Still, I wouldn’t care how many people knew about the library, if they would treat the library as a library instead of whatever they think it is. You know how often I wrote comments that tried to walk people through how to use the archives, and how to get what they needed if the most obvious records were not available. It isn’t that I wanted to keep the archives my private little secret.

But people who can’t respect the library really have no business turning it into something else. And if the staff had any respect for the library, they would safeguard it a little better, in several respects.
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Sorry to hear that Ardis.

Too bad I can’t buy my own catalog and my own courteous staff member.

For me, it’s the constant frustration of facing the same problems every day, and discovering new ones regularly, while noticing that nothing is getting better, nothing apparently being done to address the problems — possibly because nobody who might care enough to do anything understands they are problems, since there is no feedback mechanism.

And you won’t be faced by one thing that I have to deal with: I stand in line like everybody else, but when I get to the desk I’m waved aside with “you’re here every day; let me help these people who are only here today” — and when I finally do get the ear of somebody, if anyone else interrupts with their own problem, the staff member turns his back on me to go attend to the interrupter’s needs. Familiarity clearly does breed contempt.