Damn decentralization

As you may or may not know, the University of Cambridge is a rather decentralized institution. The colleges, for example, where a large proportion of the undergraduate teaching goes on, are independent from the university, with their own income, property, and the like. The functions of the colleges are quite different from those of the departments, and certainly from the university as a whole.

In some ways, this is great. It allows small communities to thrive within the larger university, and the differences between the colleges means that everyone can find a place suited to their attitudes and needs. Plus, the decentralization is an historical oddity, and I'm a big fan of slightly bizarre relics of the past.

But decentralization also has its myriad pitfalls. You're never quite sure if you're talking to quite the right person or organization to deal with your issue. You could very easily end up shuffling all around the city trying to solve a problem that could be resolved in ten minutes if you went to the right place the first time.

The most annoying problem that I've come across, though, is the library catalog. As if the University Library weren't daunting enough*, searching Newton, the university-wide library catalog is a pain in the ass.

Let's say I want to find a history book. There's a few libraries it could very plausibly be in: my college library, the history faculty library, and the UL. I know for sure that it'll be in the UL, since it's a copyright library, but the other ones would be a bit more convenient for me.

So ideally, I'd search for the book using Newton, telling it to search through the Christ's College library, the Seeley Historical Library, and the UL. The Christ's library would be easiest... just a two-minute walk from my own. The history library would be next convenient, followed by the hulking mass that is the UL.

It'd be nice to do a single search of those three libraries. But, as far as I can tell, you can't. Instead, you have to search the catalogs of each of them individually. Now, I'm sure there's got to be some way to do such a search, but I haven't figured it out yet, and you don't spend as much time as I do on the internet and in libraries without learning a thing or two about searches.

There's another problem. Even if I just wanted to search Christ's library, I couldn't do it. Instead, the catalog groups Christ's library with "College A-N." That's right, I can't even search a single library without results from other libraries coming back. Now, it's great that Clare Hall and Gonville & Caius have the book I'm looking for, but it doesn't do me much good. The same problem arises with department libraries; you've got to pick a range of catalogs to search through.

But wait! You'd think to search for books in the history library, you'd look in "Departments and Faculties F-M," right? Sure, you'd get some results from the geography library and the modern languages library, but that's not the end of the world; you're used to that sort of thing after searching the college libraries. Well, as I found out, if you're searching for a book in the history library by searching in "Departments and Faculties F-M," you won't find anything. That's because, as you'll see above, it's the Seeley Historical Library, which means you need to search in "Departments and Faculties O-Z," not F-M. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

I recognize that it's no small task coordinating and streamlining the cataloges of the 100+ libraries associated with the University. But can it really be that hard to make it possible to select particular libraries you'd like to search?

So this is one of those cases where decentralization isn't charming or quaint. It's inefficient and frustrating as all hell. You can work around the difficulties, but it's annoying as all hell when the difficulties shouldn't be there in the first place and seem to be resolvable without too much difficulty.

So yes, Cambridge has its worts. I'm not surprised by them, I just wish they weren't of this particular type.

*And it is. Besides sorting books and periodicals by topic and year received, they also sort them by size. Yes, size. They have a good reason for it, but it doesn't exactly make it easy to find the book you're looking for.