on book request spam.

november turns into december: it's time to unclutter the in-box again.

so today i deleted 318 emails that i've collected over (less than) one month's time, and most of them are spam: the majority are dead giveaways, by the nonsensical title and unknown sender.

then's there's unintentional spam from the math department. today being 2 December 2006, in the last week four emails were forwarded to the entire department in the form of book requests. three were from grad students, and one from a full professor.

these all take a common shape: someone wasn't able to find a book from the library, then emails the entire department. the idea is that the book in question is so specialized that someone else in the department must have checked it out.

the request is very reasonable: the requester wants to borrow the book for an hour, in order to check a fact or two. at worst, they want to make a copy of one chapter and return the book to the borrower.

of course, this situation is absurd. as grad students and faculty, our library privileges permit us to keep renewing our borrowed items indefinitely. when you are the borrower, then this is very convenient .. provided that you don't abuse your privileges.

for instance, i'm guilty of this vice. i once had a book checked out from the library for 1 1/2 years, possibly longer.

this is exactly the purpose behind loan recalls for university library resources. no one member of the university should be able to hoard library resources which are for the good of the many.

so to those who make book requests: if you need the book, then recall it. you might need it only for an hour or so, but chances are, the borrower also needed it for a little while. if they truly needed the book, then they would buy his/her own copy.