I thought I’d add a comment or two.

I arrived at 3:45 on Monday,so I was told that they stopped paging, but I spent the time looking through the catalog and browsing the reference area. I thought it was a pretty nice layout and there were plenty of staff members in the reading room to help patrons. I’m sure it’ll take some time for them to work out the bugs, but my experience, overall, was favorable.

I arrived a little earlier on Friday and had a pretty successful day in the reading room. I used the self-serve copy machines which was very handy. I ran into Chris McAfee (from conservation) and he was kind enough to give me a quick tour up in the administrative office area and conservation lab. It was VERY nice…well equipped and state-of-the-art. Chris and the conservation staff have a very nice view of the Conference Center and north toward the Capitol.

Overall, I was very impressed and I’m looking forward to spending more time there. I hope to see you all there!

BTW, I used the parking lot on the east side of the building and didn’t have any problems. I didn’t see any signs saying that I couldn’t use it, so I took advantage. (At some point, someone will probably catch on and put up a sign saying “staff only” or something, but until then I’ll keep using it.)

On the good news front, as far as glitches go, on the first day I was told that the photocopiers (which are really scanners, so you can save an image to a flash drive — for free — rather than printing out on paper) would only save images as b&w .pdf files at 300 dpi, and that you couldn’t assign a name to your saved file (if you made 15 copies, you got 15 files, each with an incomprehensible number as a filename, and you’d have to open each one to find the one you wanted). I thought that would mean the end of illustrations on Keepa, since I can’t edit .pdf files, and the quality was too poor anyway.

But it turns out that the photocopiers *can* copy in color, at any normal dpi, as jpegs, with any filename you care to assign.

I’m really hopeful that as the kinks are worked out, everything will be better than it ever was before, with no losses of quality.

I am back this morning, and as soon as I got in I put in a research request through the computer as I had done on Monday. That was at about 9:05 am. Well, at about 10:00 I started to wonder where my stuff was. So I asked and it turns out that requests are not being taken through the computer any more, but through the old call slips which are then handed to the desk, like in the old building.

Apparently there were glitches, which are being reviewed, and so in the mean time, use the call slips. Lucky for me, I had written down what I was going to get, so it didn’t take long to fill the slips out.

The good news, however, is that the staff is trying to expedite the call down time from 30 minutes to 1 hour down to 15-20 minutes, which will be great…

My ears must be failing as fast as my eyes. Thanks for straightening that out, Matt — and next time, please do introduce yourself.