Update: I guess I know what I’m doing this week…

Updated on February 4, 2013 By Ken Begg 3 Comments

I had obviously put my all my library holds on suspension while I was off work. I set them to restart last Thursday, knowing I’d be in today to pick up the ones that came in. So of course waiting for me this morning, with one week to watch:

Archer, the Complete 3rd Season
Futurama Set 7
Justified the Third Complete Season
Men of a Certain Age Second Season
Taken 2

So…I guess that should hold me for the next 7 days. After that, I guess I can start my February roundtable review.

UPDATE: When I actually went down stairs to check out my four available TV season sets and a movie for the week, I was told, “Oh, and American Horror Story (Season 1) just came in for you too.”

Yeesh.

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  • Okay, I’m moving to your city. My library only carries children’s entertainment DVDs and educational stuff.

  • Ken_Begg

    We do a lot of DVD business, and we’re part of a assembly of suburban libraries that (mostly) share DVDs back and forth. So I have access to a lot of stuff. The only real problem is that some patrons can get annoyed with the wait periods. Really, though, when we’re buying 8 copies of the latest season of Downton Abbey (and TV seasons often cost a fair amount), and have a limited budget and only have room in the long run to keep one of them anyway, we can’t be buying 20 or 30 copies of it because they don’t want to wait a month or two.

    We do our best, and luckily the vast majority of people understand that you can get it fast, or get it free, but not always both. And for what it’s worth, I’ve been waiting for these items just as long as a patron would be; staff doesn’t get short cuts or anything. Indeed, I’ve had American Horror Story come in from a hold twice. Both times I immediately returned it and reentered the hold list at the bottom because I knew I wouldn’t have time to get to it, and that others were waiting to watch it. Hopefully when I do get it again the discs will still be watchable.

  • No disrespect intended, but library prints would be my last option for viewing pleasure. Okay, the main thing is that I like to own rather than rent or borrow, but there’s more to it than that. When it was film, library prints were the forerunner of the rental tapes. They were run through machines with minimal or no care and tended to be incredibly splicey and scratched and worn. Along comes video tape, and it fares better by far (but it helps if you have a cleaning tape handy.) Of course, by then, there were rental stores. Because the tape is inside a case, though, VHS was a much better rental platform. Your main concern was keeping your own equipment clean. That’s all changed in the disk era. People are hard on those things, and it’s very rare a rental disk is worth the effort. (And the in-store cleaning process can sometimes be worse for a disk than the regular scratches and fingerprints.) The library system is the same deal, so I’ll always opt to buy new if possible.