eccentrici

For those of you who don't know, I work in a library. I am a circulation assistant/young adult coordinator/ILL person. Usually the only place where fandom and work cross over is when I'm doing my young adult programs. Yesterday was the first time that I've been able to use my fandom knowledge when doing ILLs (interlibrary loans).

I was in the back processing ILLs when I was called to the desk for an ILL emergency. No one there knew our code to get on to WorldCat (because god forbid anyone get ahold of that tidbit of information) and there was a lady at the front desk who needed some ILLs requested. I looked at her requests and was actually able to find one book in our catalog (she was using the editor's name instead of the author's name) and another readily available on WorldCat. It was the third request that was the problem.

She was looking for Out of the Shell by an author whose last name was Chrissey (I can't remember the first name). I looked in WorldCat. I looked on Amazon. I checked out ebooks. I looked on several rare books websites. Nothing. She thought it might be out of print but she had a review at home which featured the first chapter of the book. I googled, I yahooed, I dogpiled. Nothing. Nothing on the author. Nothing on the book. Finally, I told her to bring in the review she had printed out and I would try and help her track it down.

An hour later she comes in with the "review" clutched in her hand. According to her, she ran across this "review" by either doing a Google or Dogpile search. I looked at it. It wasn't a review. It was a story from fanfiction.net. Or at least, the first two paragraphs of a story from ff.net. It was a story based on an unnamed Ann Rinaldi novel. Then the fun began.

Have you ever tried to explain fanfiction to a layperson? A 70 year old+ layperson? No matter how hard I tried, she just couldn't understand it. She wanted the rest of that "book". I tried to explain how ff.net works and how she can read it online. I tried to explain fanfiction and how it works. I don't think she understood me and I don't think she believed me when I told her that Out of the Shell wasn't available anywhere but ff.net. Even my Browncoat branch manager tried to explain it to her. In the end, I showed her our large selection of Ann Rinaldi books and she found a few that she thought were interesting. (I tried to find the book the fanfic was based upon but the author didn't post that information and we weren't able to track down any of the keywords on our databases) She told me that if the other one ever turns up, she wants to read it.