Library complications

Some of my students have been telling me that they cannot get the required books from the library. When I was a student I had run into similar difficulties, but with our new library, all these problems have been resolved, I was thinking. In any case, I made mention of this to Fr Juan Picca yesterday, and he told me that he would look into it. Juan Picca is the librarian.

But I ran into my own little crisis yesterday and today. When I asked for several books to continue to update my seminar on Storytelling the Spirit, I ran into several snags. First of all, it took the library staff four hours to retrieve the four books. When I went to check these volumes out last night, the library staff could not get the data from my library card. This despite the fact that I made sure to ask them to activate the card when I got to the UPS in October.

Obviously, the library assistant who had activated the card at that time (or who seemed to activate it), had missed a few important steps. This demanded that I fill out another form with my vital statistics. I was a bit miffed (not to say irritated) that I was asked to give this data, material that they certainly have since I have been using the library for 18 years. Of course, when I gave the form to the library assistant on duty, she told me that I was to return the following day. The reason for this was that she was not authorized to update my data. Those who were authorised would be working the next morning.

Don Bosco Library at the Salesian Pontifical University

And if they call in sick? … I wanted to ask. Luckily for me, no one called in sick today. So this afternoon, I was able to get the card upgraded, and finally to check out the four books.

It is a matter of cultural expectations, I suppose. For Americans, the library was created to serve the wide public; for Italians, the library was created as a depository for resources that are shared with professors and those who are very serious about research. As a child I used to go to the public library every week, and I kept up the practice all throughout my studies and beyond. Do Romans, in general, have this practice? It is difficult to say.

These were the things I was mulling over as I was exiting the library this afternoon with the four books that I had requested (all four of which I myself had purchased and given to the library two years ago, by the way). At the turn style I met Fr Juan Picca again. He told me that the students should have no trouble checking out the required books. They simply had to present themselves to the library assistants with the appropriate form and the books would be retrieved from the stacks for them. Very simple, he told me.

What could I say? It had been extremely difficult for me to get my card upgraded… The library is a great resource and very updated, but my sense is that many of the library staff do not watch out for details or explain procedures adequately, so that the students are often left without a way of getting their needed resources. “Come back tomorrow” is a phrase that one often hears. I heard it several times addressed to me this semester. But, in the end the right person was able to do the right procedure, and I have full access to the library and the resources that I need. I can only hope it will be simple for my students to have access to the books that they need.