Meeting with Mary Angelotti

Today I met with Mary Angelotti, the document delivery manager. She has had this position since 1999. Ms. Angelotti is originally from Connecticut and attended Southern Connecticut State University. She received her BS degree in history and had intended on becoming a teacher. Teaching was always her professional goal. While at Southern Connecticut State University she received her MLS and MS in health science. Each are two year programs.

Mary Angelotti started at the law school library, binding. The law school library she found interesting. She then went to the Beinecke and from there she went to the hospital library and was a director there. After that she worked at the nursing library in the reference room. Ms. Angelotti enjoyed this because it was small and she was able to get to really know the students. From there she came to her present day job at the Harvey Cushing Medical Library.

The document delivery department has three services: borrowing, lending, and MACS. The borrowing service orders things Yale doesn't own for its patrons. While the lending service will lend books to other libraries and even extends to corporations like law services and pharmaceutical companies. MACS is the Medical Article Copy Service, which is an in-house photocopy service. MACS is available for staff and students of Yale.

A work day for Mary is from 8:30-5:00, though she usually stays until 6:00. A typical day includes seeing if a book is owned by another library, then checking orders, followed by printing and filling, and then telling their user friendly DOCLINE what they filled and reject what they didn't. About eighty or ninety orders come in a day. This department has 48 hours to fill the request because people need these things quickly. If an order is not filled in that time period then it goes to another library. The criteria for judging a library is how fast they get orders out and the fill rate. The fill rate for this library is 75%, which is good.

According to Mary Angelotti the most challenging part of her job is getting work done in the time allotted. Machines will break down and staff will be out, causing the work process to slow. While the easiest part is using the departments programs, DOCLINE and ORBIS, also the online catalog.

Mary Angelotti's goal is to stay sane, considering that she has a very hectic job. Another goal is to get the orders out and develop good training for staff. The document delivery department is currently dependent on the circulation desk because of a shortage in their office, so they will need to be well trained.

Besides meeting Mary Angelotti, I was able to tour the downstairs section of the library and see where the display of a collection of brains will be. The space looks nice and I'm sure the display will be out of this world.

Today was another successfully fun and interesting day.