When technology fails us

A couple of weeks ago, I heard a comment from a colleague in the faculty dining room - "I looked for articles about Antigone, and the library doesn't have anything." I asked him to explain, and he said he used our federated search engine, and came up with only a few citations but no full text. I told him to drop by my office later in the morning, and see what we really own. I searched Antigone in our online catalog QCat and got a few dozen hits. Then I pressed the WebBridge button at the top of the screen to make that search in databases that we provide. It turns out that in JSTOR alone there were more than 5000 articles. This man is an instructional designer who works in the library building - if he was confused by this, then what chance to our students have? I showed him the JSTOR hits and, for extra credit, put in a link to QCat that brings up books about Antigone in Google Books. You can see this dynamic link in QCat .

I was involved in setting up a blog for librarians called Typo of the Day - helpful for librarians who want to keep their databases cleaner in manageable steps. A spinoff of this is the Libtypos Wiki - a page that indexes the hundred-plus entries in the blog. I had several volunteers over the past few months to keep this up to date and I gave all of them the password. Yesterday, several of them were going in at the same time and tripping over each others' work. This is one of the frailties of the wiki system. Everyone set up a conference email and settled the issue once and for all. One of the librarians was bemoaning the fact that she got a lot of things wrong before she figured them out. I wrote back that I always learn things by first failing, then failing and cursing, and finally getting it right.

Last week I bought a massive wall unit to hold my LCD television, AV receiver, DVD and so on. I spent half a day getting everything wired together, and then sat down exhausted and turned on a DVD. It sounded great, but my wife asked why is there a whirring sound. I thought maybe it was the fan. No - still a whirring sound. I shut off the TV, the sound system, the DVD player. Same story - a whirring sound coming from the general direction of the cable box. I was afraid that I'd caused one of these machines some serious distress when I was moving everything around. I moved the TV off the cable box. The sound still came from the shelves. Was it behind the wall? I went outside and held my head up to that spot. Nothing. As I was walking in, I had a brainstorm about the only item in the room that runs on electricity but not through power cords. The Furbie! Sure enough, he chose this moment to have a nervous breakdown, so the whirring sound was his death rattle.