y far, the most common question con

y far, the most common question concerned finding journal articles. There must be a way to ease this problem with journals! I imagine most of the difficulty is in the fragmentation of both the task and the journal collection. First a user has to find an article they're interested in in one of many different CD-ROM or online databases. Then then they need to find if the library has that particular journal in the collection. Then they have to actually find the journal. The most recent are in the periodical room. Yet most are in the stacks with the books. Which floor they are on depends on the subject. The date also matters -- those journals older than 1975 are in Sinclair Library.

I think the problem is in part due to users' expectation that journals are stored separately from books. I can see the reasoning behind the current layout with journals on the floors relating to the science or arts topic; that way, the materials are on the same floors as the reference librarians who specialize in those topic and near other materials on the same topics. Yet it seems that by keeping this integration, users get lost and necessarily need to contact those reference librarians. (See Ideas: Cube Architecture for a discussion of possible solutions.)

The second most common user statements are "This computer is not working" or "Something's wrong with the printer." The third seemed to be "Do you have a pencil?" (Perhaps this could be allieviated somewhat; see Ideas: Roving Technician.)