On loathing Interlibrary Loan

Research includes becoming aware of prior work, locating and obtaining said prior work, then reading, sorting and digesting said prior work. In academic research, my best friend has been Interlibary Loan (ILL)... until this morning.

I spent the first two weeks of creating Geraldine locating and obtaining 12 pages of citations related to my research topic. It took 40 hours, but I did it. I saved all of my PDFs on a flashdrive and before I could make copies onto my office computer, the flashdrive failed and I couldn't recover the PDFs. But no major problem, because ILL has a message that looks like this:

"Articles posted to this page will remain accessible by the requestor for 30 days from the date of posting.
If, prior to this time, you no longer require the use of an article, you may delete it using the "Delete" link to the right of the article information.
In the event that you accidentally delete an article from this web page, you may undelete articles or e-mail us at to have them reset."

So rather than bite of Hubby's head for the 10th time this week, I e-mailed the ILL staff and requested that my articles would be reset. Then I watched a movie with Hubby and tried to make up for the 9 times I have completely lost my cool since Sunday morning. When I checked my e-mail this morning, this was the reply from ILL:

"Hello Kelsie:
The interlibrary loan staff receives articles electronically from other libraries. Once they are posted to your ILLiad account, they are automatically removed from our system. So, the ILL staff no longer has access to these articles either.
According to your ILLiad record, the ILL staff obtained 99 articles from other libraries since January 2nd. If you would like these articles again, you will need to make new requests for them."

I fought back the tears when I read this e-mail and phoned the ILL staff, hoping that someone would be able to help me. The librarian on the other end of the line told me I was out of luck and that I really did have to re-request everything.

I spent more than 5 hours re-requesting every darn article today. After 5 hours, I celebrated the completion of my task by making bread, then returned to work for another 3 hours. No that I am done, I checked my e-mail again to start downloading PDFs for a second time, only to find an e-mail from afore mentioned librarian that read:

"Hello Kelsie:
The information I provided to you earlier is incorrect. You do not need to make new requests for the 99 articles that the interlibrary loan staff has obtained for your since January 2nd. The articles are on our server. We will re-post them to your ILLiad account under their original transaction numbers.
I apologize for any confusion. "

Words cannot express the frustration I feel right now. Hubby is lucky to be gone at the moment so that he won't become headless again today. My e-mail inbox is now receiving 99 ILL cancelation messages that I will have to delete by hand. The only way to remedy this is to cry and listen to the following Reel Big Fish song and think of the librarian that made me cry today (but I hope she doesn't die... so don't listen to the end of this song!).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU-W7bKNkmo