They Say What They Say

I have spent most of yesterday and a good part of today struggling to ensure the bibliography of a collection we didn't really want in the first place is available on our website.

You see, none of the books are catalogued and the only way to know what the collection holds is through the accompanying bibliography. But the bright spark who complied the bibliography gave it to the library in this shitty database program that defies attempts to migrate the contents to a more usable system. And to make matters worse, it was thus installed on a very unstable server that crashes. Frequently. This means the bibliography is often unavailable, an event that usually occurs when Professor Very Important-Sosandso is in town for five minutes and wanted to look at the material yesterday, despite the fact that you need to give us four days notice to get the stuff out of storage.

ANYWAY, I spoke to the guy who spoke to some other guy and they managed to get the bibliography working again. What I have since done is printed off a copy of all 5000+ entries and had them spiral bound into one volume so it can be included in our reference collection. I have also made a PDF version of the bibliography in four parts and put those links on the website. So if anyone then turns around and says "I can't access the Willis Collection bibliography." I will hit them!

All this for a bunch of books that are used maybe once every two years.

I have spent most of yesterday and a good part of today struggling to ensure the bibliography of a collection we didn't really want in the first place is available on our website.

You see, none of the books are catalogued and the only way to know what the collection holds is through the accompanying bibliography. But the bright spark who complied the bibliography gave it to the library in this shitty database program that defies attempts to migrate the contents to a more usable system. And to make matters worse, it was thus installed on a very unstable server that crashes. Frequently. This means the bibliography is often unavailable, an event that usually occurs when Professor Very Important-Sosandso is in town for five minutes and wanted to look at the material yesterday, despite the fact that you need to give us four days notice to get the stuff out of storage.

ANYWAY, I spoke to the guy who spoke to some other guy and they managed to get the bibliography working again. What I have since done is printed off a copy of all 5000+ entries and had them spiral bound into one volume so it can be included in our reference collection. I have also made a PDF version of the bibliography in four parts and put those links on the website. So if anyone then turns around and says "I can't access the Willis Collection bibliography." I will hit them!

All this for a bunch of books that are used maybe once every two years.