You can’t always get what you want

The most annoying thing for me is coming to the library sometimes just to pick up that one CD, DVD, or book, only to find that someone has already checked it out in the 10 minutes it took you to walk over to Fondren from your dorm room.

Lesson learned: don’t be afraid to reserve materials in the future. It doesn’t cost anything, and it takes just a minute of your time at most (that is, unless, you have absolutely no idea how to navigate Fondren’s catalog, which is neither the smartest nor the most user-friendly library catalog I have used. For more on this see my previous post).

And just FYI, for those who’ve never actually checked out anything from Fondren, be sure to keep in mind that you need to open an account with the library in order to be able to reserve and renew stuff online.

And when you do get an account, don’t forget to renew stuff on time. What really bugs me about the Fondren reminder system is that it only reminds you to renew an item two days before it is due, rather than the day it is due.

And because, like many on the Rice campus, I am a do-it-at-the-last minute person, this has resulted in me having to make several late-night trips to the library to return an item because I forgot to renew it the day it was due.

Well, at least I enjoy midnight runs. 

5 minutes could save you 50 dollars or more on textbooks

Let me tell you the story of a now-enlightened college student, whom I shall call “Joseph.” The first semester of Joseph’s freshman year at Rice, he naively decided to take a 400-level course (which shall remain unnamed), which required the purchase of approximately 100 dollars worth of “required” textbooks. But just before he emptied my wallet at the bookstore, he happened to remember something his professor had said about “course reserves” at Fondren.

He soon found out that these mysterious course reserves were a set of items which one can only check out for a certain period of time because they have been “reserved” by a professor for the use of students in that particular class. All he had to do was go to the circulation desk with the call number of his item (book, CD, DVD, or whatever), and one of the librarians would retrieve your item(s) for you.

And so, Joseph used the course reserves to check out his required textbook once a week to do the required readings, and his wallet lived happily ever.

The same thing happened to Joseph this past fall semester in an English class. While Joseph watched as the rest of the noobs in his class wasted precious moolah on the “required” textbooks, Joseph simply went to Fondren the day before class to do the reading for class the next day.

Okay, that’s enough of that. In case you didn’t realize, the “Joseph” in that story was me. So I have first-hand experience (not third-person experience as the story might suggest) benefitting from Fondren’s course reserves.

Besides having to physically go to Fondren, the only catch is that you usually can’t leave Fondren with the item. Also, you have to go up to the circulation desk every 2 hours to renew the item if you need it for a longer period of time than that (however, you may be able to convince the librarians to extend your check-out period, if, for example, the item is a 3-hour movie).

So do yourself a favor and check out the Fondren course reserves site here.

Note that you can search by instructor, course number (e.g. PHIL 342, CHEM 212, etc.), or course name (e.g. Physical Chemistry for Biosciences, Organic Chemistry, etc.).

The course reserves don’t have the textbooks for every Rice University course, but it’s definitely worth looking at, especially during the first week of classes, so you can determine your budget for that semester. All I’m asking in return is that you send me a mere 10% of what you save on textbooks from now on.

I accept cash or check.

What?! DVDs at Fondren?

So every time I tell someone that Fondren has DVDs, I get a puzzled look. DVDs? He or she will say. That’s cool. I never knew that. The only person I know who actually checks out DVDs from Fondren is my roommate. And that’s only because I actually told him about Fondren’s DVD collection at the beginning of the school year.

By this measure, I suppose I’m just an extreme outlier when it comes to checking out DVDs from Fondren. If you don’t like waiting in lines, you can now self-checkout most DVDs now (unless they have booklets or extra materials associated with them).

Back in the old days (i.e. last year), you had to go to the circulation desk with an index card which had the call number of the movie you wanted written on it. Half the time, the librarians or student librarians would return empty-handed, either because they couldn’t read my handwriting (repeating second grade penmanship might do me some good at this point in my life) or because they still hadn’t figured out the Dewey decimal system.

If you’re a devoted fan of arthouse, you will be rather surprised by the breadth of Fondren’s selection. If you’re a fan of campy, trashy films, you’ll be happy to a find a few of those there as well. If you don’t, I’ll basically have the whole DVD collection to myself. Which is cool. 

That’s a win for me, a lose for you. But if I have competition for the DVDs, I’ll watch them quicker, and stop procrastinating on my schoolwork. Now that’s a win for everybody.

So bottom line: I encourage everyone to check out Fondren’s collection. I do realize by saying this, I am hampering my ability to pick up any DVD I want without having to reserve it before hand. But you should keep in mind that your tuition helps to support Fondren, and you shouldn’t let go to waste. After all, I can’t be the only one patronizing that section of the library. 

Interlibrary Loans—a great way to get (almost) anything you want

 Check this out.

So one of Fondren’s well-kept secret services is the Interlibrary Loan. In a nutshell, by requesting an interlibrary loan, a patron can request an item not owned by Fondren library. The librarians subsequently must request the item from another library that has the item (hence the name).

It’s a great way for the ultimate cheapo to get anything he wants without paying for it (you can even request  DVDs and CDs)?

One catch is that you need to pick up your item within about 7 days of Fondren’s receiving the requested item.

How do I know this? Well, simply put, Fondren banned me from using the interlibrary loan service after I failed to pick up the Andrey Rublev DVD I had requested within 7 days. However, in my defense, I would like to say that Fondren only managed to retrieve the DVD in time for winter break, so I really didn’t feel like driving all the way down to Fondren just to pick up a DVD.

This service is not exclusive to Fondren all three of my library branches (Harris County, Brazoria County, and Houston Public library branches) offer this service.

Sadly, Borders is going bankrupt

 I was quite saddened to hear the news a few days ago that one of my favorite places in the world—Borders—is filing for bankruptcy.

And by the way, in case you got any Borders gift cards for Christmas (like me), you should try to use them as soon as possible. Companies filing for bankruptcy will occasionally refuse gift cards as payments for items.

Surprisingly, though, they are still offering coupons for in-store and online purchases. I guess coupons are just staples of the thriving and the failing business.

The Microsoft Surface—the most overhyped technology since the iPad

Near the beginning of fall semester 2010, I decided to make the trek to Fondren just to check out this new gadget called the “Microsoft Surface.” The new arrival to Fondren was the subject of a front-page Thresher article, so I had a feeling that it may be worth a look. I decided to make a trip with a a couple  curious , tech-nerdy friends.

When we made the trip up the elevator (this was the first time that either of my friends had even been above the first floor of Fondren), we came to the familiar, musty stacks of obscure fiction and poetry. At the end of the stacks was a room of its own (a room with a view, I might add) dedicated to the Microsoft Surface.

Proof that I was really there. Photo Credit: Sonny Nguyen

Luckily for us, we were apparently the only ones on campus who actually cared enough to check out this enormous technological novelty.  (We did eventually meet a scrubby freshman from Hanszen, who almost had us believe a ridiculous story about the origin of his initialized, two-letter name, but that’s a whole other story…)

And no more than a novelty the surface proved to be. The most difficult task we faced that day was trying to figure out what the Surface was actually good for-for comparison, we actually had a biochemistry exam that evening.

We found ourselves wondering, “What purpose does the Microsoft Surface serve in a library setting? “

None, the Microsoft Surface replied, again and again. No matter what buttons we pressed or what screens windows we virtually slid to one another, we could find no utilitarian purpose for this giant tablet.

No Internet, no Microsoft Word, no calculator.  The Surface did feature a somewhat amusing four-player version of Ping as well as a Cloth simulator (all touch-stimulated), but is it really necessary to shell out thousands of dollars just to amuse a few lonely people for a few minutes?

Bottom line: the Surface is essentially a virtual coffee table that does a few “neat” things (and it’s not even a good coffee table—what kind of coffee table runs on electricity?)  

Of course, if you believe that I’m just a tech-noob (which I’m not) or a Microsoft-hater (which I’m certainly not) the best thing for you to do is to actually go to Fondren and see the Surface for yourself—or spend thousands of dollars of your own so that you can continue write that list which Americans have been writing for ages: “One thousand ways to utterly waste your money.”