Answering questions at Boston College O’Neill Library
It is a lot quieter in summer, but there are still things going on. Check out bit.ly/BCEventCal, look for flyers in the O’Neill Atrium, maybe visit the McMullen Museum? It’s also a great time to get off campus and take in all that Boston has to offer.
I’m having my assistants research this question. In the meantime, can you offer some clarification: Do you mean the statue along the driveway to the South of Bapst, or the one in the niche on the north side of the building (facing Comm Ave.)?
Update 6/6/19: If you mean the one along the driveway, yes, that’s St. Mary. The significant iconographic detail is her foot on a snake (bit.ly/mary-snake). A shrine in that location seems to have been planned by Senior Sodality in 1948; the earliest existing photo that could be found is in the 1951 Sub Turri (bit.ly/bc-sub-turri-1951), but that seems to be a different statue. It is unclear when that one was replaced with the current one, which does not have a plaque.
That’s a pretty common urban legend about egregiously overdue books. They typically don’t keep accruing fines for years and years. That legend was most famously explored in the 3rd season of Seinfeld when Jerry has a library fine from 1971. In fact, most libraries stop keeping track after a while, consider the book lost, and buy a replacement. BC Libraries charges no more then $100 in the case that someone never returns a book (see bit.ly/BCLibraryFines for more detail). Of course, some materials are irreplaceable: in those cases, the material is usually in an archive and not allowed to leave the building or a special reading room for exactly that reason.
I’m sure you’ve heard that thing before about the probability of a thousand monkeys with typewriters eventually producing all the works of Shakespeare? Well, it’s not like that. This library employs librarians, not monkeys. Librarians might not be as fun as monkeys, but they do know how to find answers, such as how to use a Word template to print onto post-its affixed to pieces of paper, and which font (courier) most closely resembles typewriter font.
Interlibrary loan services (ILL) involve thousands of libraries. Therefore, most of the policies governing these services are not established at a local level, but through consortial agreements. Most academic libraries do not offer alumni members with ILL services primarily because of contractual agreements with publishers, and practices established by the library consortia they belong to.
Yikes! I will pass your wildlife sighting on to the administration. But as far as I know, rats are generally unimpressed by wealth…
We’re a little better situated for classics like Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep), Agatha Christie (Murder on the Orient Express), and Sherlock Holmes. If you’re looking for the latest stuff you can try our Pop collection in the lobby. Another approach would be to take a book like this Crime Fiction Handbook and see which of their recommendations sounds good to you–we pretty much have everything on the list. bit.ly/bc-cfh. I found it, and a lot of mystery titles, by doing this search on the library homepage: bit.ly/bc-detective. But you’re asking me, so I’ll say: read The Big Sleep.
There are 3 flatbed scanners in the Digital Studio on the 2nd floor of O’Neill Library… IOW, almost right below me.
The Career Center (bit.ly/BC-career) They have many resources. set up a time to consult with them. And best wishes!
Güle güle!
I’m not sure what you mean: the oldest book currently checked out?
If you mean oldest publication date, my library assistants attempted to glean this information by wrestling with the information system, and it turns out to be a much more complicated process than anticipated. IOW: we don’t know. If you mean longest checked out, theoretically, that would be 4 years because faculty and staff can check items out for a year and renew 3 times. If a book hasn’t been returned after its last possible due date, it’s marked “missing,” after a month and is no longer checked out, so the checked-out clock stops. IOW, again, we don’t know. My assistants might not always have all the answers, but at least they’re honest about it!
Update 4 years later (July 2023) : a patron recently returned a book they found in their attic, which they’d checked out over 20 years before while working on their master’s thesis.
¡Me parece una excelente idea!
αἰὲν ἀριστεύειν!
I happen to be acquainted with a game theorist. He applies game theory to football pools and wins big every year. Few pools allow him, because word has gotten around that with him in the pool, nobody else stands a chance. But he never bets on baseball.There are too many variables: too many games, too many potential pitcher-batter match-ups, winds & humidity that affect home run potential, minor injuries… I mean, a hangnail can kill a pitcher’s ERA! There’s just no way to tell, which is why baseball is the best sport: just as in life, you never know what will happen. Go, Sox! (In the meantime, check out The fix is in: A history of baseball gambling and game fixing scandals, by Daniel Ginsburg. O’Neill Library GV863.A1 G58 1995.)
If you mean timmyglobalhealth.org, then without a doubt, Timmy is an extraordinary student. But I’m sure whatever Timmy you mean, he’s a good student of whatever he’s motivated to learn.
They are automatic doors, set to work with the disability access buttons as you approach. The mechanism makes them a little harder to open if you’re not using them automatically, but makes it much easier for lots of people who would have trouble with a standard door.
You are not your grades, or the classes you take. Your worth as a person is something you have regardless of how you score or what you do for work. Do your best, and maybe figure out if you can do a little better next time. It will be OK. And if you’re really sad about that particular class, look for another way to learn what it teaches.
College is a great environment for making friends: lots of people with similar life experiences all jumbled together working on a big thing, and bonding over the stress of it. After college, you’ll have to work at it a little harder. Find the people who are interested in what you’re interested in and hang out with them. Invite people for drinks. Don’t get discouraged if it gets harder to schedule, because people will be busier as you get older. And if you can recreate the conditions of sentence 1, or some of them, you’ll always have the chance to make more life-long friends. But, simply, take the first step.
Staplers (plural). Between short life-spans and repeated kidnapings (stapler-napings?), the library was having such a hard time keeping up with replacing them (often more than once a week, at $20 each) that there was a decision to stop. Staff are exploring options such as affixing a weapons-grade heavy-duty stapler to a work area with a heavy-duty cable or a strong adhesive, or in a locked room with closed-circuit cameras. (That’s a joke. Sort of.)
They are all great names, so I can’t recommend one over the others. If you are asking about specific people with these names, you’ll need create your own version of The Bachelorette and pick one yourself. Just make sure the guys are willing participants first.
