day in the library

Monday was my day for researching the annual Tolkien bibliography in the library, having exhausted the free databases at home. I drove over our local mountains to Santa Cruz, where the university library is the most useful for online searching and visitor-friendly of any I know. I bought a daily parking permit at the gatehouse, $10, drove over to the appropriate parking lot, and then walked the most stunningly beautiful quarter-mile walk from a parking lot to a college library of any I know. Even Cornell, which is the only other campus I know with pedestrian bridges over canyons as deep as this one's, isn't as attractive as UC Santa Cruz.

This was the first time I'd been there in three years, but I used to go annually so I remembered it well, including where to go to park, which isn't obviously labeled. Getting through campus is a drive through fields and forests, with only occasional buildings visible in the distance, one of which is a residence hall cluster with a vague similarity to The Village from The Prisoner.

Inside the library, masks were required and most everyone had one. The foyer to the library, which you must pass through on your way inside, is a cafe, and nobody there had masks. I settled down at a computer and spent five straight hours online searching, interrupted only by the obvious restroom breaks and much more frequent visits to the help desk, starting with one following seeing that the login screen no longer tells you what the visitor login is. (Though it does say there is one.) Then there was a hitch when it wasn't clear that inter-library access isn't available to visitors: it actually gives the option to enter a visitor account, and that's sure misleading. Lastly, when I left, I gave them a list of those databases on their pull-down menu where I found that the link was broken. You'd think they'd check this occasionally themselves, but maybe not. What if they're paying subscription fees for databases they can't access?

My other momentary paralysis came when I was about to save a file and realized I'd forgotten to bring along my thumb drive. Help desk provided the answer I should have thought of for myself. Save the file to the computer's download folder. Open up my webmail and send it as an attachment to myself. That worked except for one file which was too large to mail. Fortunately I remembered the web address and password to access the control panel for my personal website, so I stuffed the file up there until I got home.

As the years have gone by, I've had to spend less and less time in the stacks. Even the one relevant serial that UCSC gets in hard copy that no other library in my ambit gets is now available in online databases. And now, I'm finding that the pay databases have fewer items that aren't in the free databases than they used to. What the pay databases have is more complete citations (irritating to find a great article but the entry doesn't give the author's name) and, of course, many of them have full text. These I was grabbing so that I'll have them available to hand out to the Year's Work contributors next year.