Today's "Major" Issue of the Moment

We found out yesterday that our scanner ‘doesn't have’ all of the issues they need to

complete the scan for our huge archival project. Let me give this some context. In February, when I started, I was assigned the task of preparing for the archival of many of the volumes of our journals; anything before 1995, really. This included getting prices from many of the vendors around the country who may have copies of each journal that we could purchase from them; since we had exhausted all free avenues. We would then turn around and send those journals to Virginia, where they would be mailed out to India to be scanned.

We were told that all of this had been taken care of, and had been receiving reports

suggesting the success and soon completion of the scanning process. Until yesterday. As I'm sitting here yesterday, my head floating in embalming fluid, I get an email from Heather with the note "oh crap, figure this out." I read the thing and find out that the company we’re using to scan our journals is missing two whole volumes. That’s a years worth of journals. Along with those, we were also told that one of the issues that we had ordered specifically for this project was also ‘missing.’

So, now we’re stuck trying to round up the issues that they’re missing so we can send

them off to India to be scanned. Hooray! We were lucky enough that Tom had pack-ratted boxes of journals that we were able to supplement. But what’s better is that we have to reorder the issue that we ordered before plus another. Yeah!

And then, there’s the gaps online issue. See, on our journal’s sites we found that there

are random gaps and page jumps that appear between 1996 and 2000. These are things that our publisher should be taking care of, but they’ve decided to delegate the responsibility on to us, for some reason. We’re not all too happy with that as they were the one’s who made the initial mistake. Regardless, two months ago Molly in the library and I created a spreadsheet list of every gap that we could find after comparing what was online to the PubMed server (a website dedicated to housing articles from thousands of journals) and sent it on over to the LWW (our publisher) folks to get started on. Today, I got a phone call about trying to resolve the problem. It’s taken them two months to figure out what they had and what they need to order. Really? It took me two weeks and I had to take care of five journals and forty plus years, not just the two in four years. And there’s only so much you can blame on Lesa’s, one of the people at LWW, gross incompetence. So, in summation, other people are stupid, David is smart and should own an island, or some junk. No, realistically, I should have received these phone calls at least a month ago, and now that I’m busy trying to create commissions for the hundreds of statements that need to be input into our new BenchPress database I’m having to deal with this crap.

This is me, this is me drowning in papers.