Criminal Justice put in their requests. No printed matter in the bunch--all of the items are videos.

The library staff is so small here that we all have to do a little bit of everything, which I find more helpful than distracting as far as my collection development work goes. At the reference desk I can get some idea of what information students are looking for and whether our collection can meet their needs; it was a reference question that led me to discover that we don't have a biography of Walt Disney. I've also had to man the circulation desk occasionally when a student worker is busy or absent, and on one such occasion someone checked out our paperback copy of Flannery O'Connor's short stories, which I noticed was falling apart--so I ordered a new, hardbound copy.

French DVD o' the week: La Seule Fille from 1995, starring a young Virginie Ledoyen as Valerie, a proud, beautiful teenager who, alternately sullen and argumentative, has difficulty relating to everyone around her. The story made an almost convincing case that being beautiful has its problems: at work most of the women envy and distrust Valerie and most of the men pester her. No one can deny the appeal of Ledoyen in a short skirt, but this film's rigid devotion to cinema verite makes it occasionally boring. In the service of realism it is filmed in real time and does not flinch from the mundane: unedited scenes of Valerie walking down corridors, waiting at elevators, making her face. The ending was a bit irresolute, too, but I guess that is also supposed to reflect real life. In its favor, I enjoyed the acting and there was enough interpersonal melodrama to make up for the slow parts. Grade: B