Things They Didn't Teach Me in Library School: Photocopiers

摘要

One night while I sat at the reference desk, a harried professor came up and yelled, "The photocopier is out of paper!" I moved to get a pack of paper as he moved to the second copier. He turned around, red in the face and exclaimed, "This copier is out of paper too! And you call this a research library?" As this was a branch of an ARL, long-established library, then yes, I considered it a research library. Not because paper was always in its copiers, however, which as far as I know is not enumerated in the statistical counts that move libraries up and down the ARL scale. Looking at what data is collected, ARL seems to think that collections, expenditures, and staffing are most important, but there is a category called "services."