Fundraising the Dead Read Free Page B

the corner of his lair. “Hi, Alfred.”
    “Hello, Nell. You need me?”
    “Alfred, what I need is to pick your brain. Do you have a minute?”
    “For you, sure.”
    I slipped around the corner of his partition and sat down, allowing myself a small sigh of relief. “I don’t have much time before the gala, but I need to ask you about something. Let me give you a hypothetical. Let’s say I’m writing a heart-wrenching appeal letter about Dolley Madison’s boot scraper, given to the Society in 1883 by her great-grandniece four times removed, detailing how the poor boot scraper will disintegrate into a pile of rust if we don’t buy a mink-lined box for it immediately. Are you with me?”
    Alfred gave me a shy grin. “All the way.”
    I went on. “And I really want to take a smashing picture of the boot scraper to send out with the letter. How do I locate it?”
    Alfred looked thoughtful. “Do you have the accession number?”
    I shook my head. “No, I have a lovely note in my file—copperplate hand, mind you, but at least there’s a date on it—that says that the donor hopes we will treasure Aunt Dolley’s boot scraper. That’s it.”
    Alfred was warming to his task. “Was it a single item or part of a larger collection?”
    “No clue.”
    “And you’re sure it was a boot scraper, and not a snaffle bit or a peach pitter?”
    “Well, the great-grandniece thought so, but we have no idea what Dolley did with it. Maybe she beat her children with it. Did she have children?”
    “Can’t tell you. Okay, so we have an unknown object, possibly a boot scraper, with an accession number that should begin eighty-three something or other. Type: object, not paper. I punch those facts into Cassandra here . . . and voilà, a list of possibilities.”
    “Cassandra? That’s your computer?”
    “Yes. She’s often issuing predictions of dire catastrophes, when she isn’t crashing altogether. Somehow it seemed appropriate, especially since I usually ignore her and plow on regardless. But don’t worry, I back things up all the time, just in case.”
    “Right.” I was not reassured, though I did chuckle at the appropriateness of Alfred naming his computer system after a Greek prophetess, who, if I recalled correctly, was doomed to be always right yet was never believed.
    “Then we look at our list . . . and we see that Metal Objects, Miscellaneous , are housed on the fourth floor, northeast corner, shelves eleven-A to twelve-G. So that would be a good place to start. Unless, of course, the thing weighed fifty pounds or more, in which case it would be on the floor someplace, so nobody gets brained trying to get it down off the shelf. You would go up to the fourth floor and look for it.” Alfred sat back and beamed at me, clearly pleased.
    “What about if the great-grandniece also donated her diaries? How would I find books and documents?” I pressed on.
    “Well, you know the card catalogs downstairs, right?”
    I nodded sagely, even though I was fairly clueless, knowing that Alfred wouldn’t understand how someone working here might not be intimately familiar with our catalogs.
    “They give you the call number for the book, but sometimes we move books, or even whole collections, so we have to cross-reference in Cassandra here, so we know where the books actually are,” he said.
    “You keep all this up-to-date?”
    “As far as possible. That’s just the bare-bones version. I’ve only been working with it for two years, so the data are kind of limited. Everything that’s come in since I started using Cassandra is in here, or anything that I know has been shifted, but the earlier stuff, not so much. I’m working on it.”
    “And how much of a lag time is included in that possible ?”
    Alfred almost blushed. “A couple of weeks? Depends on the scope of the shift, or the backlog.”
    I contemplated the poster behind his desk. It was a picture of the Old Library at Trinity College in Dublin, where it looked as