The Photo Copier

One of the commonly-requested library services is photocopying. When I started my career as a librarian, we had an old temperamental black-and-white machine available to the public. It was occasionally ornery, but simple to use.

After many years, we got a major upgrade to a color-capable machine with trays for legal paper and manual feed in addition to the standard letter-size sheets. It has many amazing capabilities and an absolutely abysmal user interface that clearly only made sense to whichever antisocial engineering intern was assigned the job of designing it. Everything is accessed through a touchscreen display, and if the machine doesn't like your input, it very loudly beeps to register its objection.

Since I seem to be the librarian most willing to work through its idiosyncrasies whenever anyone runs into a problem, I am frequently called upon to assist folks with their copying chores. Last week featured a flurry of folks facing photographic failure. I used the photocopier, and became the photo copier.

First, one of our local characters, S, wanted copies of an old little league baseball card. If you have been in youth sports, you probably know what these are. The son of an old business client had given it to him ages ago, and was now running his own business. S had hired that business to do some work on his property. He wanted a copy of the old card to give back to the entrepreneur now, about 25 years later. I was able to persuade the copier to scan both sides of the card, enlarge them, and print both on a sheet of paper at good resolution.

Then, an older lady, M, brought in an album of old wedding photos she wanted scanned and e-mailed to a family member in honor of her 50th wedding anniversary. I was able to get our fancy copier to do all that, but I needed to spend some time manually feeding them singly through the flat scanner bed instead of using the auto-feed. M was able to confirm all the photos actually went through, which was nice. It doesn't always work right, after all.

Finally, S returned with his own stack of snapshots. He had pictures from the old job for the baseball card boy featuring siblings, the family dog, and his old home. I got quite the earful of old stories while managing to scan, enlarge, and copy these pictures.

A small-town librarian wears a lot of hats, and this was just a few more odd jobs among many filling my workweek, to say nothing of those D&D games and painting classes!