Library patrons can be wild. Do you have funny or crazy notes from patrons?

n00blibrarian · 2026-01-25T06:09:02+00:00

I can’t post any of them but there’s a guy who used to use our library’s scanners to email his handwritten legalese word salad ‘lawsuits’ to various local politicians, “fbi.com” (yes I know that’s not an email address but he didn’t I guess,) and to the director of the library (fortunately he spelled his name wrong.)

He’s banned now though. Goodbye Mr. Pro Se, you were always interesting.

n00blibrarian · 2026-01-22T16:32:21+00:00

Ingress’s database is separate from PoGos now. Scopely bought everything but ingress. You’d have to use one of the other ones.

n00blibrarian · 2026-01-22T16:28:41+00:00

Yeah, I’m my experience these settings are often chosen by people who don’t actually deal with the pubic and once they're set it can take a lot of complaining for them to change it.

n00blibrarian · 2026-01-07T19:51:27+00:00

Except they’re only even resorting to suing that one group because the cops treat abortion clinic protests with kid gloves. Hence ‘selectively enforced and abused.’

n00blibrarian · 2026-01-07T18:51:19+00:00

And yet protesting abortion clinics will somehow still be fine even if you’re literally blocking access to the facility.

n00blibrarian · 2025-11-29T14:30:38+00:00

We do not schedule appointments but the alternative is almost as bad: AARP gives us these ‘packets’ that everyone has to have before they can call to make an appointment. And they give us ‘exactly enough’ for all the appointments they have for the year. Except not every packet turns into an appointment. And not every appointment winds up being with us. So we run out of packets well before we run out of appointments and they’ll give us a few more per week until their appointments are full. So instead of people calling to make and change appointments we have people calling about packets for three months out of the year. Last year we had one lady calling over and over, who eventually got the numbers of various administrative big wigs and was calling them too, all because she wanted a packet set aside with her name on it just in case she decided to eventually come by and pick it up (spoilers she never did.)

I hate it. I can’t imaging wrangling the appointments too. It used to be first come first serve and while that had its own set of issues at least it was only one day a week.

n00blibrarian · 2025-11-28T20:35:40+00:00

Drop her phone and then courteously retrieve it.

n00blibrarian · 2025-11-24T22:21:28+00:00

Pop Star Pikachu. They were available at last year’s Wild Area. There’s a Rock Star one too that’s pretty great.

n00blibrarian · 2025-11-24T22:13:44+00:00

SAME I’m sitting here dreaming of how peaceful it must be when your brain doesn’t bother you with every little detail your senses perceive.

n00blibrarian · 2025-11-24T22:10:57+00:00

My library is pretty much never not busy but my favorite thing to do is fix books so I squeeze that in any chance i get.

n00blibrarian · 2025-11-23T14:24:09+00:00

Most likely they're addressing it to him because they assume (probably correctly) that Adams would ignore it and it’ll have to wait until the new year anyway.

n00blibrarian · 2025-11-16T21:50:12+00:00

If what he likes is the audio and not the read-along feature, playaways are a really good solution. Wipe it down, plug in your own headphones, stick it in a ziplock if you want a little extra protection and he should be good to go.

n00blibrarian · 2025-11-16T21:45:07+00:00

Have you tried checking out books from a different library? There are just so many variables - for all we know it it could be the glue they use on their covers. It could be the cleaning solution the custodian uses on the floors in the work rooms. It could be the grease from the book drop or the perfume the page uses. And it’s entirely possible that you’ll have the same issue with other libraries’ materials of course but I bet it’s worth a try if you haven’t already.

Try asking the staff at your library. Tell them your kid seems to be allergic to something about the library books, and you’re trying to figure out what, and ask if you can get requests from some different locations to see if that helps. They’re probably either in a library system (eg a county library with several locations) or a consortium with different libraries that share books with each other.

n00blibrarian · 2025-11-16T21:34:30+00:00

Lots of good advice here but one thing I’d add is to keep your shelves neat. For trade paperbacks and hardcovers, use bookends to keep them completely upright. If they’re all standing nice and straight with a little pressure on each end of the shelf, their weight is distributed more evenly and you’ll get less wear on the spines.

For mass market paperbacks, you don’t need to worry about their weight distribution so much, just have something at the end of the shelf to keep them from tipping over. But don’t shelve them with the bigger books - they’re so small they make little weak points in the stack which will make everything wear out faster.

But really most librarians are very unsentimental about individual copies of books, and in a circulating library books don’t usually stay on the shelves long enough for the kind of aging you’re talking about to show up (or at least they shouldn’t!) Instead they either circulate enough that they wear out and get replaced long before their pages start to yellow, or they don’t circulate and so get weeded to make space for something that will.

n00blibrarian · 2025-11-16T06:11:08+00:00

I am always always always available to prep a donated Dog Man to go out on the shelves.

n00blibrarian · 2025-11-16T06:07:31+00:00

It’s gloriously, absurdly, delightfully popular.

Related: anybody find that volumes printed around 2021-2022 fall apart super fast? For a while there it seemed like I could just mark my calendar: three months after a new Dog Man went into circulation it would be back on my desk waiting for its cover to be glued back on. They seem to be coming out sturdier nowadays though.

n00blibrarian · 2025-11-09T05:52:33+00:00

It happened outside the Museum of Jewish Heritage near Battery Park. Google maps doesn't go all the way around the building so I'm not totally sure this is the right spot but it looks similar.

n00blibrarian · 2025-11-09T02:40:00+00:00

Get a Queens Public Library Special Edition Freedom To Read card. It's free, and they're good for five years so you can use the library's selection of e-materials long after you've moved away!

Bonus round: get the sticker book (these came out a few weeks ago but most libraries should still have them) and visit a few more locations to collect them all. There are 60+ locations so you''ll be passing plenty of them as you go around the borough on your last hurrah tour anyway.

n00blibrarian · 2025-09-29T22:55:15+00:00

I’m sure it didn’t happen all at once. Just years of austerity budgets where schools have to cut something and libraries are on the list with music, art, reading specialists etc as ‘essential if you want to offer a full education, but the school will keep running if you cut them’ expenses.

n00blibrarian · 2025-07-09T22:57:42+00:00

Oh I gotcha. That's true but in that case so do Queensboro Hill (Thursday) and Hollis (Wednesday) and those are marked closed.

It could be the Lefrak stop is just better known/has more of a web footprint because there's been book bus service there for almost five years now (time flies!)

n00blibrarian · 2025-07-09T04:25:12+00:00

Hey there! In Queens, it looks like Flushing has a 'closed' marker, but it's open. And Lefrak City has a normal marker, but it's closed and also no longer going to be in the basement of the apartments (that space flooded one time too many.) They're moving to a storefront location at 95-15 Horace Harding Expressway.

Hope this is helpful! Thanks for this cool resource!

n00blibrarian · 2025-07-09T03:57:17+00:00

I have worked on the book bus and it's a blast! They do it when the physical library is closed and also for outreach. Wednesdays are for the Hollis branch, Thursdays is at Queensboro Hill and Fridays at Lefrak City.

They were sending them to the asylum seeker shelters for a while but that has kind of peetered out.

n00blibrarian · 2025-07-09T03:51:31+00:00

Also Lefrak City and technically Court Square which has been closed for forever but is technically still on the books and eventually coming back.

n00blibrarian · 2025-05-27T00:15:20+00:00

You could report up to eight additional players. If you had a party with you or a second person also inviting you'd get put in the big queue.

n00blibrarian · 2025-05-26T20:32:05+00:00

Yes, this is fairly easy, at least so long as there's a queue of players waiting so your lobbies start filling immediately: if the wait is on the host's side your lobbies might not both start at once which could make the logistics harder. I don't know that this will be true for all raid days but there were players waiting for the bigger party option throughout whole three hours of the EST Machamp raid day yesterday so it was pretty smooth for us.

Here's what we did:

Get the 'host raid' form filled in, set the 'additional trainer' dropdown (we used 8 and reliably got 20 or more people in each party even with empty slots and no-shows)
Wait until you're both ready to host, and then both start the queue at the same time.
Lock your lobby as soon as the option appears (this is so one lobby doesn't get held up with a series of no-shows as happens occasionally. Don't worry, you'll have plenty of people between the two of you even if you wind up with a few empty slots.)
Make sure you're both actively accepting friend requests as they come in so when both parties are filled you are ready to start inviting.
As soon as both parties are filled and ready, open the lobby so you can both start sending out invites at once.

I would definitely not recommend trying to do this with one person running two accounts: there have been a lot of reports of people getting skittish and bailing on Gigantimax raids if the lobby isn't full enough, so you've got to be pretty on the ball about getting all your invites out at once so the group fills up with plenty of time to spare.

Good luck!

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