about getting a book like that? This could take you out into the web in a different direction. If you could connect to your local system and actually place an order and go through the steps involved, that might prove interesting. Don't be afraid to go with some of the simple, physical mechanics of the work. Aren't there many librarians around who were attracted in childhood to the paraphernalia of organization? who longed to have their own files of paper slips, drawers with cards beautifully arranged, charts, stamps, and desks with compartments? Not everyone will thrill to a demonstration of check-in screens, spread sheets, or a label on a journal. But Miss Manager recalls an ancient memory of seeing a chart of Dewey Decimal numbers explaining the arrangement of library materials and feeling that here was a way to make sense of all this seemingly random stuff. Not everyone will respond as you might wish. But how many of the kids who thrill to Tuffy the Tooth actually go on to become dentists? You will be appealing to those children who already have an attraction to the organizational principles which underlie much of our work. From you they will learn that there is a real, grown-up, interesting, honorable, and necessary profession that will allow them to make a career out of the kinds of things that appeal to them. And what tooth-wielding special effects monger could ask for more?

Dear Miss Manager:

How much work should I do to check the work of the vendors who send us material? This has become a serious problem for us. The two people working in acquisitions in my library seem to be spending more and more time researching what was purchased when and finding proof of payment and evidence of returns and so on and less time ordering and paying the bills. Shouldn't the vendors be able to keep better track of their own transactions? Am I justified in saying, "We've paid you, we're done with this transaction, YOU figure it out if you're still having a problem!"

Sincerely,
Mad as a Wet Hen

Dear Hen:

Ah, that insatiable longing to tell off the vendor! How many times have we all fantasized about letting that particularly irksome and unhelpful person at the other end of the line know how we really feel? It is a temptation that you will no doubt give into once in a while in your career for the simple reason that there always seem to be one or two vendors who invite such a reaction and who respond to nothing else. A compilation of horror stories from law libraries alone could fill a whole NUC-sized set, with annual updates. The particular phenomenon you refer to is a common one, and one of the most frustrating. I was sure at the height of the legal publishing merger mania that there was a tacit agreement between the parties that the company with the worst computer system always took over the accounts and the company with the worst customer service took over the phones.

Let us use as our example a company called Poplar. Poplar starts off by sending you a notice that you have a credit of $3,000. You see no indication of that and ask Poplar to explain the source of the credit. Poplar cannot do this because Poplar has taken over two other publishers and all your account information from those publishers was transferred to Poplar by creating new account numbers for the two companies. You now have three account numbers with Poplar. This is the first you knew of this. Can you get every thing transferred to one account? No. Can you have a printout listing which titles are under the separate accounts? No, and actually Poplar needs to set up a fourth account to handle all the publications from the previous three publishers who are now one, so can you please send Poplar a list of everything you are getting from Poplar and from the two other publishers? But, you say, you are getting updates to all those publications, so someone at Poplar must know what you are getting, how come this rep doesn't? Well, that's the distribution department. Can't they provide a list of everything they are sending to this library? No. Why not? They have a different computer system. Can't they send a printout? No. But Poplar wants you to send Poplar a printout? Yes. At this point, you hang up the phone, you look at your notes and the eight pencils you have broken during this conversation. You contemplate what to do when from today's mail you receive a notice from Poplar that you owe $5,280 and that if you don't pay immediately they will stop all shipments. You call customer service and pray that you get someone else. You get someone else. This new person seems friendly, concerned, helpful. She asks you please (if it's not too much trouble) to send copies of just the last month's worth of invoices and checks and then all of this can get cleared up. This sounds so hopeful that you spend the time to gather and copy and fax the invoices and the checks. Whew! What a relief. Three days later a collection agency calls. You are a deadbeat. Pay up your Poplar bill. You call Poplar's customer service number. No record of a fax, no invoices, no checks, impossible that you had such a conversation with anyone because they couldn't possibly do all that. Yes, you say, and her name was Sue. Sue? Sue works in a different department, she had no authority. Could the costumer service representative get the invoices and checks from Sue? No. ....

To those who haven't worked in this area, such a scenario probably sounds like a wild exaggeration. But everyone in the law acquisitions world has a story (or several) like this, and they could go on quite a bit longer. Your options become: 1) do the research yourself and provide the iron-clad proof of your position; 2) pay whatever they say you owe and hope it all evens out in the end; 3) sever all ties with the company; 4) find one person who will help. Although number 3 is the most tempting and would be the most satisfying, it is the most difficult, especially in the post-merger world. Often your own version of Poplar has at least some publications you can't do without for some reason, and no one else does. Number 2 has its advantages especially when you consider how much time it will take you and your staff to figure out the details, but it also ensures that the problem will keep coming back until it is fixed. The best thing to do is some combination of numbers 1 and 4. The crucial step is to find someone who will help. Sometimes that is a local representative of the company assigned to your library, although you should be aware that a sales representative is not the same thing as an account representative. You should also be aware that sales representatives sometimes say that they want to handle complaints, but then have trouble doing so. Sometimes it is a person like Sue at the company who understands the problem and can work from the inside to get information moving between departments. But even if you find a person willing to help you out, you will probably have to provide some information to get things moving. But don't waste too much time on the research until you find the helpful person.

If you can not find anyone to help, don't forget the wonderful folks at CRIV (the AALL Committee on Relations with Information Vendors). Their website, www.aallnet.org/committee/criv/, offers a number of options when you are stuck, including information on customer service, and a chance to request mediation if things are at a point where resolution looks impossible. Also, ask for help from your colleagues. You are not likely to be the first person to have a bad experience with a particular vendor. The relief of hearing something like: "call this number, ask for Bob, he will take care of your problem" can be almost worth the pain of dealing with a previously uncooperative vendor.

Dear Miss Manager:

Evolutionary psychology clearly demonstrates that women are better at noticing details than men and that men are better at leading the work of other people. In our libraries that means that all the managers of Technical Services departments should be men, and all the catalogers, check-in people, etc. should be women. Why is this obvious truth not universally recognized?

Sincerely,
Darwinian Librarian

Dear You're No Darwin: