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(Unintentionally) interesting item fro ARCHIVE digest



Dear colleagues,

It may just be me, but I felt that the auto-generated response to Rick Barry's ARCHIVES posting that I enclose below says an awful lot about a number of issues facing archivists/librarians in the era of electronic access.

In case it slipped by you, here it is:

------------------------------

<Date:    Mon, 5 Aug 2002 09:38:05 -0400
<From:    "Karen L. Jania" <kljania@UMICH.EDU>
<Subject: Re: Update of rbarry.com/mybestdocs.com website: August 4, 2002

<We are in receipt of your request. Due to the current backlog, it will be
<approximately three weeks before you receive a response from one of the
<Reference staff. Thanks for your interest in our collections.
<Sincerely,

<Karen L. Jania          e-mail: kljania@umich.edu
<Acting Head, Access and Reference Department, Bentley Historical Library
<Phone: (734) 764-3482    Fax (734) 936-1333
<1150 Beal Ave., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2113

< http://www.umich.edu/~bhl/bhl/refhome/refhome.htm

<* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

<
<On Mon, 5 Aug 2002, Rick Barry wrote:

<> Date: Mon, 5 Aug 2002 03:49:15 EDT
<> From: Rick Barry <RICKBARRY@AOL.COM>
<> To: ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU
<> Subject: Update of rbarry.com/mybestdocs.com website: August 4, 2002
<>
<> Dear Colleagues:
<>
<> Please excuse cross postings.

Here, in the the interest of brevity, I mercifully delete the remainder of Rick's (long) posting that was robotically bounced back to the list (I'm not sure why it appears that this specific item got bounced back. If the party at the U. of M. subscribes to the digest, then I don't know why only this part appeared and if they don't subscribe to the digest, why doesn't the list get an answer to every single individual posting. Maybe I am wrong in assuming that the response was the result of an automated process and it truly was considered a reference query to be dealt with later.)

Probably there is an aspect to this that is so obvious that I simply can't see it. In any case it is of interest that there is a three week wait for a response from reference staff. As a matter of discussion, I am curious if this is typical of archival institutions and if members of this list see this waiting time increasing as a result of the snowballing popularization of e-mail. Also, do institutions (officially or informally) set priority of response based on the medium (phone, letter, e-mail, in person) by which the query was transmitted and what other considerations are factored in?

I guess I did raise the matter of brevity, so I leave off here,

Peter Hirsch

Cataloger (with an archival bent) for NYPL

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