*swears at library catalogue*

[tree_and_leaf]

I hate OLIS. Not only did it insist that we have no books by Richard Southern, which was obviously untrue (as was demonstrated by looking for individual titles), but I also spent three quarters of an hour looking for an author who I only subsequently discovered was unlocatable on the system because some idiot had misspelled his name

Bah, say I.

Comments

[sammee42.livejournal.com]

HOW could someone misspell Richard Southern? It's such an easy name to spell and he's such an important medieval scholar! Geeze.

Congrats on surviving the viva!!!! I'm sorry I wasn't on LJ and unable to wish you pre-viva best wishes, but now I am sending you post-viva congratulations. :) xx

[tree_and_leaf]

The misspelled bloke was a different scholar, H.U. Gombrecht. The author search function didn't have any variation of Southern, RW at all, which is weird, given that a title search turned up lots of his work.

Thanks for the best wishes!

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

I sympathise with the wrongly spelled names, but it could be worse - try working in Oriental Studies!

[tree_and_leaf]

I can only imagine - anything involving transliteration can't be good. OLIS is bad enough for German, as it can't do umlauts, so searching for anything which has an umlauted vowel in the first syllable is dodgy. But where there are several possible semi-legitimate variants, combined with catalgouer error, well: *boggle*