A Manual of Library Desk Practice as practised at The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine or Zen in the Art of Librarianship

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Wujastyk, Dominik
  • Barker, Judith
  • Hooper, Katy

• Preface: This document is intended to be helpful to Library Assistants and others who have tours of duty at the library’s Enquiry Desk. The manual attempts to combine simplicity with completeness, an admittedly foolhardy aim. It is a grass-roots document, in the sense that it is written ‘from below’ by the people actually working on the desk regularly. It is dated November 1986 on the title page, and its contents will probably be going seriously out of date within six months to a year. If the manual proves to be of genuine use, then its authors intend it to be corrected and reissued from time to time, in order to keep pace with changes in the library. To this end, a Master Copy of the manual is kept at the library desk, and all changes should be recorded in the margins of this copy. The text of the manual is also kept on a disk somewhere handy (!) and can be edited using any word processor. It is formatted using LATEX and PCTEX, and a new version can be reprinted at any time on the Institute’s laser printer. (This part of the job should be handled by an expert in TEXnology.) The ‘Zen’ of the subtitle may refer to the state of mental blankness produced by reading this manual through too quickly. But it is also meant to give a sense of the light touch with which all the following technical details are best handled, in order to remain calm and fulfilled.

• Date created

  1990

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Manuals
  • Library And Information Studies
  • Libraries

• Type of Item

  Report

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-0bf8-fg60

• License

  Attribution 4.0 International