Differences

One of the funny things about living in a different country is trying to be objective when noticing differences of an inconvenient nature. What I mean is that, aside from all the things that are different in a lovely and charming way, there are bound to be a few things that are different in a way which is either hard to get used to or hard to understand.

take for instance my experiences with British stationery... The battle that I fought came with some gains (two rings=wrong, three rings=right) and some losses (all north Americans should bow down to the box file). The easiest (though not the healthiest) way to deal with these inconvenient differences is to just decide that this other way of doing things is inferior or wrong, however this, many have learned is not always the case. And so the subject of differences brings me to two examples that came up on Tuesday which I did my very best to objectively evaluate before making any snap decisions.

so here we go.

Difference Number 1

First off to the University Bookstore to spend some pounds. Let me start out by telling all my friends from Queen's that we never knew what we had with the campus bookstore... And that if I could go back in time I would make myself cherish every experience I had at that store just a little bit more.

At Queen's, the bookstore has two parts; first, a typical looking bookstore and second, in the basement a course book area where book are organized by class and course code because professors have registered their reading lists with the bookstore in advance. At Sussex the bookstore merely looks like any old close, chapters, waterstones, indigo that you might walk into with no second part at all. This means that in order to find a book on history, you must go to the history section find the subsection that would suit the title you are searching for and then search by author.

This seems simple enough (some might say that we were babied at Queen's having all our books organized by course and readings list) but for someone like myself who is doing a program which is interdisciplinary in nature, this means that I had to look for each individual title under about seven or eight different headings, some in sociology, some in world history, some in historical theory, some British history, some anthropology, etc, etc...

At any chapters or the queen's bookstore this problem would be solved by typing the book title into one of the many available computers at which point the book would come up with its potential headings, however there are no computers available for customer use in the store. Oh and wait, even if they were available the Bookstore's website is linked to an online catalogue of all books available from all publishers and so

a. it doesn't have any headings listed for shelving and...
b. it doesn't even have any way of identifying if the book you are looking at is in stock at the store or not.

due to the heavy traffic volume (or so I suspect), it also can't do searches with more than two terms in them, which means you have to choose two words from the title you are looking for which are the most obscure and unlikely to appear together in any title of any other book ever written if you don't want your search to come up with thousands of books. And then when you find your book, it basically just confirms its price and that it exists, but not whether or not it is in stock or if you have to order it.

my salvation in the store was one man sitting alone at a desk at the end of a long queue of students... Who when I finally was able to speak with him, looked up a few titles and ordered me a couple of books not available in store.

so after about an hour of stress in the bookstore I bought a few core reading titles and then made my way to the library. This brings us to...

Difference #2 - The Library

This is the difference I am able to be more objective about, and probably the one that will redeem me from looking like a jaded and cranky student who just wishes life could be easier.

As someone who has logged many hours researching and working in Libraries I like to think that I can handle myself in a building full of books, but I found that this was not quite the case when I went to hunt of my various articles and chapters I needed to photocopy for reading.

I spent about half an hour navigating the library catalogue on a computer and had written down all the codes to the books and journals I needed to track down. Sadly, when I went to find these books in the main collection I found that a lot of them were missing despite the computer saying otherwise. At first I assumed another student had beaten me to it but after searching around the photocopy shelves for returned books and consulting the computer something didn't seem right. For example, one book said that there were six copies available in the library and it seemed unlikely to me that all six copies were in use but not checked out, especially since there was not a six-book gap at the place I had been looking for them.

After doing a second check and a fair bit of head scratching, I went back to the computer to check things out. Upon a very close inspection I realized that you could get further details on each book and that the book with six copies had one under "main" two under "short" and three under "core"... but they all seemed to have the same catalogue number.

As it turns out the library catalogue is divided into three sections. "Main Collection" for books that are checked out for six weeks, "short term" for only a week or so and "core collection" only checked out for a few hours at a time... this is somewhat similar to what I am used to, except that while this distinction is made in the catalogue it is also physically made in the collections. Meaning that there are three different sets of call numbers going from A-Z in different areas of the library. The main is of course the biggest collection, the short term is a bit smaller, and the core collection is a section that is cornered off with its own security system and own check out centre.

While at first this difference was most definitely inconvenient, unlike the bookstore I'm not about to dismiss it as "inferior" because I do see the value that will come from arriving at the library and always knowing that all my readings will be available within hours from the core collections... its also nice because with the three distinctions you dont find yourself figuring out which have which types of loans (all are colour coded) and you dont have to make a librarian go and get books and reading reserves for you because you can access them all in the core collections room.

anyway, I thought these were examples of the little differences and hang ups that often become to mean so much more when you are living somewhere new... so I thought I would write a bit about them.

all in all things worked out despite the stress and frustrations... now I have most of my course books (although there are a few costly ones on order still) and all my course readings for the first week, which incidentally are comparable in size and length to what I would have expected to be a course reading package for a whole term during my undergrad. And so my reading begins!!!! so scary!

- C