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June 14, 2006
How Long Should It Take For a Book to Be Returned to its Shelf?
If you don't want to read a rant, don't read this. For about a week, I've been trying to finish my second post on how to identify a scribal school. In one sense, I am nearly done with only a few loose ends to nail down. One of these loose ends involves looking up every ideogram on several Akkadian literary tablets from Ugarit and seeing when that ideogram was first introduced into the classical scribal curriculum. There is only one more tablet that I want to analyze in this way. The research involves confirming the reading of the ideogram (I need to study my Harra=hubullu and diri a little more, since I don't know them all by heart). Then I look up the Akkadian equivalent in the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, which normally has references to the school tablets in which the ideogram is equated to its Akkadian reading. I then confirm what I learn in the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary by checking the reference in the appropriate number of Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon. It's kind of a pain in the ass neck but because I am exploring what I think is a new idea, I want to be rigorous.
I spent a good deal of last Saturday afternoon in Honnold Library in Claremont working on this and in the course of that work, I had taken several volumes of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, a couple volumes of Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon and the library's copy of Ugaritica V to the table I was using. When I was done, I followed the rules and left the volumes on the table so they could be professionally reshelved. You sure wouldn't want the only person to have looked at these volumes in the last several years to put them back on the shelf.
Today, Wednesday, I went back to complete this phase of my work and not a single volume had been reshelved. But it was worse than that. While the volumes of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary that I had been using were in the reshelving staging area, neither Ugaritica V nor the volumes of Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon that I used on Saturday were anywhere to be found. I was told of several places where they might be but they weren't in any of those places either. I've had this problem before and in every case the books have magically returned to the shelf within the next few days.
The result was that I couldn't complete my research and was thoroughly frustrated in the process of trying. Does anyone know the penalty for reshelving books at the library? Anything short of death might be worth it.
Posted by Duane Smith at June 14, 2006 4:25 PM | Read more on Odds and Ends |
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