Dear Library @ UTS, It is with some dismay that I have been informed of the new state of affairs regarding the library system. As a user of the library both to research and to carry out essential learning tasks, to be informed that: a) It will take over 2 hours to obtain a book that is not on the shelves, until at least 2020, and possibly through to 2092 b) It is impossible to examine a shelf of books without submitting an e-request for each book individually c) The library book repository is unfortunately in a different building to the library proper. Both the Mitchell Library and Macquarie University have a similar system; the turn around time in their systems are respectively roughly 5-20 minutes at most. If you could please outline how, in this new environment, one is expected to carry out research. Research often, if not always, involves the trawling of multiple sources in order to find a number of reference texts. Under your current system this is not possible. It isnt possible or even plausible to request a shelf of books. A virtual display of the spines of the books on a virtual shelf does not and never will serve as a substitute for being able to directly take multiple texts off the bookshelf and scan through them to see whether they are fitting for the research task at hand. Waiting for two hours to get a single book just compounds the difficulty inherent in such a system. It seems strange as well that despite the glowing editorial your new system received in the Sydney Morning Herald, that no attention was given to the extreme turn around time, or the fact that this will put a serious crimp on research capacity at UTS. If you could reply to me, and outline how these problems can be circumvented, I would be most appreciative. What concerns me most is the long turn around time, the inability to mark a whole shelf as an e-request, and the inability to make an anonymous request so as to read a book without being monitored by some sort of central authority. Thank you, and I look forward to your timely response.
Posted on: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 01:24:53 +0000
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